Each of us will remember Rabbi Louis J. Swichkow, who died on Sept. 21, for the man and the rabbi that he was in our own particular lives during the close to 50 years he served the Milwaukee Jewish community as spiritual leader of Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue.
In recalling some of my own impressions of him, I hope to jar other people’s memories of him, for, after all, one important way we Jews mourn and pay tribute to those in our lives who have passed on is by remembering our interactions with them.
Rabbi Swichkow taught a few high school students in the school office on the synagogue’s first floor during the times that I was taking elementary school classes.
When my father realized that, he would come early to pick up the carpool so that he could sit in on those classes.
My father loved them — so much so that when Rabbi Swichkow suggested that my parents send me to Camp Ramah during the summer after my twelfth birthday, they agreed. That was probably the single most important Jewish decision that my parents ever made, for Ramah had a tremendous effect on my life, and I owe that completely to Rabbi Swichkow.
To go to Ramah, though, you had to be taking at least six hours a week of Jewish studies during the year, and so I continued on in Hebrew high school after my bar mitzvah. That included study sessions at Rabbi Swichkow’s home every Saturday afternoon.
We would examine the weekly Torah reading with the commentary of Rashi or, when holidays approached, we would learn the books connected to the holidays or the laws governing their observance. Rabbi Swichkow was a terrific teacher — open to the broadest and the most minute of questions, patient and, most of all, clearly in love with the material and concerned that we would love it too.
I have come to know many, many rabbis in my life, and few of them are willing to devote every Saturday afternoon to teaching high school students. I only hope that he knew that we appreciated his devotion to us even if we had no idea of how special that was.
Rabbi Swichkow was a very traditional man in both his own life and in the standards that he created for the synagogue. And yet in the 1950s, when I was growing up, he had already created the policy that girls for their bat mitzvah would do exactly what most boys did for their bar mitzvah — namely, recite Kiddush in the synagogue service on Friday night, have an aliyah to the Torah on Saturday morning and chant the haftarah with its accompanying blessings.
It was only many years later that I discovered that in the vast majority of Conservative synagogues at that time and on into the 1960s, girls’ bat mitzvah ceremonies would be confined to some readings on Friday night. In later years, as the Conservative movement became largely egalitarian, Rabbi Swichkow did not follow that lead, yet he was a true pioneer in the education and participation of women in Jewish worship.
He also modeled the scholar-rabbi. Rabbis are called on to do many things at all hours of the day and night, and nobody can do all the things that rabbis might legitimately do as rabbis.
So it takes academic interest, discipline and determination for a congregational rabbi to pursue scholarly projects, and, in the end, few pulpit rabbis produce scholarly books.
That is not an indictment of most rabbis; they are just focused on other important things. Rabbi Swichkow, though, managed to do the research and writing necessary to produce “The History of the Jews of Milwaukee” and thus served as a rare model of the scholar-rabbi.
I remember him also as a staunch Zionist. For a rabbi trained in an Orthodox yeshiva in the 1930s, Zionism was not a foregone conclusion; quite the contrary, for at that time many Orthodox Jews were opposed to Zionism as pushing God’s hand in bringing the Messiah.
Rabbi Swichkow, though, worked hard for Israel. I remember his utter glee as France and Great Britain helped Israel in the 1956 Suez conflict, and some of his most passionate sermons focused on our need to support Israel.
Rabbi Swichkow was a human being, after all, and like all of us, that means that he was not perfect — however one defines that. But his life-long devotion to Jews and Judaism, expressed in immense investments of time, energy, and skill, was an incalculable gift to the Milwaukee Jewish community and the mark of a life well lived.
Y’hi zikhro barku, may his memory be blessed.
Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff is rector and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
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