The Nassau Shul

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we three Jewish boys, Marvin, Herbert, and Arnold, were excused 15 minutes early from our class in the Nassau School so that we could walk down the hill to the Shul for Hebrew School. [The Catholic boys and girls got out early on Fridays to go to their church’s instruction]. Sometimes I would take a short detour to the Nassau Pharmacy and get a fifteen-cent sundae from Mr. Waters at the Nassau Pharmacy. I don’t know why we were released early since it was a short walk, and Mr. Cohen was never ready for us when we got there. He always looked the same and wore a brown, slightly rumpled hat and the jacket from an old brown suit. He had a mustache, but no beard, although he usually looked as though he had a couple of days’ growth of whiskers. His teeth were brown and crooked. They reminded me of the teeth of a woodchuck I once caught in a spring trap.

At least once a week, Mr. Cohen would start the afternoon by butchering chickens in the yard behind the Shul. That was always great fun to watch, as he would pick a couple of feathers off the chicken’s neck, murmuring a prayer before administering the coupe de Graz to the birds, which were usually carried around to the back of the Shul in burlap bags. The few older students who went to school by bus in East Greenbush got there a little later in the afternoon, so they missed this entertainment. The Shul originally had an enclosed wooden porch in the front, where there was an old wind-up Victrola and a few of the old thick 78 records. I remember one record that we played was nothing but gales of laughter, not like the laughter on a sit-com soundtrack, but almost as though the laughter was used as musical instruments. Sometimes, the laughter got on Cohen’s nerves, and he would come out to the porch and shoo us away.

When the Hebrew School was started, I was in the third or fourth grade. Initially, my sisters, Lelia and Sylvia, and my cousin, Leona, all of whom were in higher grades at Columbia High School, were part of the student body. A few days after the Hebrew School was first started, my sisters successfully petitioned my father to be excused from attending with the argument that girls didn’t get Bar Mitzvahed, so what was the purpose of going? Leona also dropped out a short time later.

At first, the plan was to teach us to read, write, and speak Yiddish. We had a thin black book, sort of a poorly illustrated Dick and Jane, without a Spot. I quickly learned and never forgot the phonetic, “Pamela kumpt arine mit a groisy tumult.” Unfortunately, that’s all I ever learned. The congregation was almost evenly split into two factions. One camp insisted that the children learn Yiddish, and the other group wanted us to learn Hebrew. The balance of power would shift every so often, and we put away Pamela and started to read similar-looking characters that made words that sounded different and meant something else. Then the powers would shift again, and out would come noisy Pamela! In the end, I never became trilingual, or even bilingual.

Twice a week was not enough to prepare for the Bar Mitzvah, and during the school year, we had a Sunday morning session. Mr. Cohen had a small farm on Duesenberry Hill Road, a couple of miles east of my family’s home at the foot of Lord’s Hill. He would stop his car in front of my parents’ home and wait for me, sometimes impatiently blowing the horn of his green 1930s Lafayette coupe. We would stop to pick up Arnold, who would always be dutifully waiting in front of his parents’ fruit stand. Sometimes I would pretend to sleep late, and after a while, Cohen would drive off without me. Riding with Mr. Cohen was an adventure. His eyesight wasn’t too good, and he wore thick glasses with yellowing clear plastic frames and smudged lenses. He relied on me to look for traffic when he pulled out. “Moshe, give a keek.” Our fate was in my ability to judge whether he could get the Lafayette across Route 20 before a tractor-trailer slammed into us. 

As I studied for my Bar Mitzvah, Mr. Cohen taught me to chant the appropriate passages in Hebrew. I remember asking him to translate the passages for me, but he dismissed my request, telling me that I didn’t need to know what it meant, only to be able to say it. To this day, I have no idea of the meaning of my Bar Mitzvah chanting. 

A Bar Mitzvah was not a social event in my childhood in Nassau. There were no invitations sent out. My mother came, but my sisters and uncles didn’t. My maternal grandfather, David, who was very orthodox, came from the Bronx for the occasion, bringing me a new tallis and tefillin. He clucked over me as he wrapped the leather straps of the tefillin around my arms and head that morning and chanted along with me. After the ceremony, we all had the usual round of liquor and honey cake and went home. I have never taken the tefillin out of its burgundy bag since that day.

After my Bar Mitzvah, I only went to Shul on Yom Kippur. After the big supper late in the afternoon before the holiday, my father and I would pick up my uncle Harry and drive to Nassau. The car would be locked up in the parking lot of the Nassau Hardware Store for the night, with my father and uncle usually making some comment about the fact that the store’s owner, Sam Smith, not only didn’t come to Shul but that he openly drove on the high holiday. In my early years, my uncle Sam would also come for holiday services, spending the night at Harry’s house. The evening services were always the same. Naturally, the men sat in the few chairs set up in the center of the Shul or along the long tables on the right side. The women sat on the left. The evening (like the following day’s services) was an endless ritual of standing up and sitting down. I would read the English text without making any spiritual connection. Every so often, the leader would yell out the page where we were supposed to be, and pages would be turned. Once or twice Old Man Pollack would growl at my father and Harry to keep quiet when they would start talking about secular matters to each other. Sometimes the prayers would be interrupted so that Morris Gross could auction off the privilege of holding the Torah.

Until my father was in his late 70s and ill, we always walked home on Yom Kippur evening. Traffic was heavy in the early years since the New York State Thruway Berkshire Spur hadn’t been built, and Route 20 was the main road from Albany east into New England. We walked against traffic without a flashlight, and as each truck roared by, we got a blast of cold air in the face. I remember walking home some years when it was still warm, but I also have memories of walking in the bitter cold and even in the rain. My father and Harry would talk all the way to Harry’s house, usually about the stock market and town politics. The next morning we would be up and out of the house by nine. For some odd reason, I recall that the weather was usually warm and dry for the walk back to Shul on Yom Kippur morning. Sometimes Harry would wait for us to come by, but if Sam was staying at his house, the two of them would usually strike out on their own. I always felt a bit self-conscious walking to Shul. Mostly, just bums walked the roads, and here we were walking all dressed up in suits. Every so often, probably six or seven times during the three-mile walk, a neighbor or one of my father’s tavern customers would spot us walking and stop to offer a ride. My father would thank the people and offer a brief explanation of why we were walking. I think that many of the same people stopped each year. My father’s youngest brother, my uncle Max, lived halfway up Lord’s Hill between our house and my uncle Harry’s home. Max was the family’s first atheist, and if he drove his pickup truck past as we were walking, he would wave and toot the horn. My father just ignored him on Yom Kippur.

If the weather was nice on Yom Kippur, it was traditional to go for walks around the village, particularly up Elm Street and Lake Avenue. The men would go together in groups. The less observant the men, the longer and more frequent the walks. Some of the boys would collect a pocketful of horse chestnuts from the big tree that stood in front of Kelly’s Hotel (now the closed gasoline station). They made good “stones” to throw on the school bus the following day. 

One year the congregation had an unexpected visitor for Yom Kippur. Maude Wagner, an eccentric older Christian woman who lived with her brother on Jefferson Hill Road, came to the Shul for Yom Kippur. She just marched in, announced that she was Jewish, and took a seat among the startled women. Most of the congregation was amused watching as she tried to follow the backward pagination. Some of the women tried to help her follow the progress of the services in the prayer book. Others scowled, but no one asked her to leave.

I remember some years when my mother walked to Shul on Yom Kippur, but those occasions were very few. She never seemed to have too much interest in religion, and I think she disliked having to sit apart from my father in Shul. She was resentful that her father, David, had not been a good provider for his family, as he spent most of his time in his Shul in the Bronx when she was growing up, rather than earning a good living to support his large family.

After my father died on Yom Kippur in 1979, I continued to go to Shul on Yom Kippur evening for several years. I would drive to my mother’s home in Nassau for the traditional dinner and then drive to Shul before sundown. After the evening services, I would drive to my home in the northern part of the county, but not come back on Yom Kippur day. At first, I felt a connection with my father and uncles while sitting at one of the long tables, remembering how things had been there, but eventually I realized that most of the faces were new and unknown to me, and soon I became a stranger in the Shul and stopped coming. 

All of the men who were the men of the congregation when I was a child are now long dead. I remember their faces and words each September when my sister Sylvia and I walk among the monuments in the Nassau Hebrew Farmers Association Cemetery, putting stones of remembrance on them. 

I am glad that the Nassau Shul continues, even though my family no longer takes an active part in it, and there are few, if any, of the founding families still actively associated with it. As a child, I envied the stately Methodist and Catholic churches in the village, but as I grew older, I realized that the structure was unimportant. For me, the Nassau Shul will always be Morris Cohen butchering chickens in the back yard, Morris Gross auctioning the Torah, and my father and uncles kibitzing while the old men dovened in some incomprehensible language.