Temple Menorah ‘adopts’ Romanian community

All Jews are family in a way, say the rabbis. So it seems appropriate that it was a family connection that led Milwaukee’s Temple Menorah to “adopt” into its “family” a Jewish community in Romania.

Shlomo Lerer, brother of Menorah’s senior rabbi, Isaac Lerer, not only has worked for the Israeli government in Israel. For the past few years, the office of the chief rabbinate there has sent him as an emissary during the High Holidays to the community of Brasov (pronounced Bra-shov), Romania.

Though Shlomo is not an ordained rabbi, his rabbi brother, Isaac, said that Shlomo “has a beautiful voice and can conduct services and speak as a volunteer.”

Shlomo would tell his brother the sad story of Brasov’s Jewish community. Once a prosperous community with eight synagogues, it was decimated by the German Nazis and the communists. It now has only one synagogue, a small Jewish community center and “a few hundred Jews,” Rabbi Lerer said.

While the local Jewish community center and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which receives funds from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Annual Community Campaign, do what they can to feed the elderly Jews there and provide other aid, Shlomo Lerer told his brother “it would be a mitzvah” if the rabbi could also help.

And so Rabbi Lerer did. With money from the synagogue’s Ezra Fund, which was originally founded in the 1980s to provide aid locally, plus additional donations — “Our people [at Menorah] are very gracious,” said Rabbi Lerer — he was able for the last three years to send checks to the Brasov community just before the High Holidays.

The community there was so grateful that this past September, it listed “Temple Menorah Milwaukee” on its “table of honorable donors” in the community center and sent a photograph of that to the synagogue.

And this so moved Rabbi Lerer that he suggested to the synagogue’s board of directors that the synagogue adopt the Brasov community, which it did at its meeting of Oct. 17.

“It’s a wonderful feeling, doing good things to help people in need not only here, but everywhere,” Rabbi Lerer said. Moreover, “who would have thought that Temple Menorah” would be known in Romania?