Appleton Jews thrive, but local anti-Semitism irks some
This is the tenth in a series of articles designed to familiarize readers with Jewish communities throughout the state.
Appleton — It seems the Jewish community here once liked to memorialize celebrities and managed to produce some.
The community, located just north of Lake Winnebago, has the only synagogue in the state named for a person outside the Bible or Talmud. That person was the most famous Jewish community figure of his time, the British businessman, philanthropist and activist Moses Montefiore (1793-1894), and he was still a powerful memory when Appleton’s then-Orthodox synagogue named itself after him in 1903.
As for the second point, of the handful of Wisconsin Jews who became famous to the world, two spent formative years in the Appleton area: novelist Edna Ferber (1887-1968, “Show Boat” and “Giant”); and celebrated magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss, 1874-1926).
Houdini especially still seems to “haunt” the community. A couple of the now Conservative synagogue’s members interviewed for this article referred to him without prompting; and one lifelong resident, physician Alan Cherkasky, recalled that in high school, he belonged to the “Harry Houdini Chapter” of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization.
That chapter no longer exists. Only “eight or nine” Jewish teens now constitute an informal youth group that is currently talking about whether to affiliate with BBYO or with the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth, according to spiritual leader Rabbi Haim Cassorla.
That does not mean the community is shrinking. It apparently has a recent history of slight ups and downs, but generally exists on an even keel.
Jennie Rusky, 85, has lived in Appleton all her life, and her father was the first president to serve in the synagogue’s first building, constructed in 1922. (Its present building was completed in 1969.) She said that in recent years the “numbers stay the same” at around 80 families.
This is confirmed by other community leaders like Cassorla, though he estimates the range of fluctuation slightly higher, at between “85 to 135” families. (The American Jewish Yearbook of 2001 puts the total Jewish population of the Appleton area at around 300.)
Currently, the community is growing a bit. Business-owner and board member Jared Bailin, also descended from one of the synagogue’s founding families, said that about 10 new families became members within the last year, an influx that began even before Cassorla began work as spiritual leader last August.
Cassorla reported that there are more than ten students in the religious school’s current bar/bat mitzvah class, a sizable proportion in a total religious school class of about 30.
However, the class following will have one, and Cassorla said a pattern of alternating big and small classes exists throughout the grades. “Fecundity is a semi-annual thing here,” he joked.
Influence of geography
Besides memories of its past, geography is probably the influence that most shapes the particular character of this Jewish community. Like many synagogues in smaller communities, Moses Montefiore serves Jews living in a large area, with “one or two” families from as far away as Fond du Lac.
But unlike the synagogues in Wausau and La Crosse, which serve a community described by a radius from the main city, Appleton’s community mostly resides in the small cities along the Fox River, which flows northeast from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay. At the synagogue’s recent Purim party, there were families living in Neenah, Menashe, Appleton and Kaukauna, cities that run from southwest to northeast along the river.
All these municipalities are having what Cassorla, who has served other small Jewish communities (see Chronicle Oct. 18, 2002), called an “identity crisis” brought about by sharing in the “national effort to consolidate municipalities.”
This has some influences on Jewish community affairs, he said. For example, the spring break of the synagogue’s two-day-a-week religious school coincides with that of the Appleton school system, but not with that of the Neenah school system, to the inconvenience of parents and annoyance of kids.
Geography has another influence; Appleton’s Jews are not as removed from the state’s larger Jewish communities as are other small communities. According to synagogue board chair Jerry Zabronsky — who grew up in the D.C. area — the Appleton community is “far enough from Milwaukee and Madison that we have to run our own show, but close enough that we can still rely on their resources sometimes.”
That’s what Moses Montefiore Synagogue did during its search for a new rabbi, which lasted a couple of years. Hazzan Carey Cohen of Milwaukee would travel there to lead services periodically.
Still, the community emphasizes self-reliance, as do nearly all the state’s smaller Jewish communities. And as in those communities, the people who like living there say they enjoy that aspect of the lifestyle.
“I like the smallness” of the community, said former Milwaukeean Nancy Lewandowski, a not-currently-practicing physician who has lived in the community for four years with her physician husband Tom and their three children. “Smallness means everybody has to get involved … if you want your kids to have a Jewish community.”
Indeed, she became a member of the synagogue’s board after living there only a year, which she said couldn’t happen in a larger community.
Oren Kosansky, professor of anthropology at Lawrence University and faculty advisor to the small Jewish student group there, also said he liked how community members “took care of business” at the synagogue in the time before Cassorla was hired. That was “exciting for me” after having lived in such larger communities as Montreal, he said.
With the self-reliance goes a sense of community warmth. Jaynie Cherkasky came from St. Paul, met her Appleton-native husband Alan at a Jewish singles event in Chicago, and moved with him to Kaukauna. She acknowledged feeling apprehensive about going there, but “from the first second” of meeting the community “I felt like this was my family that I’ve been with my whole life,” she said.
Of course there are some of the usual little conflicts in a synagogue that has to provide for people of different levels of religious observance. The congregation has become more liberal Conservative in such matters as gender egalitarianism, to some members’ displeasure. Bailin said the synagogue tries to “be all things to all people” and that to go from the Friday night to the Saturday morning Sabbath services is “almost like going to different congregations.”
Neveretheless, former Milwaukeean Annette Stein, who has lived in Appleton for 12 years and runs the synagogue’s gift shop, called the community “a melting pot…. Everyone seems to get along very well.”
How much anti-Semitism?
The one issue on which there is some disagreement concerns the level and influence of anti-Semitic sentiment in the area.
Most of the people interviewed said there is little or none. Paul Eisen, a New York City-born insurance broker who has lived in Appleton for 25 years, said when asked about local anti-Semitism that there had been “nothing really, to my recollection.”
Rabbi Cassorla and board president Zabronsky report good relations with the non-Jewish community and both have spoken at area churches — Cassorla recently when a Lutheran church in Neenah decided to stage the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” and asked him to discuss the show with the cast and the church’s adult education group.
And even though Jewish kids often are very few in area public schools, at least two of them — Jackie Reich, 13, a seventh grader at Einstein Middle School, and Isaac Sherman, 15, a freshman at North High School — reported no particular problems with classmates or school staff. “They treat me the same as everybody else,” said Reich.
Still, Sherman admitted that while he has “never been harassed” for being Jewish, he does “hear lots of jokes” from non-Jews. Others have said they have heard worse.
Cassorla, who teaches Hebrew at Lawrence University, recently attended three of a five-lecture series there on the Middle East and the impending war with Iraq. “I was blown away by the depth and breadth of anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment among the students and faculty,” he said.
Dr. Alan Cherkasky said that he and “four or five” other Jewish physicians at a particular clinic in town had heard many anti-Semitic comments from colleagues and “nothing was done about it.” So Cherkasky and most of the other Jewish physicians left that clinic, and now only one is left, he said.
But others question how significant such instances are. Zabronsky said that Lawrence University, while famous, is small and “not a dominant player” in the community; and Appleton is not the kind of “university town” that Madison is. “I’m more disturbed by the general [anti-Israel] attitude on college campuses than by Lawrence University specifically,” he said.
Cassorla acknowledged that he has not heard “on the street” the sentiments he heard at the lectures. Prof. Kosansky, who attended two of the lectures, said, “I would not characterize them as anti-Israel…. There was sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but that is not necessarily anti-Israel.”
And Cherkasky apparently had no trouble finding a new position at a different clinic, the Aurora Medical Group, which he said has “great diversity” on its staff. The anti-Semitism he encountered “didn’t drive me out of the community,” he said. “I grew up in this community and nobody is going to make me leave.”
Loading ...