A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [100]
IN 1911, the same year Chaim Rottenbergs 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 metro entrances to apartment buildings. The building site was on a rundown street off of Rue des Rosiers, Rue Pavee.
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 Pavee 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 rabbi nically 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