To recapture what they had, your shul doesn’t need the flags. What it really needs is the soldiers
ON a recent visit to the “old neighborhoods” of Montreal, shkiah was fast approaching and with it the realization that I wouldn’t make it back home for Minchah. So I davened in a nearby shul.
I write this as if it were a bedieved because I was out of time, but really, I was thrilled at the opportunity. I have an obsession with such places.
You know the type, especially if you live out of town. A once-proud building designed, erected, and funded by Jews who believed that this shul would be the answer, the center, the response to what they had seen: those shuls built in the ’60s would host not just events and shiurim, but also bar mitzvahs and weddings.
It would be home.
If you know these shuls, then you know that they have a certain smell, maybe of the old carpet in a coatroom that might or might not still have saloon doors, and they have a certain décor: lots of brass plaques and, if you’re lucky, perhaps a corridor lined with black-and-white pictures of stern-looking past shul presidents.
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