World’s ghost synagogues wait to be reborn

Ispent this Passover in Spain, land of Jewish ghosts. Spain was once a place where Jewish piety and poetry flourished. Now it is full of neglected sites and abandoned synagogues. Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain.

This is sadly familiar. To travel almost anywhere in the world as a Jew is a tour of loss. I have spent months on sabbatical seeking out vestiges of Jewish life in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Each country I’ve visited — Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Christian or Communist — bears marks of a once-flourishing Jewish population.

With rare exceptions, there are three kinds of synagogues that survive at all. There are those that whisper their history through the faded remnant of a Jewish star on a stone above the arch of a building now serving as a mosque, a church or a department store. There is the historic synagogue, no longer in use, that is preserved by the waning Jewish community or the government as a monument to what once was. And there is the synagogue that still functions, but all too often only for the handful of older people, and who pray with the consciousness that no one will come after.

Many of t hese empty buildings, like those in Eastern Europe, are a mute reminder of the mass murder of the Second World War. The synagogues in Poland and Lithuania were filled one day, empty the next. Others reflect the emigration of entire communities to Israel or the U. S. because of persecution, economic deprivation or cultural isolation. And some represent a gradual ebbing away, the slow fade of a minority swallowed by a larger culture. Intermarriage, absorption, indifference: the trifecta of modern disappearance.

During the morning service at Istanbul’s Ashkenazi synagogue in early March, I was asked if I could read the Torah, because no one there knew how. The man leading the service was standing in for a rabbi who had died years earlier. In Yangon, Myanmar, the country’s sole remaining synagogue was open on Saturday morning. I entered and sat by myself for a half- hour, watching tourists wander in, take pictures with their phones and leave. Finally a Chinese woman spotted me and, sensing my confusion, said, “No minyan.” There was no prayer quorum. I was waiting for Jews who would never come.

In country after country I have sat alone in sanctuaries that were once teeming, remembering the opening lines of Lamentations: “How does the city sit solitary, that was once full of people! How like a widow, that was once great.” Those lines are read each year on Tisha B’Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. How often, I wonder, have Jews recited those lines and realized they will soon apply to the very synagogues in which they sit?

Every Shabbat morning at my synagogue in Los Angeles, some 700 people come together to celebrate and sing. In their voices are echoes of the emptiness of the synagogues of their past, in Iran, in Russia, in Poland and in other places where communities still exist but won’t for much longer. My congregants’ grandparents were a worldwide chorus.

Years ago, an American rabbi told me once he met an old man in Pruzhany, Belarus, who said he was the childhood teacher of the prominent scholar and philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik. “I am surprised to meet someone in a place so far away,” the rabbi told him. The man answered sadly: “It didn’t used to be so far away. This place used to be very close.”

In places that were once close, they now have caretakers instead of congregants. There are no pilgrims, only tourists. No prayers, only pictures. In Hebrew, a synagogue is called not a house of God, but a house of gathering. But there are none left to gather.

The flourishing of Jews in Israel and America is a proud story, often told. The destruction of Jews in the Holocaust is a tragic one, even more often told and commemorated and mourned. But there is also the slow slipping away in once great communities all over the world, with each child who leaves for the big city or another country or simply no longer cares, the loss of a thousand cultural legacies once borne by an ancient, scattered people.

And yet. The Jewish philosopher Simon Rawidowicz once titled an essay “Jews, the Ever-Dying People.” He wrote that each generation believes it is the last. In my travels I’ve come to understand that sadness is essential, but despair is a sin. Spain may be a land of ghosts, but it was not hard for me to find Jews with whom to celebrate the Passover Seder.

In the former Soviet Union there are new Jewish summer camps and schools. In Budapest, travelling with the Joint Distribution Committee, I met with young Jews who learned of their heritage in their teens and 20s from dying grandparents who had survived the Nazis and the Communists. They were eager to learn who they really were. In Sweden I taught young Jews. And across Europe, even amid a resurgent anti- Semitism, there are proud Jews eager to reclaim what has been lost.

Throughout Jewish history the “ner tamid,” the eternal light, has gone out. But it has also been relit. All those empty synagogues wait; all those unopened books and unsung words retain their meaning. We are rekindling people. The New York Times