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The Detour and Return to Ancestors’ Home
In May 2011, Althea and I visited the Jewish temple that my great-grandfather Max and his son Isaac built in the Borscht Belt of New York State, in 1924. It was chartered as an orthodox congregation, changing over to a mainstream Reformed congregation more than 40 years later.
I had not been to Livingston Manor (Borscht Belt Central) in eighteen years — just after I discovered my birth family, the family Brooks. My mother was dead two years, and I was getting to know other family members in several cities. I was intrigued by her hometown, and what townspeople might tell me. During the May 2011 visit, I was given a tour of the small temple building: its sanctuary, the ark and its Torah scrolls, the downstairs classrooms, and heaps of neglected books. Just the two of us, the Board President of the temple and I.
Althea walked our dog and walked off the 270-mile drive from Framingham Massachusetts. I decided that it would be great to get a sense of temple’s heyday by attending a major holiday service or a bar/bat mitzvah. May and June were busy months for me, but I checked the temple’s online calendar and found that a bat mitzvah would be celebrated on July 9th.
Typically the 13-year old celebrant recites a few prayers more than once, and chants several sections from one of the five books of the Hebrew Bible, all in Hebrew. I…
