As American Jews, we are thankfully a diverse group. But nearly all of us have at least one thing in common. We or our parents or grandparents were born in one city and have moved to another, often to many others.
My father’s father, for example, was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, moved to Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side, then moved to Coney Island. My father’s maternal grandfather was born in Hungary, became a pulpit rabbi first on the Lower East Side, then in Harlem and then in Brooklyn. My father’s mother was born in Hungary and then moved to Brooklyn. My father was born in Coney Island, moved briefly to Toledo and then moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where my parents met. My father’s parents eventually left the shrinking Orthodox community in Providence and moved to Passaic. That’s just on my father’s side.
Here is what I gather: In each of those places, my father’s family thought that they had found their place in the world. They asked around about the Jewish community, heard good things about the shuls and the schools, and moved, thinking that this was it.
My family and I moved to Teaneck about two years ago from the Boston area. When my work took me to this area, my wife and I discussed where it would be best to live. We considered the Upper West Side, Riverdale, West Orange, Westchester, Queens, etc. For years, when driving from Sharon, Massachusetts to Philadelphia, where my parents live, we would stop in Teaneck for food. Before my grandmother, a”h died, she and my grandfather would drive from their home in Passaic and come to eat here as well. They would alternate between Noah’s Ark and Shelly’s. Our rabbi also recommended Teaneck to us for its Jewish community, especially for its schools. Nothing can be more important for a Jewish family than the quality of the schools in an area. It is a sign that a community has put down real roots and is planning for the future. Our rabbi’s daughter, who also lives here in Bergen County, helped guide us.
In February, I was at Yeshivat HaKotel in Yerushalayim. It was a tense day in the Old City, as, just an hour before, a terrorist attack had taken place at the Damascus Gate, killing Border Police Officer Hadar Cohen. I was being ushered around the famed hesder yeshiva by the leadership of Yeshivot and Ulpanot Bnei Akiva and finally came to meet with a group being led by someone well known to those in our area, Rav Reuven Taragin. Rav Taragin is dean of their overseas students and long connected to the Teaneck community. When I was introduced to him and his colleagues and they were told that I was also from Teaneck, a number of people in the room—perhaps to reduce the tension on a stressful day—jokingly referred to Teaneck as “Ir HaKodesh,” or City of Holiness.
My wife and I believe that we have found our Ir HaKodesh in Teaneck. We live between two huge but amazingly warm shuls in what I have heard called the “Hebrew Hills.” Our kids go to huge but also amazingly warm schools. Yes, we cannot help but have this nagging sense as students of history that maybe this is not our ultimate home. My wife is the archivist for the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey (JHSNJ). Until recently, the JHSNJ was in Paterson, once the center of the Jewish community in northern New Jersey. The JHSNJ is now in Fair Lawn, where many of the former inhabitants of Paterson have come to live. That massive Paterson community built massive shuls and schools and neighborhood associations and all the other elements of communal life. Nearly all have passed into archival memory.
My mother has told me about the last moments of a once vibrant Orthodox shul in Providence, Rhode Island. I remember going to Sharei Tzedek as a very small child and being amazed at the hundreds of families that were there and how grand the building was. Some 30 years later, all but a handful of the congregants had moved out of the rapidly changing neighborhood. The shul closed when the congregation could not even get a minyan on Rosh Hashanah. Finally, after a decade of abandonment, people came and were taking the last bits and pieces of what was once their second home. My mother got the honor cards: the cards handed out to congregants who were being honored with leading roles in the service. She called me and told me of crying over what had become of this once sacred and beautiful shul.
Why do we think that Teaneck will be different? Here’s why. Most of those communities that have failed in the past were based on ephemeral things like local manufacturing jobs.
We (now referring to the collective, rather than my family) live in Teaneck and in places like Passaic and Englewood, but we primarily work in Manhattan. We also now work primarily in the service economy, not in manufacturing. There will presumably always be law firms and banks and accounting firms a short drive or bus ride away in Manhattan. New York City is what I have come to recognize as the undisputed greatest commercial city—and likely the greatest all-around city—in the world. We can rest reasonably assured that while the metropolis will wax and wane, it will always be.
Also, we are a primarily Modern Orthodox community. We cherish our shuls and schools, and we also live secular lives. We run for and are elected to council positions. We build solid bridges with those from other parts of the community. We are not going to sit idly by or simply be unaware of what is going on around us. We are involved in every element of our collective lives as Teaneckers. We interact with fellow Jews and with non-Jews, those south and north of Cedar, etc. We believe in Torah and Avodah, and we practice that synthesis in our everyday lives.
Perhaps, in the end, none of this really matters. Each of these stops our families have made along the way are just temporary mileposts on a road. We are all destined, iy”H, to go to the actual Ir HaKodesh, Yerushalayim itself. We will soon be moderately drunkenly singing out “L’shanah HaBa’ah B’Yerushalayim,” may we next year be celebrating Pesach in Jerusalem. My organization, Yeshivot and Ulpanot Bnei Akiva, was started by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, Shlita, before the modern state of Israel was founded and now runs 74 schools for some 25,000 students in Israel. The schools are founded on the premise that modern Jews need a background in both Torah studies and secular studies. Those schools serve as the anchors for their communities and are awaiting the generations of us who will hopefully make aliyah speedily in our days.
While we plan that final move, we can rest assured that our communities here are ones where we can peacefully study Torah, forcefully pursue our avodah and passionately play politics.
By Akiva J. Covitz
Akiva J. Covitz, PhD, is Executive Vice President of Yeshivot and Ulpanot Bnei Akiva’s North American office. He teaches at Yeshiva University, and previously served at Harvard Law School as Associate Dean and a member of the faculty, and at the online learning company edX as Vice President.
