Larry Steinhardt on Wearing a Tallit

Growing up in a small rural town in New Jersey, Larry Steinhardt was an "other."

He was one of, perhaps, two Jewish students in his high school with a population of just more than 100 students. His mother, raised in a more religious home than his father, insisted the Steinhardts be part of a synagogue. They found a small congregation of around 20 families with no full-time rabbi and infrequent Shabbat services. Larry's sporadic attendance was always at his mother's insistence and never from any personal desire to belong to a Jewish community except for one night a year.

"When it came to Kol Nidrei," Steinhardt recalls. "That was a must. We absolutely had to go. It was the only time we felt an obligation to attend. We felt it was significant because we were going to be cleansed of our sins and forgiven."

Still, the experience did not bring much comfort to Steinhardt who felt out of place wrapped in a tallit, praying with other Jews.

"I didn't like having to explain why I was different," says Steinhardt. "It troubled me as a kid. When I joined Central Synagogue and did not have to wear a tallit, I felt comfortable. The idea of not wearing one is appealing to me."

Also appealing to Steinhardt was the welcoming presence of Central Synagogue's clergy. When Steinhardt lost his mother in 1987, he felt compelled to join a synagogue community. Rabbi Rubinstein and Central Synagogue seemed the right fit and he and his wife, Wendy, went on to raise their daughter, Jaime, there.

Jaime became Bat Mitzvah in 2003. On that occasion, the family’s history and Steinhardt’s personal struggles with tallitot seemed to come full circle. When Jaime became Bat Mitzvah, Steinhardt wore the same tallit his parents had given him at the time he became Bar Mitzvah in 1960. Jaime wore the tallit that her grandfather, Steinhardt's father, had worn when he became Bar Mitzvah in 1923.

Susan Schlechter on the Kol Nidrei Prayer

Kent Swig on the Kol Nidrei Prayer

Pat Rich: Reflections on Kol Nidrei

I was particularly happy to receive the letter inviting me to be a bimah guest for Kol Nidre in 2008. Although I had been asked before, I had attributed those invitations to being a committee chair, which I am no longer.

So I was very honored to be asked to participate this year at services at the Waldorf Astoria (in the Grand Ballroom—the only place large enough to accommodate 1700 people) for services. As the five guests sat in the robing room with the new Rabbi, Michael Friedman, who had just asked four of us if we would be willing and able to stand and hold the Torah during that portion of the service, I told them how meaningful that honor was to me.

I remember that my father used to come home after Shabbat services and invariably would tell us—even boast—when he had been asked to hold the Torah. He would always add that not only was it an honor, but a tremendous responsibility. "If the Torah were dropped, something horrible would happen to everyone present "(I'm not sure if it was that they would be blinded or would die.) But because he was strong and reliable, he was chosen, he explained.

I added that in previous years when I held the Torah, I found it a potent, moving experience. It is very heavy; it seems to pulsate with meaning and history. But I felt the weight of carrying it was being shared by my mother, my grandmothers….all my female forbears who had never been allowed to approach the Torah, no less to carry it at such an auspicious occasion as Kol Nidre. Their lives and support had given me strength and determination.

For several years, I have been fascinated by the Torah. I have been studying and considering its meaning in and for Jewish history. As a student, rather than a scholar, I have come to believe that it is indeed the Torah that has kept the Jewish people as a 'people' for more than two thousand years.

Some believe that the Torah was dictated directly from God to Moses, others that it was written, probably by several people, over a period of time. The Five Books of Moses—the Pentateuch— was 'canonized' many years ago, which means it could not be changed. Yet since at least the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., there has been continual, ongoing study and interpretation of the Torah—at first, to adapt to the inability to obey the Torah's teachings about sacrifice and priesthood which could not longer be followed in the absence of the Temple. As the Rabbis assumed leadership of the Jewish people, they interpreted its teachings and laws and made study and prayer the vehicle for Jewish observance. In my view, that emphasis on personal and communal study, questioning, and interpretation is what has kept the Torah alive and meaningful through so many phases of history, throughout so much of the world.

And there I was, in the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue in Manhattan in 2008, ready to be given the Torah to hold through Kol Nidre, that most solemn prayer service—one that has been conducted for thousands of years, with the participation of millions of people.

The room was darkened, the ark was opened, and Rabbi Friedman handed me…the Torah covered in blue velvet, not white, like the others. This was the extraordinary "Auschwitz Torah" that had been given to Central Synagogue earlier this year. At an emotional ceremony, we were told that sixty-five years ago, the people in the village of Auschwitz, knowing that they would be sent to the camps to die, took the Torah from their synagogue, tore out some sections that they hid and took with them into the camp, then wrapped the Torah scroll in tin, and buried it in their cemetery.

In 2004 Rabbi Menachem Youlus of the Save the Torah Foundation searched and eventually located the Torah, missing some sections—which were later located in the possession of a local priest. Before they went to their death, the townspeople who had kept them in the camps had given them to the priest for safekeeping.

With the financial assistance of a wealthy American, David Rubenstein, the Torah was restored and he donated it to Central because, he said, we are at the heart of the American Jewish community.

And somehow, it felt that the history of the Jewish people was in my arms. It was very heavy; but I am the beneficiary of the strength of my people.