Young Israel of Woodmere celebrates 50 years

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By Michael Orbach

Issue of April 9, 2010 / 24 Nissan 5770

The Young Israel of Woodmere began with a phone call in 1955.

The call was to Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky, then a first grade rebbe in Yeshiva Toras Chaim in East New York. Myron Bienenfeld, the father of a boy in Rabbi Kamenetzky’s class, wanted his son’s rebbe to visit the community where the family lived. It was in a foreign place called ‘Long Island.’

“He tells me people are moving in, and I didn’t pay any attention,” Rabbi Kamenetzky recalled last Sunday in a lengthy telephone interview. “I have no time to visit, but I said ‘Chol Hamoed I’ll drive in.’”

During his visit to the family, Rabbi Kamenetzky noticed that the only shuls, including Congregation Beth Sholom, were far away from the Beinenfeld home.

“I said, ‘You have such a beautiful home, it would be the nicest place to make the minyan right after Shabbat,’” Rabbi Kamenetzky counted. “I’ll say a dvar torah.”

Rabbi Kamenetzky brought unused siddurim from his father-in-law’s shul in the Bronx. Eventually Bienenfeld and others convinced Kamenetzky to move into the neighborhood, agreeing to pay the $17 Rabbi Kamenetzky made each week as a shul rabbi in East New York. They also purchased the house on Barnard Avenue where Rabbi Kamenetzky still lives, for $17,000.

Eventually the shul moved to a storefront between Forest and Derby avenues in Woodmere and then to a house on Cedarhurst Avenue and Peninsula Boulevard, and then to the mansion that would become Yeshiva of South Shore, until the congregation made its way to the Young Israel of Woodmere’s current location on Penninsula Boulevard.

Initially, the National Council of Young Israel was reluctant to have the shul become a Young Israel, and relented only after the congregation had been around under the name Etz Chaim for several years.

“They refused me, [saying] that there were no religious people there,” Rabbi Kamenetzky explained.

On April 18, the Young Israel of Woodmere will celebrate its 50th anniversary. With close to 1,000 member families, the shul is the largest in the Five Towns and one of the largest Orthodox shuls in the country. There are eight minyanim on a typical Shabbos morning, two Daf Yomi shiurim each day, and five minyanim for Mincha and Maariv every night.

Robert Schulman, an endrocrinologist in Borough Park, had the first bar-mitzvah in the shul that would become the Young Israel. His father, Milton Schulman, discovered the shul one weekday morning.

“He was driving down West Broadway and he saw the storefront, and he went in and he met Rabbi Kamenetzky,” said Schulman. “There was an instant connection; he just liked him a lot, and the two of them developed a strong friendship that lasted all these years, and we’re still very close with him.”

Schulman’s father moved his family from Lynbrook to Woodmere to be close to the shul. Once bar mitzvahed, Schulman and his brother were drafted into laining the parsha each week.

“It was like being a pioneer,” he recalled, adding that he used to hustle people inside the shul for the Friday night minyan.

After founding the shul, Rabbi Kamenetzky eventually left his position as rabbi to focus on the new Yeshiva of South Shore and to help build other Five Towns institutions, including Torah Academy for Girls. Rabbi Shaya Lebor became the rabbi of the shul in 1960 and led the congregation until 1981, when the shul’s current rav, Rabbi Herschel Billet, took over.

Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky, the son of the founder and the current Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva of South Shore, said he first met the charismatic Rabbi Billet at a batting cage of all places, as Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky was returning from a Shabbat in Lakewood.

“I was batting and I see a yunger man — a yeshiva man — who was batting in the cage next to me. It wasn’t such a common occurrence back then and we engaged in a conversation. I thought he was learning in Sh’or Yoshuv, but he said he was the new rabbi,” Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky laughed.

He described his first take on Rabbi Billet as “a young, dynamic person who hit the ball pretty well.”

His favorite moment at the Young Israel of Woodmere, he explained — aside from being chased by Rudy Rosen during Seudat Shlishit — was when the youth Shabbos, where the children ran the Shabbat minyan, coincided with Israel’s victorious conclusion of the Six Day War.

“I was 10 years old and I gave the drasha,” he remembered. “Lo ‘chayal koach: not with the MIGS [Russian fighter jets] or the forces of the army, tanks or the Russians.... I’ll never forget it,” he said. “It was such a small place that we knew everybody. Imagine knowing everyone in the Young Israel [today].”

During Rabbi Billet’s tenure, the shul’s membership has quadrupled from 250 member families to its current size. The shul was renovated in 1997. Rabbi Billet was characteristically modest about his role in its development.

“The credit for building goes to the laypeople, who put in their hard work for no reward, and Rabbi Kamenetzky and Rabbi Lebor, who built it.” Rabbi Billet said.

“They deserve the credit. I took over what already was in existence and it grew naturally.”

“The community had HAFTR and HALB, and we had an eruv and a mikva and the Vaad Hakashruth,” he continued. “That was all created before I got here. When you have good schools, mikvah, an eruv and kosher services and you’re proximate to the city and the railroad, it’s a win-win situation. Unfortunately,” Rabbi Billet laughed, “we’re in the diaspora.”

Rabbi Billet also credited the Young Israel of Woodmere’s longtime executive director, Rabbi Danny Frankel, and Paul Silverstein, who oversees the youth department.

The shul was instrumental in the community’s development — supporting local, national and international Jewish causes and providing the lay leadership of the eruv, mikvah, and a number of local schools. Both Kulanu and the Tova mentoring program were founded in part by members of Young Israel.

“The Young Israel was the mothership,” Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky explained, adding that Yeshiva Shor Yoshuv was also co-founded by members of the shul.

Jeffrey S. Gurock, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and the author of “Orthodox Jews in America” (Indiana University Press, 2009), called the event a “milestone.”

“When I think of the history of shuls like Young Israel of Woodmere, it reminds me that back in 1960, suburbia was seen as a backwater for Orthodoxy, as it was predicted, and evident early on, that the migrants from the inner city of New York, if they were interested in maintaining religious life, would opt for Conservative and perhaps Reform Judaism.” Gurock explained by email. “The regnant sense was that those children and grandchildren of immigrants who were blessed with affluence and were fully Americanized would largely gravitate away from ancestral Orthodoxy. This synagogue and community have graphically refuted that assumption, evidencing that for thousands of Jews, being comfortable with this country’s ways and successful in its professions and industries can go hand in hand with a strong fidelity to Orthodoxy, — a commitment that has only grown over the decades.”

The dinner will honor the past rabbis of the shul and the founding families and members. The only problem with lasting for half a century is that many of those people are now gone. Rabbi Lebor died in 1997 and Milton Schulman in 1991. Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky, who is recovering from a fall, plans to attend.

“They only came because we built,” Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky said.