When seven German immigrants incorporated Mount Sinai Congregation here in March 1914, they probably didn’t imagine a group of congregants creating a book about it 100 years down the line.
It’s also a safe bet they couldn’t have foreseen a title like “In Wausau, They Grill Lox.”
Tara Woolpy of Minoqua has spent the past year working on the project with fellow editors Larry Weiser of Stevens Point and Julie Kobin of Wausau. She explained that the title of the book has its own story.
That story involves Julie Luks, a physician who is also the wife of Mount Sinai’s 14th full-time rabbi, E. Daniel Danson.
“The first year she was here she took lox to her colleagues as a gift — probably for Christmas,” Woolpy said. “And clearly, they had never had it before. Because when she talked to them afterward, someone said, ‘That fish sure was strange, but it was okay if you grilled it.’”
Such are the realities of modern Jewish life in central and northern Wisconsin, the area served by Mount Sinai. Members of the current congregation are spread out over a seven-county area, 120 miles north to south and 60 miles east to west of Wausau.
“In Wausau They Grill Lox” was the brainchild of Weiser, a longtime member of the congregation and a retired professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Weiser got the idea after his friend Mark Seiler, also a retired professor at UW-SP, published a book about the Jewish community of Stevens Point.
When the building of the disbanded synagogue there was deeded to the Portage County Historical Society, Seiler, who isn’t Jewish, was put in charge of it.
In addition to getting the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, he put together several exhibits and eventually wrote the book, which was published as a pro-bono project by a local publisher.
“I thought it would be really nice if we could have a book about Mount Sinai of the same type [Seiler] wrote — it’s a very lovely book,” Weiser said. “But I did not want to write the book myself, so I shopped around and searched for someone who would be willing.”
Weiser’s quest turned out to be less easy than he’d imagined. Over the next couple of years, he asked every suitable person he could think of, and got many polite refusals.
Woolpy’s refusal to write did not include a polite refusal to edit, and at that point, Weiser’s idea became a reality. One of the first people he’d asked, congregant Gail Skelton, a retired sociology professor at UW-SP, had written a 35-page history of the Jewish community of Wausau.
Skelton was willing to add to her work and bring it up to the present. With that starting point, Woolpy, Weiser and photo editor Kobin set to work.
Weiser compiled membership, burial and yahrzeit lists, with an eye toward providing information for readers who might be interested in genealogical research.
As Kobin searched for photographs, Weiser and Woolpy solicited essays from former and current congregants, former rabbis and, of course, Mount Sinai’s longest-serving and current rabbi.
Danson marked his 25th anniversary last year. (See June 2013 Chronicle.) In addition to his essay, he wrote the book’s introduction.
“This has never been a Jewish community of the gilded ghetto, of ‘see and be seen,’ but instead one that has needed and welcomed all comers,” Danson writes. “Entering this book is like walking into an attic filled with wonder, full of pictures, letters and unvarnished memories.”
By all accounts, Mount Sinai has flourished, in large part, because of its culture, which, as Danson put it, is one that “has needed and welcomed all comers.” (Full disclosure: This writer was a member of the synagogue when she lived in Marshfield.)
The part about need is a simple function of numbers. With a membership that has held roughly steady at about 90 families, central and northern Wisconsin’s Jewish community is a tiny minority.
“We can’t get into those kinds of battles where half the congregation splits and goes somewhere else, because there is no somewhere else,” Woolpy said.
But small numbers alone don’t fully explain how Mount Sinai’s members feel about their synagogue, or its effect on their view of themselves as Jews.
Woolpy described the congregation’s atmosphere as “lack of snootiness,” attributed in part, to Mount Sinai’s founders having been merchants and junk dealers.
But the more contemporary composition of the congregation, which includes more doctors, professors and other professionals, has not changed the congregation’s culture.
Rabbi Larry Mahrer served the congregation from 1977 to 1982.
“There was no stuffiness, no sanctimonious feeling in the place. Everybody was friends with everybody else, and it was a very pleasant place to serve as a rabbi,” Mahrer said. “It’s a wonderful community, and the word I would use is relaxed. There was no phoniness there.”
Like many of Mount Sinai’s members, Jody Gross had previously lived — and belonged to synagogues — in large cities. She moved to Marshfield in 1984 with her husband, Jerry Goldberg.
Both are physicians at Marshfield Clinic. Their three sons became bar mitzvah and were confirmed at the synagogue. Goldberg still teaches in the religious school.
“It’s the first place I’ve felt at home Jewishly anywhere,” Gross said.
Part of that has to do with the way the congregation’s members treat one another. It’s a given at Mount Sinai that the entire congregation is invited to every bar and bat mitzvah celebration.
The way members welcome newcomers to the community is also a factor.
“From the moment I walked in the doors, I loved the congregation,” Woolpy said. “It’s an amazing small-town, really friendly and embracing congregation.”
That, according to one of its longest-lived members, is also not new.
Lucille Libman Shovers, 89, now a resident of the Jewish Home and Care Center in Milwaukee, was born in Wausau and lived there until five years ago.
Her late husband Alfred had a cattle dealership and Lucille worked as a sign language instructor at a school for the deaf. They raised their three children there.
“We weren’t as active as some members of the synagogue,” she said, “but that didn’t matter. I baked cakes for bake sales, and we went to services, and everyone knew everyone and everyone cared about everyone.”
Mount Sinai is holding a Centennial Celebration banquet on Saturday, May 3, at the Wausau Country Club in Schofield. The guest speaker will be Rabbi David Fine, director of the Small Congregations Network of the Union of Reform Judaism.
For more information, or to attend, contact the synagogue office at 715-675-2560.
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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