Jewish America
Detroit revival
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Print | The sanctuary at Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue before Friday night services. Courtesy Dan Klein |
DETROIT — Blair Nosan grew up in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, attended the University of Michigan, and then, like thousands of other young Jews from the beleaguered state, moved away.
Although she grew up in a heavily Jewish area Nosan, 26, had felt disconnected both from her Jewish identity and the nearby city, which was undergoing its own debilitating population drain. Over the last decade, 25 percent of Detroit’s residents have taken flight. Some 5,000 young Jews left Michigan between 2005 and 2010, according to a 2010 survey by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.
But then, Nosan came back.
In 2009, she moved to Detroit to work in its burgeoning urban agriculture scene, eventually starting her own pickling company, Suddenly Sauer.
Nosan was startled to learn that she was part of a significant migration of young Jews to the Motor City — a young Jewish renaissance that has been as unexpected as it has been successful. It is evident not just in numbers, but in a resurgence of Jewish activity and vitality in the heart of Detroit, including among Jews who had never been Jewishly active.
“I did not expect to find a Jewish community at all,” Nosan said, echoing the sentiments of many of Detroit’s new Jewish residents. “Most of the Jews were living in Detroit as participants in the Jewish community, but with their Jewish identity in mind were trying to fill in the blanks of this long history we had had in the city but weren’t raised with.”
 | Jordan Wolfe, founder and former director of CommunityNext, explaining the work of his organization. Courtesy Dan Klein |
Over the last few years, a slew of new programs from the institutional to the grass roots and from suburb to city have blossomed in the Detroit area.
Detroit’s first Moishe House opened in June in midtown, and its occupants — five from the suburbs of Detroit and one from Los Angeles — have been holding five or six Jewish events a month. The most recent was a sauerkraut workshop taught by Nosan that attracted 16 people.
At a bar in Royal Oak, a suburb near Detroit, Rabbi Leiby Burnham began a weekly program in 2007 called Torah on Tap to talk about Judaism in a bar setting, with the drinks paid for by an anonymous donor. Starting with seven people, the event now draws as many as 100 per week.
The most striking example of the transformation of Jewish life in Detroit is at the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue, the last remaining shul in the city. Detroit once was a major hub of Jewish life, with 44 synagogues. After race riots in the 1960s and economic decline, however, most of the city’s whites — Jews included — left for the northern suburbs, repeating a pattern then taking place in cities across the United States.
In 2008, the 90-year old Conservative shul was in dire straits — open only once a week, often unable to assemble a minyan, and without a rabbi (the last one passed away in 2003). The board was considering packing it in and selling the historic four-story building.
“Some didn’t think we had a future,” said David Powell, who has attended Isaac Agree for decades. “We continued to plod along until reinforcements came.”
Starting a few years ago, those reinforcements began to come in the form of young social activists and entrepreneurs who were drawn to the city by its growing arts scene and revitalization programs that offered subsidized rent and unique employment opportunities for social justice work. Many of the Jews among them came to the synagogue, changing it in the process. They began running services, serving on the board, and organizing events of the sort that the old shul had never seen: Israeli film screenings, potluck dinners, Israeli folk dancing. Community activists also used it as a gathering place.
“The synagogue wasn’t meeting the needs of the city, and it was struggling,” said Oren Goldenberg, a filmmaker and prominent activist in the community. “It needed to adapt.”
Isaac Agree became ever more popular. Services were held three days a week rather than one. Events were organized to celebrate all the holidays. The synagogue began offering Hebrew lessons and even conversion classes. Now, it hosts a Shabbat dinner every Friday night.
“I liked Isaac Agree because it stayed; it’s been here the whole time,” Nosan said. “That’s a poignant point of entry for the community — what’s already here and been here, and figuring out new energy that’s being brought to the table.”
In the past few years, Isaac Agree has more than tripled its membership households, becoming the only Conservative synagogue in Michigan not to suffer a decline, according to the 2010 federation survey.
“There are definitely more Jews here than there were a year ago,” said Goldenberg while having coffee in Avalon International Breads, a bakery co-founded by Jackie Vicks, a 20-year resident of the city who joined the synagogue last year. “I live here. When things change, I know it.”
Some of the new Jewish revitalization programs, including Torah on Tap and Detroit’s Moishe House, are receiving support from CommunityNext, a program begun by a Detroit returnee based on the idea that creating cultural activities and a strong cultural center is as important as jobs to retaining and attracting young adults to Detroit.
“Young Jews are not going to move to suburbs, they’re going to move to cities,” said Jordan Wolfe, the Detroit native who launched the program in 2010 after returning to the area in 2007 following a stint in California’s high-tech sector. “They’re willing to take jobs as a waiter if there’s something to do.”
CommunityNext’s strategy is to support both Jewish culture and Detroit’s revitalization.
The program, which was funded in the first year by $60,000 from two anonymous donors and another $40,000 from Detroit’s Jewish federation, organizes Jewish events and offers Jewish entrepreneurs small business loans and free office space. CommunityNext also supports nonsectarian Detroit revitalization projects such as Come Play Detroit, which helps organize intramural sports leagues. In its first year, Come Play Detroit created 27 leagues in nine sports involving 4,500 people.
“We’re building community, but the larger agenda is Detroit,” said Rachel Lachover, CommunityNext’s associate director. “People are moving back. People are talking about Detroit.”
JTA Wire Service
More on: Jewish America
PHILADELPHIA – Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore of the U.S. Navy, was one for voyages.
His first came in 1802, at the age of 10, when he offered his services to the captain of the USS New Jerusalem, stipulating that he be returned to Philadelphia in time for his bar mitzvah at Cong. Mikveh Israel, then less than a century old.
More than 200 years later, Levy, in the form of a two-meter-high statue weighing more than 1,000 pounds, has arrived back home. The artwork of the man famous for abolishing flogging in the Navy and later purchasing the home of Thomas Jefferson began its journey in a Moscow studio and has landed atop an enormous pedestal outside the same Old City synagogue where Levy once read from the Torah.
Illinois faceoff seen as bellwether for 2012
WASHINGTON — Political observers here say a suburban Chicago congressional primary that features two Jewish candidates is a test of the Democratic Party’s direction for 2012.
The race’s two highest profile candidates are Brad Schneider, who enjoys establishment support and has strong ties to the organized Jewish community, and Ilya Sheyman, a 25-year-old progressive activist who has proven to be a whiz at small-donor fundraising.
In addition to the race’s generational aspect — Schneider, 50, is twice the age of Sheyman — observers see the primary as a bellwether for Democrats as they head into next year’s nationa elections: Will the party tack left. or try to hold closer to the center?
California’s clash of the titans
Solomonic choice: Two pro-Israel incumbents, one race
WASHINGTON — The California race between Democratic congressional incumbents Howard Berman and Brad Sherman is pitting experience against energy, compromise against confrontation and — painfully for many in the Jewish community — pro-Israel stalwart against pro-Israel stalwart.
“These are two guys who are extraordinary leaders on issues of importance to those who care about Israel,” said a pro-Israel insider in Washington who, like many others in the community, asked not to be identified in order not to offend either congressman.
“Congress will be lessened by one of them not being there,” said the insider, who likened the choice to Solomon’s judgment to split the baby.
Berman, 70, and Sherman, 57, currently represent adjacent districts in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. They have been thrown against one another because of the post-census redistricting of California’s electoral map by a nonpartisan commission.
San Francisco’s record turn
Pop-up store in Mission District highlights Jewish LPs
SAN FRANCISCO — For the iTunes generation, Tikva Records’ pop-up Jewish record store in San Francisco probably looks like something out of the Stone Age.
For those born during the Stone Age, the record store is a comforting throwback to the days of vinyl, glorious vinyl.
Open Dec. 1-28 in a Mission District storefront, the pop-up resembles a classic 1950s record store: shelves lined with 12-inch LPs and knick-knacks from the era when music turned at 33 rpm.
“Vinyl has come back in,” says San Francisco’s David Katznelson, co-founder of the all-volunteer nonprofit Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. “This is definitely the first pop-up Jewish record store.”
