My family history paints a different picture

M

ost of us are familiar with the truism that the bottom of New York Harbor is covered with tefillin thrown overboard at Ellis Island. And it’s true that many immigrants arrived looking forward to rejecting the old world and embracing the new — and that included their religious observance.

Yet my family history paints a different picture. Both sets of my grandparents were prewar immigrants and my father a”h grew up in the old neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He would often share vignettes of his childhood with us, which transported me to that disappeared world — a world of struggling immigrants so much more nuanced than the standard “they had to work on Shabbos” narrative.

Shacharis

It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Monday morning in 1930, and we’re in the majestic Knesset Israel shul, otherwise known as the Lyndale shul because it sits on Lyndale Avenue at 5th Street. The neighborhood is known as the Near Northside, as it sits right on the northern edge of downtown Minneapolis. The congregation was founded in 1891, and in 1913 moved to this location — an impressive brick structure with symmetrical stair towers capped by twin domes.

Including its dome, the shul reaches nearly five stories above the street level, and seats 800 men comfortably on the main floor. Two balconies, one above the other, comprise the women’s gallery.

The new rav is Rabbi Hyman, a talmid of Slabodka and a survivor of the Chevron massacre. To the left of the bimah sits old man Potek, bathed in the blue and red shadows of the stained-glass windows that dominate the shul’s interior. Old man Potek is always there. His melodious voice fills the shul with the sounds of his Torah learning from Shacharis until after Maariv. The chevras Shas is there too. More than a dozen lamdanim gather each day to learn Gemara, and each day someone else says the shiur.

The bulk of the members, however, are the peddlers.