Members of the Tribe (16 page)

O
ne autumn Friday night I took a sentimental journey to my old temple in Pontiac, Michigan. Predictably, the visit was a disappointment—everything was smaller, shabbier, and less familiar than I had imagined. The people I had grown up with were gone, and the congregation that night was made up of strangers.

Only the rabbi’s sermon was the same. He was a new man, but his talk that night was a set piece right out of my boyhood. It was divided into two parts. The first was its American message—that the prophets had all been liberal Democrats who would have supported the ERA, gun control, school busing, and a cutoff of aid to the contras. In my day, the prophets were Hubert Humphrey men; twenty years later, they were with Mario Cuomo and Michael Dukakis.

With the real—i.e., American—business out of the way, the rabbi turned to the obligatory “Jewish” part of his sermon. “We Jews have been persecuted throughout our history,” he told the congregation. “Titus, the Spanish inquisitors, Hitler—all have sought to destroy us; but they are gone, and we are still here. Adversity has kept the Jewish people alive.”

If Jewish survival depends on adversity, the Jews of America are in trouble: There isn’t a single Torquemada or Titus on the horizon. But the congregation, familiar with the standard rabbinical rhetoric about oppression, seemed untroubled. Invocations of the horrors of the Jewish past are stylized bows to tradition; the Jews in a place like Pontiac have no personal experience of persecution.

Seen from the inside, their suburban world is a warm, secure place. But below Eight Mile Road, in the inner city of Detroit, where most Jews no longer live or even visit, there is a tiny pocket of people who were left behind during the exodus of 1967. Fundraising to them means finding the rent money. They don’t go to Israel because they don’t have the bus fare.

A few years ago the federation opened a branch of the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue was once the grand thoroughfare of Detroit, a street lined with gracious public buildings, impressive Gothic churches, and fine stores. That was before 1967. Today it lies in the center of the city like a knife wound, raw and sore—a tawdry strip of two-hour motels and porno shops, tottering winos, drug addicts, and underemployed muggers.

Putting the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue sent a clear message—it was there to serve the urban, non-Jewish poor. The federation wanted to do something to alleviate Detroit’s poverty problem, get a little good publicity, and provide some jobs for Jewish social workers. But when the doors opened, the staff was astonished to find dozens, and ultimately hundreds of Jews turning up for help. Some were mentally ill, others old and sick. A few were men and women on the skids, Jewish bums hiding out in flophouses, unable to face the pressures of suburban respectability.

One person who was not surprised by the appearance of these forgotten Jews was Rabbi Noah Gamze. Gamze had been dealing with them for years at the Downtown Synagogue, the funkiest congregation in the city of Detroit.

The Downtown is located right where it ought to be, in the center of Detroit’s once-bustling but now almost deserted business district. When I dropped by, on a weekday afternoon, the sidewalk in front of the small building was empty and there were parking spots right on the street. I rang the bell, and after being inspected
through a speakeasylike peephole, I heard the clicking of multiple locks and Noah Gamze swung the door halfway open to let me in.

Rabbi Gamze ushered me into his office, a cluttered room barely large enough to hold a desk, shelves of books, and a threadbare couch. The Downtown Synagogue was founded in the days when hundreds of Jewish merchants worked in the city and sometimes needed a place to say Kaddish or to discharge some religious obligation. In those flush times the synagogue had been solvent, even prosperous. But most of the Jewish merchants left and it has become a struggle to keep things going. The Downtown still provides a daily minyan for businessmen, but Gamze has broadened his mandate; slowly, without intending to, he has become the chief rabbi of Detroit’s outsiders.

At first glance Noah Gamze seemed wildly miscast for the role. He is an almost comically mild-mannered little man with wire-rim glasses perched professorily on his nose and a black silk yarmulke resting on thinning white hair. I guessed he must be close to sixty, although his formal, stilted language, high-pitched monotone voice, and didactic conversational style made him seem much older.

My first indication that appearances might be deceiving came when Gamze offered me a drink. Rabbinical refreshments generally run to tea and cookies, but he lugged out a bottle of whisky and shyly asked if I’d join him in a l’chayim toast. I got the feeling that Gamze doesn’t get much drop-in trade.

“Isn’t it a little rough for you down here sometimes?” I asked. He shook his head mildly. “I’ve had some experience along those lines in the past,” he said. “For one thing, when I was a young rabbi in Chicago I was acquainted with Jacob Guzik. I even had the honor of presiding at his funeral.”

It took me a minute. “Jacob Guzik? You mean ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik from the Capone mob?” Gamze smiled modestly. “You were his rabbi?”

“Well, yes I was. And I must say, I always found Mr. Guzik to be a generous and charitable individual. Of course he wasn’t a strict observer of the Sabbath, but how many of my congregants are?” Gamze sighed theatrically. I wasn’t sure but I thought I detected a twinkle behind his thick spectacles.

There was a knock on the office door, and a tall, stooped man came in. He was dressed in a mismatched plaid jacket and trousers
of indeterminate chemical composition, and, like Gamze, wore a black silk yarmulke. With great formality Rabbi Gamze introduced him as Sam Glass, janitor of the synagogue.

Sam Glass is the kind of Jew that people in the suburbs don’t believe exists. In his mid-fifties, he has spent his whole life in Detroit on the wrong side of the tracks; currently, he was living in the back of a burned-out store in the barrio. He had no connection with other Jews until a couple years ago when Rabbi Gamze found him selling newspapers in front of the Coney Island on Lafayette Street. Gamze took him in, and Glass has been with him ever since.

“This is Mr. Chafets, Sam,” said the rabbi. “He is a writer from Israel.”

“Uh, rabbi, you mean he came, uh, all the way from Israel?” gulped Sam in a hollow, Deputy Dawg baritone, a look of the utmost concentration on his face.

“Yes, that is correct,” piped Gamze. “He is a resident of Jerusalem, which as you know is the capital of Israel.” Sam nodded in affirmation, the pupil of a wise and learned master.

Rabbi Gamze was eager to talk about the media coverage of Israel, and he courteously included Sam in the conversation.

“Sam, Mr. Chafets has delved into the question of journalistic attitudes toward Israel. Perhaps you have seen some of his work on this most important subject?”

Glass let this nicety pass and waited.

“Mr. Chafets has examined the work of many prominent American journalists who are Jewish, such as Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel …”

Sam lunged forward in amazement. “Uh, wait a minute there, rabbi, are you, uh, saying that Ted Koppel is
Jewish?
”

“That is correct.”

“Gosh, I can’t believe it. Jewish! I always thought he was
Danish
.”

The doorbell rang and Sam, still shaking his head and muttering in astonishment, went to answer it. The afternoon minyan was beginning to arrive. It has been increasingly difficult to find a quorum in recent years. This, more than anything, is what prompted Noah Gamze to venture out into the inner city to search for new recruits. Combing the Cass Corridor, a greasy stretch of flop-houses
not far from Wayne State University, he discovered several dozen down-on-their-luck Jews.

“They don’t always attend our services, of course, but occasionally some of them drop by. They have the status of paid guest worshipers,” Gamze told me.

“How much do they get paid?” I asked.

“Two bucks a shot,” he said benignly.

There were a couple guest worshipers in the congregation that afternoon. Gamze introduced me to Willie “The Barber” Schwartz, a nonunion man with a patch over one eye and a suspicious glare in the other. Curtis Dennis introduced himself. A thin black man in his fifties, he was dressed in a war surplus leather bomber jacket, work pants, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Curtis Dennis is a convert to Judaism and a major player in Gamze’s game plan for achieving a daily minyan.

The day before, in a ghetto neighborhood not far from the synagogue, an eleven-year-old boy had been murdered by a fourteen-year-old in an argument over an imitation silk shirt. Dennis took me aside and confided that the victim had been his cousin. He also mentioned that he needed ten dollars to send the bereaved family a wreath. “I hope you come up with the money,” I told him, and he gave me a baleful look. A few minutes later I saw him talking earnestly to Rabbi Gamze, who listened respectfully, took out his wallet, and handed him a bill.

We went upstairs to the chapel. “Come on, rabbi, we’re running late,” said one of the businessmen, anxious not to get trapped downtown after dark. Mayor Coleman Young, in his ongoing cold war against the suburbs, had just erected a monument to Joe Louis—a giant black fist that extends over one of the city’s main freeway exit ramps. Most white merchants like to pass that statue heading north by sundown.

Gamze picked up his prayerbook and began to read. From the row behind me I felt a tap on my shoulder and Curtis Dennis, in a deep ghetto accent, said, “mincha, page one hundret and eleven.”

After services, Rabbi Gamze walked me to the door. “Tell me something, did you believe Dennis’s story about that kid being Dennis’s cousin?” I asked. The former spiritual advisor of Greasy Thumb Guzik looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if he had overestimated my sophistication. “Of course not.”

“Then why did you give him the ten?”

Gamze’s expression changed to one of gentle reproach. “Lying is a sin. But poverty is a worse sin. When a fellow Jew needs help, you help.” He turned to Sam Glass, standing at his elbow. “That is known as
tzedaka
. Are you familiar with that term, Sam?” Sam nodded vigorously. “Uh, yes rabbi, I, uh, learned it from you.”

Over two millennia Jews have been accustomed to turning to each other in times of crisis. In America, where the crises are few and far between, this tendency has been blunted—but not abandoned. When Jews are in real distress, they still turn inward, as if by instinct. That is true in the inner city of Detroit, and it is equally true at Temple Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco—a gay synagogue in the midst of a deadly epidemic.

There are homosexual congregations in almost every large city in the United States. But San Francisco is the capital of gay America and Sha’ar Zahav, with 250 members, is the most visible and influential gay synagogue in the country. I first heard about the congregation from a reporter on the
Northern California Jewish Bulletin
with the wonderfully unlikely name of Winston Pickett. I assumed that it might be difficult to make contact with Sha’ar Zahav but Pickett assured me that it would be easy, and it was. I simply called Rabbi Yoel Kahn from Sacramento, where I had gone to give a lecture, introduced myself and my project, and asked for an appointment. Kahn was more than agreeable; he suggested that we spend part of a day together, so that I could get a firsthand look at the inner workings of the temple.

Kahn’s openness stemmed from the fact that San Francisco takes Sha’ar Zahav in stride. The city is a liberal, tolerant place where Jews have long been accepted as members of the local establishment. Many of the old-line Jewish families, like Caspar Weinberger’s, have converted to Christianity, and the intermarriage rate is among the highest in the country. At the time San Francisco had a Jewish mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who was reportedly taken aback to learn, during a visit to Israel, that her Christian mother disqualified her as a Jew in the eyes of the Israeli rabbinical establishment.

This kind of Talmudic distinction is not taken seriously in San Francisco. Orthodox rabbis in the Bay Area maintain cordial relations with their Reform and Conservative colleagues, and even the local Chabad representative is said to be soft on heresy. Aquarian minyans and other New Age worship groups dot the city. San Francisco is probably the only place in the country where a gay synagogue could become a part of the Jewish establishment.

I took a bus from Sacramento, sharing the ride with commuters too smart to drive and travelers too poor to fly. As we boarded the Greyhound, the terminal’s loudspeaker boomed, “All aboard for San Francisco. Cigarette smoking is permitted in the last six rows of the coach. Please, no cigar, pipe, or marijuana smoking on board.” It was seven-fifteen in the morning. I laughed out loud and a businessman in a dark pinstripe suit standing behind me said, “California.”

Temple Sha’ar Zahav, which was once a Mormon church, turned out to be a disarmingly plain two-story white frame building located on a quiet residential street in the Upper Market area. Its ground floor is an unadorned chapel that seats several hundred on spare wooden benches. Upstairs there is an equally functional social hall and the rabbi’s modest office. I had expected something garish and lurid—a strobe
ner tamid
, sorcerers’ moons, and astrological signs on the ark—and I was a bit disappointed by the austere decor.

To an Israeli, the notion of a gay synagogue is as incongruous as kosher pork chops. The religious establishment in Israel takes the Scriptural view that homosexuality is an abomination, and even the nonreligious Jews tend to see it as a perversion or a sickness. There are a few gay bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, but homosexuality is far from accepted, and it takes considerable courage to come out of the closet. I entered Sha’ar Zahav full of wonder that there could be a synagogue for homosexuals, or that so many would be willing to publicly affiliate with it.