T his week’s column is being filed from Triadelphia West Virginia. Never heard of it? The nice lady at the front desk of the Hampton Inn and Suites when we checked in at 2 a.m. on our way back home from spending Yom Tov in Ohio said we were “only ten miles from downtown Wheeling.” Maybe that helps.
Of course having a little innocent New Yorker fun at the expense of West Virginia always runs the risk of drawing an irate letter to the editor from someone who was president of the Wheeling chapter of NCSY in 1973. Then again considering that this state didn’t even have its own Chabad shaliach until one arrived in Morgantown in 2007 perhaps that risk is beyond minimal.
So my Shacharis in Triadelphia may have been the first time words of kedushah were ever uttered in that spot on G-d’s earth. But who knows? The “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War” exhibition at Yeshiva University Museum two years ago included the testimony of a Union soldier from Ohio who told of a Pesach Seder he held in 1862 together with “twenty of my comrades and co-religionists belonging to the Regiment…. There in the wild woods of West Virginia away from home and friends we consecrated and offered up to the ever-loving G-d of Israel our prayers and sacrifice.”
The hotel stay was very nice but I’ll admit to not being entirely comfortable in these parts. Pulling into the parking lot of the Hampton Inn I parked next to an SUV that displayed an image of a high-powered rifle above the words “You Go Ahead and Give Peace a Chance. I’ll Cover You In Case It Doesn’t Work Out.” Indeed of the 50 states West Virginia has the fifth-highest share of gun owners.
