Why a Physical Synagogue is So Important

Thursday marks the 17th of Tammuz on the Hebrew calendar, a fast day beginning the “Three Weeks” leading up to the 9th of Av, the date when both Jewish Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed. The Mishnah in Ta’anit (4:6) lists multiple reasons why the 17th of Tammuz was deemed a fast day, with one lesser-known reason focusing on the date the Korban Tamid (daily sacrificial offering in the Temple) ceased to be offered. This “consistent korban” was meant to be sacrificed twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. For our family, we feel a particularly deep connection to this day, which also marks the 15th yahrzeit of our beloved patriarch, Emil Katz (Matisyahu ben Shmuel Zanvil HaCohen). He lived the ideals of the “korban Tamid” and exemplified the steadfastness of the committed, shul Jew.

My grandfather, born in 1917 in eastern Hungary near Debrecen, lived a remarkable 88 years, and I thankfully spent my entire childhood and teenage years in his presence. His life was far from easy, as he survived the Holocaust in a slave labor camp as a member of the Hungarian Labor Battalion while losing nearly his entire immediate family in Auschwitz. Just months after liberation, my grandfather married Eva Gelberger, a distant relative who herself survived Auschwitz.

The postwar era was not without its challenges, as the young couple fled Hungary before the communist takeover, ultimately settling in Los Angeles after a few years in a U.N. displaced persons camp in the U.S. zone in Austria. My grandfather made ends meet in the 1950s and 1960s while helping my grandmother raise three children (including my father) working as a bookbinder and a lay cantor, servicing different communities in the Los Angeles basin during the High Holy Days season. After a few years in North Hollywood, the young family made its way to the city, and began davening at Beth Jacob of Beverly Hills, a renowned Modern Orthodox synagogue that became my grandfather’s home away from home until his death. Sadly, my grandmother died in 1967 from a brain tumor, and my grandfather then married his first cousin, another Auschwitz survivor and recent widow herself, who moved from Montreal to Los Angeles to help my grandfather raise my uncle, then just 7 years old.

Whenever I return to Beth Jacob on annual trips to Los Angeles, I am overcome by a whirlwind of emotions as I experience our family’s history intertwined with the fabric of the shul itself.

My grandfather had been raised in an ultra-Orthodox home and spent his formative years in a local cheder and learning at a yeshiva run by an illustrious cousin, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Cohen (the maternal grandfather of the famous Esther Jungreis, the “Jewish Billy Graham”), in the town of Derescke. The priestly Katz family that he was born into was entrenched in a true love of Torah learning, observance and fidelity to halachah, and chazzanut, and my grandfather carried these values with him even as circumstances brought the boy from the Hungarian shtetl to the burgeoning postwar City of Angels. My earliest memories of my grandfather always involved Beth Jacob, where he was the shamash (sexton) for the early minyan, often arriving at 5:45 a.m. or earlier to open the shul and prepare for Shacharit morning prayers that took place in the downstairs chapel. He would often serve as the chazzan, including leading one of the longest weekday service of the year, the Selichot that are recited on Rosh Hashanah eve. He would stay after services to visit with his friends and attend a Daf Yomi shiur, only to return to shul later in the day for Mincha and Ma’ariv services.

I always enjoyed visiting the early minyan and seeing my grandfather running the show. The crew consisted mostly of Holocaust survivors, including my beloved maternal grandfather, who all trekked out in the early hours to begin their day with this special ritual. Our family had a beautiful custom of gathering for a Sunday morning brunch organized by my maternal grandmother, timed to start when my grandfathers returned from morning minyan. Sunday night dinners would also be timed around Mincha and Ma’ariv, as their absence from davening with the minyan at shul was simply nonnegotiable.

Together with some peers in our new community in Israel, we began the process of building a shul about two years ago. Now on the threshold of moving into our “permanent” trailer — called a caravan in Israel — my involvement in the shul is a direct influence of my grandfather and has its roots in Beverly Hills. My grandfather believed that the most important physical space in someone’s life, outside of their home (although perhaps even on par with one’s home) was the shul. Although attendance at the shul in based in halachah, as Jewish law prefers that the set prayers take place in a shul, my grandfather always recognized that shul attendance also had a social component, and was a place where aging survivors would meet twice daily to follow in the paths of their beloved ancestors and communities who had been destroyed. 

Whenever I return to Beth Jacob on annual trips to Los Angeles, I am overcome by a whirlwind of emotions as I experience our family’s history intertwined with the fabric of the shul itself. Weddings (including that of my parents), funerals, bar and bat mitzvahs, commemorations of yahrzeits and countless other familial events have taken place in Beth Jacob over the past 60 years of our family’s connection with the shul. There is something absolutely magical walking into the chapel downstairs and reflecting on the room that was my grandfather’s domain. Like the Korban Tamid offered twice a day, my grandfather would return to this room twice a day for decades, without fail. This hallowed space was a room of prayer, song, Torah study, tradition and community, and it is this multi-varied legacy which we, his descendants, hope to pass on to our children and future generations again living in the land of our ancestors.