A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [134]
Too large to fill, the Templum was used only on rare occasions. None of the locals objected when the New York Orthodox built a mikveh next to it, even though liberal synagogues do not use mikvehs. There were no liberals left. No one in Cracow had used a mikveh since before the war. The New York Jews would bathe in the mikveh to purify themselves before making a pilgrimage to the cemetery at the Remuh. Word spread among Poles that these Jews could not refuse a panhandler once they had been to the mikveh. They were in a purified state, and if they rejected a beggar they would have to go back to the mikveh and bathe again before going to the cemetery. Believing this, the Poles would line up to greet the Orthodox as they left the mikveh.
Emily Korzenik arrived in Cracow without speaking a word of Polish or Yiddish. But she had an entourage of translators. Also with her was an NBC television crew, a documentary film crew, and a photographer from People magazine. The elderly woman who had said “Bring us life” had not said anything about bringing press coverage, and she gazed uncertainly at these Americans. Not knowing what else to do, she invited them to lunch. Korzenik looked at the well-kept little Remuh and at the larger Templum, where the walls were rotting and old papers were stacked along the walls, and decided that she liked the Orthodox synagogue better. “It seemed like the most cleaned up,” she said.
Czeslaw Jakubowicz, a white-haired man with a sturdy broad-featured face, was the president of the handful of people that was the Cracow Jewish Community. He was the old-timer who hadn't left. He had not stayed out of principle, however. In 1956, when large numbers of Cracow Jews were leaving, he decided that he would emigrate to Antwerp with the remainder of his family. They already had relatives there. But Jakubowicz's family did not understand the rules of this game, and so instead of lying and saying they were going to Israel, they applied to emigrate to Belgium. Permission was denied. During the 1968 purge he again missed the open door because his uncle, the president of the Community, was arrested, and by the time he was released five months later, the government had stopped offering the visas.
Jakubowicz stayed on to become the president of the few dozen remaining people. At most there were 250 people in Cracow who would call themselves Jewish, and the majority of them were not active. At his lonely post Jakubowicz received word that Americans wanted to do a bar mitzvah in the Remuh with a woman rabbi. He could barely remember the last Cracow bar mitzvah—in the early 1950s, in the Templum. But who was this woman who said she was a rabbi? “There was never such a thing in Poland. It was not Polish tradition. Can you imagine a woman priest?” he said. Women pray in a separate space, they are not allowed to do the Torah reading, and they do not wear prayer shawls. How can a woman be a rabbi? Troubled by this, he contacted a Bobover Hasidic rabbi who was visiting Poland and told him that an American woman rabbi wanted to bar mitzvah an American boy in the Remuh. The Bobover rabbi called New York, the home of an Orthodox rabbi named Nacham Elbaum. Elbaum was eating a bowl of soup when he received the news of a woman rabbi in the Remuh. He put down his spoon and ran for a taxi to Newark Airport for a flight to Warsaw.
The ceremony was moved to the Templum, and Elbaum led the prayer with a cantor he had recruited while changing planes in Vienna. Emily Korzenik found herself in the balcony with the rest of the women. Nor was the media very happy. Rabbi Elbaum would not allow them to use cameras, since this would be contrary to Orthodox custom. One photographer who happened to be Jewish was