Yesterday, we did not have a presenter at our Thursday morning breakfast group meeting, but rather we sat at tables of eight (actually we each sat at two tables of a different eight) and each of us talked a little about ourselves.

Once again, I realized that all of my “extra-curricular” activities, with the exception of professional activities related to my 40+ year law practice, have been with organizations connected with the Jewish community. I remarked that, looking back, this is surprising to me; I would not have expected that to have been the case if you asked me, say, 60 years ago. So how did it happen?

Growing up in suburban St. Louis, my family belonged to a large Reform congregation, and basically only attended religious services on the High Holidays. Other than that, and Passover seders, there was nothing related to Jewish religion that occurred in our house. I did not start going to Sunday School until the third grade, although I think most of my school friends started earlier. I decided to have a bar mitzvah (looking back, I am not sure why this was important to me then; most of my Jewish friends were not then having bar mitzvahs, and my father hadn’t), somewhat to the surprise of my parents, who neither encouraged nor discouraged it. I went to a secular summer camp, and I was not involved in any Jewish teen organizations. I viewed the Reform Judaism I grew up in as the norm, and was very surprised when I went to college and discovered that, among the many Jews I met there, the majority probably had Conservative or Orthodox backgrounds. At least, that was my impression.

The college was Harvard, and it had an active Hillel that I ignored after going to a few events, thinking that I didn’t belong there. I think that was because Hillel was then filled with Conservative and Orthodox Jews, and that just was not me. I went to High Holiday services while I was in college, I think each year, and I did take a few Jewish history courses, which I found interesting. I took Russian language courses and studied a lot about Russian history and literature, and was clearly interested in the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement. When it came to writing a college thesis, I chose to write about a Jewish anti-Zionist, socialist organization, the Bund, and its relationship to the Russian Communist Party (the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) in the early 20th century, during the last years of tsardom.

When I got to law school at Yale, I was involved in no Jewish activity, except for high holiday services, which I remember attending at a suburban Reform temple.

When Edie and I married in 1976, we joined Temple Sinai, a Reform congregation down the street from our house. We were members of Sinai for about seven years, and our children started religious school there. Edie became involved as a member of Rabbi Gene Lipman’s “kitchen cabinet” that met on Sunday mornings to give him feedback on whatever was happening at the temple. I was recruited by my law partner Ed Berkowitz to run for the Board of Directors and before I knew it I was not only running for the Board but for the position of Assistant Treasurer, and I was elected.

I dutifully attended board meetings, but I don’t remember ever communicating with the actual Treasurer (I don’t remember even who he was), and I was completely at a loss as to everything that was going on. Had the Treasurer resigned (or worse) and had I found myself in that position, I had no idea what I would have done. I don’t remember ever seeing a budget, and I don’t think I knew anything about the congregation’s financial position.

During my few years as an officer of Temple Sinai, there were a few traumatic events. There was an election to the board of a very active, well liked, and well respected woman who, it turned out, was not Jewish (not born Jewish, never converted), and that caused ridiculous trauma, and there was a big to-do about whether to renew the contract of a part time assistant rabbi, who had violated his contract by performing a mixed marriage of a young congregant off-campus.

In 1983, Edie’s father passed away, and she wanted a congregation where she could say kaddish on a regular basis, and that was not Temple Sinai. So we went south instead of east and joined Adas Israel, a large Conservative congregation. This was terra incognita for me. It was quite different from Sinai, and at that time Conservative services and practices were different from Reform. I think I had only been to one Conservative service in my life, and I was 40 years old. (The Conservative service was for a bar mitzvah of a cousin of Edie’s.)

A few years after we joined Adas Israel, the congregation fell into crisis, because it started a major renovation project and discovered it did not have the funds to complete. I had vowed, after my Sinai experience, to stay very anonymous at Adas, but a good friend there who was far from anonymous asked me if I would join a small group of men (all men, it was) to figure out how to get the congregation out of the mess it was in. This took a good part of a year and much of my time. I was no longer anonymous.

Because I was now a known quantity, I was asked if I would run for the board and I said “yes”, and did, and then a few years later, I was asked to run for one of the vice presidential slots and I did that. I was not an officer of my second congregation.

I took this job seriously, which meant that I was away from home several evenings each week, leaving Edie with two young daughters. This wasn’t fair, and I announced that I was not going to serve a second term as an officer, although I stayed on the board. As opposed to my time at Sinai, I now knew what I was doing. I knew how the congregation functioned.

One of my board tasks was to be liaison to the elementary school that the Congregation ran (separate from its pre-school), that started as a K-3 school and was then expanded to K-6. Soon it was apparent that the building could not house a school of this size (and a growing school at that), and that the school would have to move to another site. The school was a part of the Congregation, with no separate legal identity, but was operated as a community school, and the majority of parents were not Adas members. The parent council decided not only to move to a new location, but to separate from the synagogue and create its own legal identity.

This led to more turmoil, especially as it turned out that finding a site to move a functioning school was not going to be easy and the school wanted to stay at Adas until a location was found where it could move comfortably. This set up more conflict.

During this period, as I was identified with the school by many Adas board members, it was suggested that it was time for me to step down from the board, and I did. When the school, now known as the Milton School, temporarily relocated to an empty public school building in Silver Spring, I was asked to join the board of the school, which I did and which I served for five years, helping the school to find, and to finance, its current location on 16th Street NW.

NOTE: I realize that this post is long enough. I will do Part 2 tomorrow – how I got to Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, and the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies.