CHICAGO - On a recent Sunday afternoon at a historic
Chicago synagogue, the sanctuary was packed but the mood was
restrained: A longtime congregant had died, and about 300
people had turned out for his funeral service. But amid the
solemnity, the occasional mourner discreetly pulled loved ones
out to the synagogue's front steps to snap cell phone pictures
of a large brick house, mostly obscured by shrubs, across the
street.
Such scenes have become commonplace in recent
months at KAM-Isaiah Israel, a Reform congregation in the Hyde
Park neighborhood. The dome of the historic Byzantine-style
synagogue looms over the red-brick house where Barack Obama
has lived for the past three years, and from which he made the
short trip across the street to deliver an early political
speech to a Jewish crowd. Now that Obama is an international
figure - and the block is home to the urban White House of the
president-elect - congregants and guests arriving for a
Sabbath or funeral service have to work their way through an
extensive cordon of Secret Service and local police.
The intense security that surrounds not just the Obama
home, but also a few nearby blocks, makes visiting the
synagogue a complicated affair: No unauthorized cars can enter
the area, and the hearty pilgrims who park blocks away and
enter by foot are subjected to checkpoints. But for a
congregation that prides itself on having remained on
Chicago's largely black South Side when most Jews moved to the
northern suburbs in the 1950s and '60s, the excitement about
its neighborhood - indeed, its block - producing the country's
first black president far outweighs the hassle of parking.
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"I've been channeling my parents lately, because 50
years ago, this was the dream," said Roberta Siegel, an active
KAM-II member whose father was the president of Isaiah Israel
(prior to its merger with Kehilath Anshe Ma'arav, or KAM) in
the 1950s. "A commitment was made to keeping this an urban
middle-class community."
Indeed, the synagogue stands
today as a living symbol of a kind of historic black-Jewish
cooperation that the presidential election both recalled and
vindicated, given the high rates at which Jews voted for
Obama.
Inside KAM-II, the two communities are living
side by side. On the morning of the funeral, a crowd of mostly
older Jewish congregants gathered in the sunny social hall to
hear a professor from the nearby University of Chicago speak
about Martin Buber and the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the same
time, the domed sanctuary was occupied by a small black
Christian congregation called City of Faith, which holds
weekly services in the building. In a synagogue classroom,
children from the two congregations worked on a quilt together
as part of a community arts program called Poetry Pals. This
sort of cross-pollination has touched Obama's life in the
neighborhood, as well: His daughters went to preschool at the
nearby Akiba-Schechter Jewish Day School.
Several of
KAM-II's congregants and leaders, including the synagogue's
emeritus rabbi, Arnold Jacob Wolf, and current president,
Larry Bloom, know Obama personally and have supported him from
the outset of his political career.
When Wolf met
Obama for the first time at a fundraiser for the fledgling
politician's state senate campaign, he told the Forward, "I
said, 'Someday you will be vice president of the United
States,' and he said, 'Why vice president?'"
All
hands on deck
Bloom, a former city alderman, said
that he used to introduce the candidate to locals on commuter
train platforms when he was running for state senate. In the
days before the area around the synagogue was a no-drive zone,
Bloom sometimes parked in the driveway of the parents of Obama
adviser Valerie Jarrett on his way to synagogue.
"This
is a congregation where the question wasn't, 'Are you going to
vote for Obama?' The question was, 'What state are you going
to help canvass?'" said Darryl Crystal, the synagogue's
interim rabbi.
Crystal and others at the synagogue say
that they have gotten used to life with the Secret Service,
which has increased its force around Obama's house several
times over the course of the past year. As the Forward
reported at the time of the presidential primaries, for
several months Secret Service agents had the key to the
synagogue and permission to use its restrooms at any time of
the day or night - which sometimes led to them tripping the
alarm. Now, however, they have their own facilities.
"You don't often see the same person," Bloom said of
the agents. "They change the guard every 45 minutes."
Of Obama, he said, "We know when he comes and goes."
On one memorable occasion, the motorcade rolled out half an
hour before Kol Nidre services began.
This closeness
to fame has hit no ordinary synagogue. The imposing building
was constructed in 1923 by renowned Chicago architect Alfred
Alschuler, at a time when the Hyde Park community was
prospering thanks to the expanding University of Chicago.
In the 1950s, the city's Jews began moving en masse to
Chicago's northern suburbs. During that era, the spiritual
leader of KAM, Jacob Weinstein, was nationally famous for his
social activism. He campaigned successfully to keep the
synagogue in the city, but the membership dropped to around
350 families from around 1,000.
"Jews left the
community in droves," said Nancy Perelmuter, the widow of the
rabbi who came to take over the Isaiah Israel congregation
during those years. "The president of the congregation wrote a
letter to my husband, asking, 'Do you really want to come?'"
When the two congregations merged in 1971, the
combined membership rose to about 930 families and KAM moved
into Isaiah Israel's historic building. The congregation
became a gathering place for Jewish intellectuals from the
University of Chicago. Today, the university's president is
among the members; the magazine rack in the lobby, rather than
holding synagogue bulletins, boasts an array of leftist
intellectual publications, from Dissent to the Journal of
Palestine Studies.
The joy over Obama's election comes
during a rough period for KAM-II. The most recent rabbi left
on a sour note this spring after a six-year stint during which
he and the congregation frequently clashed, and his
predecessor was not rehired after three years at the
synagogue. Crystal, who took over the congregation last July,
will, per his contract, move on next summer.
The
synagogue has lost some congregants because of the tumult -
about 475 families currently belong, down from an average of
about 500 in recent years - but it also continues to face the
obstacle that it has been struggling with for 50 years: Most
of Chicago's Jews live on the city's north side. About half
the congregation's new members live outside Hyde Park. In
addition to that, a few newcomers have been deterred, at least
initially, by the security around the synagogue.
"I
put off joining, because it took me awhile to figure out how
to approach the building and how to get in," said Alyssa
Luboff, a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of
Chicago. Luboff attended a recent Friday night service geared
toward new members, with her three small children in tow. "I
still haven't figured out how to park," she said.
Bloom said that he has heard from both potential new
members who come to the synagogue to peek at the house across
the street, and from those who say that they security has them
nervous about coming. For his part, he said, he tries to look
at the situation from a different point of view: Obama's.
"When Sarah Palin said she knew about Russia because
you could see it from Alaska, I wanted to say, 'Obama can see
a synagogue from his house; he obviously knows Jews,'" Bloom
said.
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