Synagogue memories

To the Editor,

When I read your report about the conservative Wallingford synagogue Ohev Shalom (December 18 edition), I was reminded of many stories. Some were about Jewish Americans and African Americans in Swarthmore and included my experience with home-buying in 1971, as well as my late wife’s report about her jazz saxophone teacher who was prevented from moving across Yale Avenue from his “Precious Place” in the “Scrapple Hundred” neighborhood, which is what the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore used to be derogatorily called. Another was about a zealous convert at Ohev Shalom who asked me to leave the premises when he caught me writing poetry during a bar mitzvah.

But the better stories are about Reconstructionist Beth Israel, especially the ousting of Rabbi Brian Walt when he was paying as much attention to Nicaraguan refugees and Central American politics as he was to Israel and the Palestinians. Beth Israel was then in Media behind Pinnochio’s restaurant, in a building which I understand to have been a haven for the Orthodox Jews when they left Chester. Eventually Beth Israel developed a building fund and moved to larger quarters on South New Middletown Road.

I’m sorry Bruce Godick is sad about the effect of the pandemic on Ohev’s centennial celebration: It was to have been only a party. My father founded a conservative synagogue in a New York suburb when we moved out of The Bronx in 1945. He remained very active with it; but when, in its last days, a congregant at a men’s club meeting said he was sad about its coming demise (I was there), my father said, “It’s only a building.”

John Brodsky
Swarthmore