USCJ Review - Spring 2007
A Fuchsberg Story – An Appreciation
It was late autumn in Jerusalem. The air was crisp but not cold, and the light – the light was Jerusalem light, that clear, piercing, stern, soul-revealing light that makes you understand why the city makes some people crazy with joy and belief, others with rage and despair.
It was a Friday afternoon, and Shabbat comes early in late autumn. Shopkeepers started to cover the windows of their stone storefronts with brightly colored metal gates that looked even brighter in the glinting, slanting light. The lastminute shoppers seemed ever more frenzied as they confronted fewer and fewer options. People carried bottles of wine and bunches of flowers, as they rushed by, heads down.
And then we joined the rush, joined the men in their black suits and black hats and fur streimels and embroidered robes and knit kippot and embroidered Moroccan hats, joined the women – although there were far fewer women on the streets by then – in their sturdy, boxy long suits and their floaty dresses and fluttery layers of scarves, as we too walked to shul. The sun gleamed from the west, still high above the horizon but already beginning to gild the city with the pure gold that heralds the arrival of the Shabbat queen.
We were in Israel just for one week, and we decided to spend the one erev Shabbat we had at the shul at United Synagogue’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. We knew that the synagogue, Moreshet Israel, has a beautiful building, but we did not know what to expect.
Services that night were led, as they are once a month, by Nativ students; they are led another once a month by students at the Conservative Yeshiva. Nativ is United Synagogue’s program for highschool graduates, who choose not to go directly to college but instead to spend that year in Israel. For the first semester, the students study either at Fuchsberg’s Conservative Yeshiva or at the Hebrew University. The second semester’s program takes many of them out of Jerusalem to do social service work on kibbutzim or absorption centers throughout Israel.
The sanctuary at Moreshet Israel, which is elegant, spare, and lovely, was entirely filled, and there were quite a few people standing against the walls in the back and on the side. Most of the people there were students, some seemed to be teacher age, and some were older people, members of the community.
The service was almost entirely sung, Carlebach style; some of the melodies were ethereally beautiful and some were rousing, even raucous. When the singing began, I must admit that it sounded to me like noise, loud, tuneless, braying noise. But then something happened. The noise resolved itself into melody, and soon into the sounds of pure joy. I looked around at the young people, davening with enormous and visible and touching kavanah. The energy level was extraordinarily high, the hormones practically visible, and the goal of all this was to create a community through prayer, to draw closer to God both individually and as a group, and to welcome in the wonder and joy of Shabbat.
Services at Moreshet Israel are not always like this, I am told. The shul has more than one constituency; others have more sedate tastes. But certainly at least this night, the level of spiritual and emotional energy was so high that the lovely stone walls could barely contain it. Some of the best and brightest of our next generation, the future of the Conservative movement, the future, even, of the Jewish people, were in that room.
The Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, home to this overflowing of kavanah, is an unusual place, a hidden gem in Jerusalem, the city at the center of the Jewish world.
