A Chosen Few (30 page)

Today there is rarely a
charcuterie
in France that doesn’t sell smoked salmon, but in the early 1960s, Parisians who wanted it went to Rue des Rosiers. Although a little out of the way, the street had tremendous potential because it was not far from the central
market, Les Halles, which had everything but smoked salmon. To get smoked salmon, people walked over from Les Halles to Rue des Rosiers, turned up the little side street, spent hundreds of francs at Klapisch, then walked forty yards back to Rue des Rosiers, noticed a little bakery with challah and bagels and other exotic breads in the window, and spent a few francs at Finkelsztajn’s.

Henri always watched what was going on in the neighborhood, and he was becoming irritated by this trade. He wanted to see a little more of the money spent at his shop and began offering herring and other traditional family foods, as well as a few Sephardic dishes and even Madagascar specialties from his wife. Soon others started doing the same. The Ashkenazim started noticing that hummus and vine leaves sold well. The Sephardim started catching on to poppyseed strudel and cheesecake. Soon it was hard to tell a Sephardic store from an Ashkenazic one.

But although they looked the same, the people were still different. They were not as different as a Pole and an Algerian (they did, after all, share common religious, moral, and intellectual traditions), but one was a Mediterranean and the other a Central or Northern European. Significantly, the North African Jews who settled in Marseilles and other points along the French Mediterranean found it far easier to adjust to living in France than did those in Paris or Strasbourg. But the jobs and opportunities were not in the south.

It was not only the climate but the history of the two peoples since 1492 that had shaped different mentalities. While North African Jews had experienced occasional persecution and even violence, especially in Morocco, they had not had a Holocaust; nor had their society been shaped by centuries of Cossack raids and regular pogroms. While the Ashkenazim had learned to either keep a low profile or assimilate in a world controlled by Christians, the Sephardim had learned to be a separate but assertive subculture in a society composed of separate groups.

There are slight differences in practice between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Religious Sephardim wear the four fringes, the
tzitzit
, tucked in rather than showing on the outside of their pants, which is a sign of piousness among Ashkenazim. Even the most religious Sephardic boys do not wear
peots
, curled side locks. Ashkenazim consider rice not to be kosher for Passover but Sephardim find eating rice on Passover completely acceptable.

Traditions also vary among Sephardic groups. In the Sabbath
service at the Esnoga, the Dutch royal family is blessed in old Portuguese. Algerian Sephardim have a lamb feast the night before Passover. Yiddish, essentially German dialect written in Hebrew, is uniquely Ashkenazic. But North Africans speak Judeo-Arab, which is Arab dialect written in Hebrew. The Dutch, Turkish, and Greek Sephardim speak Ladino, a Jewish dialect based on fifteenth-century Spanish.

One of the richest differences among Jewish subcultures is in music. The biblical readings of both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic service are chanted on a five-tone medieval scale. The music is not noted on a score but simply alluded to by marks above the Hebrew lettering indicating the direction of pitch. This leaves considerable latitude in the actual melody of the music, and a wide range of religious music has been created, much of which is passed down by unwritten tradition. The Sephardim are particularly noted for the beauty of their chants; a number of celebrated operatic singers have recorded Sephardic airs.

While the music can be very different and unfamiliar, any Jew should be able to go to a synagogue anywhere in the world and follow the service.

What the North African Jews were not prepared for in Paris was the degree of Christianization that had taken place in the French spirit of Republicanism. This would not have been surprising to someone who had seen the German Enlightenment or the American Reform movement, but there had been nothing like this in North Africa. The synagogues of Paris, instead of chanting, played organ music. The capital had three kosher butchers for 120,000 Jews, and only two or three kosher restaurants. And the strictness of the kosher was, to North Africans, highly dubious. Few Paris Jews were kosher at all. In a typical North African assessment, Lazare Bouaziz said, “Paris Jews were very discreet. They were Jews who did not want to say they were Jewish.”

The North Africans also found French Jewish education to be inadequate, and since most of their distinguished rabbis, scholars, and educators had moved to France, they began to make their own arrangements. Rabbi Naouri was now in Paris, along with the younger rabbis who had gathered around him in Bône. One of these younger Bône rabbis was René-Samuel Sirat. Sirat had first come to France in 1946 as a sixteen-year-old student, and then went on to study at the École Rabbinique de France. At the time he was studying in Paris, there were few Sephardic Jews. On Saturday
mornings he would walk across Paris to Rue Popincourt, on the eastern edge of the city, where the Salonikan community had a synagogue. These were Sephardic Jews from the Greek port of Thessaloniki. Before the war 20 percent of Thessaloniki had been Jewish, and it had been one of the most important and culturally rich Sephardic communities in Europe. The Nazis had deported 45,000 of the Thessalonikan Jews to concentration camps. The Gestapo officer in Greece, an Eichmann favorite named Aloïs Brünner, was later transferred to Paris, where he was able to deport more Salonikan Jews from this neighborhood, and after the war the few remnants of Salonikan Jewry were vanishing. (Brünner, who was then only in his twenties, also vanished, but he was sighted in Syria in 1986.) The synagogue on Rue Popincourt and another on Rue St.-Lazare, near Rue Bleue, were among the few places where the fifteenth-century rites and passionate music of Salonikan Jewry could still be heard. Sirat, who would not take a bus on the Sabbath, walked for more than an hour on Saturday mornings to hear this service. Today, the Rue St.-Lazare synagogue is Algerian, and the Rue Popincourt synagogue no longer functions. Another nearby Salonikan synagogue is now Moroccan.

Sirat was saddened by the general level of Jewish education in France. Few Jews went to synagogue, and on the rare occasions when they did go, they could not really carry it off because they could not read Hebrew. Jews would say a kaddish for their deceased parents by reading a text transcribed into Latin. A Holocaust survivor had written a book that was in wide usage on preparing young people for bar mitzvah. Instead of the customary intensive Torah study, it simply offered a few passages. To Sirat, the Talmud-Torah classes such as Finkelsztajn had attended were “really nothing at all.” There were only three full-time schools for Jewish studies in the entire country, all three of them in Paris.

Sirat saw it as his mission to stay in France and build the Jewish education system. With few truly Orthodox Ashkenazim, the Salonikans dwindling and only a handful of North Africans, it was a lonely struggle. Then suddenly, he was joined by another 350,000 North African Jews. North African Jewish communities, especially in Algeria, had been tightly organized and extremely activist. Even the departure was well organized and carefully funded to help the poorer Jews. Now France itself needed to be organized. Naouri directed the French rabbinical board, the Beth Din. Created in 1905 to regulate religious law, the Beth Din was
chiefly in charge of certifying marriages and supervising kosher practices. Naouri began to enforce strict laws on the slaughter of animals and the regulation of kosher shops.

In 1964, with Paris suddenly experiencing a renaissance of strict observance, it seemed natural that a new rabbi, tall, thin, with a fine brushed beard, boundless energy, and the fixed features of a man who does not compromise—Antwerp’s Chaim Rottenberg—should arrive in town.

I
N
1911, the same year Chaim Rottenberg’s father decided to move from Poland to be a rabbi in Antwerp, a small Ashkenazic community was established in the Pletzl. They had raised enough money from small contributions to build a new synagogue, and full of optimism for their growing community, they commissioned the leading Parisian architect of the day, Hector Guimard, to design it. Guimard was changing the look of Paris, bringing the long graceful curves of art nouveau to everything from
métro
entrances to apartment buildings. The building site was on a rundown street off of Rue des Rosiers, Rue Pavée.

The synagogue that was built, in a simple and stylish way, may be the most beautiful in Paris. Rising in a narrow space between two old Pletzl buildings, it was designed with long elegant vertical lines to exaggerate its height, and with a three-quarter balcony and a simple, tall leaded-glass window at the back. Typical of the period, the long lines are softened by graceful curves. From the posts supporting the balcony to the tulip-style light fixtures to the pattern in the leaded-glass window, the design recalls the graceful bowing of long-stemmed flowers.

In the fall of 1964 the rabbi for the Rue Pavée synagogue died, and Chaim Rottenberg was invited to replace him. In the Antwerp community it is said that, “It was in Paris that Chaim really found his work.” In Antwerp a community with numerous ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Rottenberg was constantly clashing with the other rabbis. But in Paris he was a phenomenon.

The building where the Rottenbergs were to live, next to the Guimard synagogue, was a cramped, damp Pletzl tenement. They had to clean it and build closets and virtually make an apartment out of the space. Chaim earned a modest salary, and Rifka had a small reparations payment from West Germany. Chaim had refused his own German payment, calling it “blood money.”

Chaim, with his long stride and peering eyes, was seen everywhere in the neighborhood, inspecting, and most of the few kosher shops were, by Rottenberg standards, all too lax. Sometimes in these early days Rifka was even seen buying a challah from Henri Finkelsztajn, something that in later years would be unimaginable. The Finkelsztajns had never claimed to be kosher and always did a good trade on Saturdays. In fact, once the other shops became more observant, Saturday turned into the Finkelsztajns’ best day.

Rottenberg found that the milk was not kosher. Milk that was not under rabbinical supervision could come from anywhere and could have had contact with meat. Rottenberg insisted on a supply of rabbinically supervised kosher milk for the entire year, and not just for Passover. He was troubled by the lack of
mikvehs
, or ritual baths. There was only one, very old-fashioned ritual bathing place in Paris.
Mikvehs
are used for purification. Converts immerse themselves there, as do married women after menstruation before they resume sex. Single women presumably have no need for a
mikveh
. Men bathe there to reach a purified state before a particularly holy moment, especially Yom Kippur. The fact that there was only one
mikveh
for all this activity had not greatly troubled the community up until then, because in reality few modern Jews ever use one. Most French Jews—in fact, most Jews—have never seen one.

But Rottenberg wanted not only a new
mikveh
, but an ultramodern one. Anyone who knew Chaim Rottenberg knew what the next step would be. He would start insisting that people use the
mikveh
. His plans required an enormous sum of money, much of which he raised by going one by one to people in the Pletzl and suggesting they pay what they could. If they were poor, he would take coins. If they were rich, he wanted to see ample checks. Sometimes he would smile at people, and sometimes he would shout at them. Once the
mikveh
got under construction, his regular visits to the builders and architect insured that everything would be strictly according to rabbinical law, even at the cost of the workers’ sanity. He was relentless. But people liked him. He was from an old rabbinical tradition in which a community is held together by the singular force of a rabbi’s personality—the kind of rabbi that was called a Rav, a great one. Their lives would take on the daily rhythm of religious practice because his did, and his presence would bring people into the community.

He would also grab them, scouring the Pletzl on a Saturday
morning for a few loose Jewish men to fill up the minyan, or quorum. Soon he had no problem with minyans, but he would still grab people. “Come stay with me,” he would say. Some people avoided the Pletzl because of Rav Rottenberg. Others became daily members of the Rue Pavée community. He would grab them, house them, teach them, arrange their marriages, then teach their children. His fanaticism was blended with love and a tireless enthusiasm. He could instill fear and then surprise people with his tolerance.

He ran around, stuck his head in everywhere, and knew everything that was going on. One man whom he had pulled in studied in his group every night for two years, then finally got the courage to confess that his wife was not Jewish. This was a terrible confession to a man like Rottenberg. It meant their children would not be Jewish, and for all the man’s studying, his Jewish line would end. But Rottenberg only nodded and said, “I know that.” Henri Finkelsztajn, who did not go to synagogues and was never going to be grabbed, still loved the sight of Rottenberg. He thought this tall, elegant, dark-coated rabbi with the long beard darting through the narrow streets was a welcome addition to the old Pletzl.

Rottenberg, of course, still liked to be “a troublemaker.” When Henri Schilli, a Grand Rabbi of France, died, a funeral procession was arranged with a Rothschild baron in the lead. In France, Rothschilds always lead anything run by the Consistoire Israélite, the central Jewish authority in France. It is with good reason that the Consistoire’s synagogue is commonly referred to as “the Rothschild synagogue.” But Chaim Rottenberg did not think a rabbi’s funeral should be led by a man who was not a rabbi or even a religious Jew by Rottenberg’s standard. He walked in front of the baron so that he himself was then leading the procession—in his words, “out of respect for the torah.”