A Safe Haven
by Louise Motel
I still have no idea what my parents were thinking in 1954 when they bought a house in the north side Chicago community of Sauganash. My mom was a Brooklynite and my dad had been born and raised in Saskatchewan, Canada who had been practicing medicine in Chicago for almost 10 years before their marriage.
So he should have known that the stately red brick colonial on the 5900 black of North Forest Glen Avenue was located in a neighborhood with very few Jews
.
Author and former Chicagoan Adam Langer wrote, “Growing up Jewish in Chicago means you didn’t grow up in Sauganash.”
Back in those days, had you driven down my street during the month of December, you would easily have spotted our house. It was the only one without an evergreen wreath, festive twinkling lights or a grinning plastic Santa. In fact, because of its abundance of Christmas paraphernalia, the City of Chicago awarded our street one-way status throughout the holiday season.
At the local elementary school, my sister Debbie and I were the olive-skinned girls with hazel-brown eyes and dark curly hair, playing at recess amid a sea of blue-eyed blondes. We were the only ones who missed class on the High Holidays and who refused to sing the more religious Christmas carols. Our “otherness” was duly noted. Mothers excluded us from birthday party invitation lists. A ballet teacher inexplicably cut our solos from the program the day before a holiday dance recital.
As we grew older, we also became the recipients of anti-Semitic slurs, uttered by pre-teens parroting toxic terms heard during their parents’ dinner table conversations. But none of these incidents had prepared me for the moment in seventh grade when I realized that the doodles being scribbled by the boy sitting next to me were swastikas.
It was against this backdrop this that, in the early 1960s, my parents found Beth Emet.
I’m not sure exactly how my parents learned about “The Free Synagogue,” located at the corner of Ridge and Dempster, a good 20-minute drive from our house. There were certainly closer shuls. My guess is that they had been told about Rabbi Polish’s compelling sermon style and Beth Emet’s reputation—even then—for social activism. Maybe they had also heard about the synagogue where, in 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr. had spoken on the bimah and then later spent the night, as he was unwelcome at Evanston hotels.
We were soon integrated into life at Beth Emet, on whose religious school walls hung photographs of many students who had dark hair and eyes just like I did. Rabbi and Aviva Polish became my parents’ friends, and their son Danny taught my Sunday school class. I attended a fairly new summer camp in Oconomoc, Wisconsin, then known as “Union Institute,” where all the campers were Jewish. And I stopped worrying about the words to “Silent Night,” as I mastered “Oh, Chanukah.”
Fast-forward through cultural and socio-political changes too extensive to have ever been imagined. On the American Jewry front, we have witnessed a Jewish Vice-Presidential candidate and the election of numerous Jewish legislators at both the national and local levels. There are now three Jewish Supreme Court justices, not to mention a Jewish mayor of Chicago (which has now been dubbed a “sanctuary city”). Bagels-and-lox have gone mainstream, while Yiddish words regularly populate the New York Times crossword puzzle.
And yet, we have become increasingly aware that anti-Semitism in this country is not some bygone relic, like black-and-white TVs or cars without seatbelts. According to a recent report issued by the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic activity in the United States increased 57 percent last year, the highest level in more than two decades. This includes bomb threats, cemetery desecrations and physical assaults. There has also been a general resurgence of white supremacist activity that has emboldened anti-Semites, as evidenced by the venomous attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia last August.
These reports of prejudice and nativism have stirred up some painful memories of my Sauganash childhood. But I am also reminded of how, more than 50 years ago, Beth Emet provided my family and me with a safe haven in which we could be our authentic Jewish selves. That it continues to do so today, while championing the humanity of the homeless, minorities and immigrants, makes me feel even more grateful for my parents' decision to become part of the Beth Emet community.
