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Up From the Ashes
A synagogue on fire is a provocative image. When I went downstairs Saturday morning and saw that the cover of the newspaper had a picture of Central Synagogue on fire, my mind began racing. The billowing smoke against the smooth purple sandstone conjured up fears of Islamic terrorists, memories of photographs taken after Kristallnacht and recollections of reading about the destruction of the First and Second Temples.
I was relieved to read that my initial assumptions were nothing more than the unpleasant fantasies of a journalist expecting the worst. As it turned out, the fire was an accident that happened in the course of the construction of an air-conditioning system. Nobody had been seriously hurt. The landmark building was not beyond repair. The Torah scrolls were safe.
The fire struck a personal chord -- a minor one, to be sure, but with more dissonant overtones than the simple sad note of the coverage in the papers and on local television. It is said that it is harder to mourn the loss of a relative one shares a troubled history with than a person for whom one's love is not mitigated by darker emotions. Central Synagogue is for me a difficult uncle. Central was my gateway to Jewish ritual. It was there that I observed the High Holidays for my first 20-odd years and where I celebrated my bar mitzvah. Yet Central Synagogue was also where I went on Sunday mornings as a child to receive a Jewish education typical of Reform Judaism in the 1970s and that left me with a hollow feeling that may, in thinking about it, have been exacerbated by the very architecture.
"Awe-inspiring" is the adjective that many observers, including Rabbi Alexander Schindler, have used in recent days to describe the 1872 wonder built by Henry Fernbach, one of the first American Jews to distinguish himself as an architect, and...