Joan Frankel Weil

Rosenthal: Why don’t you tell me your name and where you born, your date of birth, some of those particulars.
WEIL: My name is Joan Weil. I was born March 30, 1945 in Evanston, Illinois. That’s a suburb of Chicago and we lived there only until I was three years old. I was born to Idelle Okman Frankel and Alex Frankel, that’s just where I was born.

Rosenthal: Tell me a little bit about your household and your family growing up.
WEIL: My parents were first generation Americans. They were both born in this country. Their parents came from parts of Russia – what was then Russia and Austria. My paternal grandfather came from Austria. Two of my grandparents came from Riga, Latvia and one came from a shtetl in Lithuania. When we were living in Chicago all of our relatives lived there. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, many cousins. But we left when I was three and my brother was seven and moved to Muncie, Indiana.

Rosenthal: Why did you move?
WEIL: I don’t know that I can really answer that. I was three years old. My father had studied at the University of Chicago and was in social work. Suddenly he changed completely and took a job in Muncie, Indiana. He bought a men’s wear store. It was like work place men’s wear – work clothes. Big jeans, camping type things. Later he owned a couple of army-navy outlet stores. I can’t really tell you why that happened because the whole family was still back in Chicago. Almost every vacation we would drive four hours to Chicago to see the family. It was an unusual experience. We were separated from the family. We moved to this small town, Muncie, Indiana, which had a population of about 60,000 people and a Jewish population of 60 families. Everybody knew everybody else. We never had any relatives living with us in our home until my maternal grandfather died when I was eight years old and my grandmother lived a short time with us when she was quite ill before she died. Otherwise it was just our family of four.

Rosenthal: What kind of Jewish practice did you have in your home and did you celebrate the holidays and that kind of thing? 
WEIL: We definitely celebrated all of the holidays. My father was from a more conservative background. He went to cheder as a child. When he was a teenager he even considered going into the rabbinate. I’m not sure what changed his mind. He had a more formal background in Judaism. My mother, I honestly don’t know what kind of practice they had in their home. When my parents were married and we moved to Muncie we were in the only congregation in town with 60 families and it was classical Reform. That’s how I was brought up. We were very active in the synagogue. At times my father was president of the congregation. My mother was president of the sisterhood. I was president of my youth group. The youth group was made up of four cities, because we had so few people in town. It was Muncie, Anderson, Marion and Kokomo. The youth group was called MAMNIKO from those initials. We were part of National Federation of Temple Youth. I went to conclaves; I went to Jewish camp. All of those things we were really involved in with the synagogue.

Rosenthal: What about celebrating the holidays?
WEIL: We had Passover seders, not like my husband’s family, but occasionally we would have a Passover seder in our home, but often we would do it with the temple. I remember seders at the temple. Or we would go up to Chicago with the family in Chicago. We did Hanukkah. I remember dressing up for Purim. I remember being Queen Esther. A lot of our life revolved around the temple. 

Rosenthal: Did you observe Shabbat?
WEIL: We observed Shabbat. We did light candles. I don’t remember going to services. We often did not have a rabbi because we were a small congregation. We were close enough to Cincinnati, where Hebrew Union College is, that they would send student rabbis to us. Sometimes we would have a student for Fridays and Saturdays or sometimes we would have a visiting rabbi come in or to do High Holidays. Two or three times I remember we would have a full-time rabbi for a year or two at a time. Those were easier to do. I’m trying to remember if there wasn’t a rabbi there if anybody in the congregation ran the service and I don’t think they did. I think if there was no rabbi there was no service. We did have Shabbat School. We had a Sunday school. It was taught by people in the community, in the Jewish community. In fact, I taught at that religious school after I had my confirmation. There were no bat mitzvahs; there were no bar mitzvahs until my brother was a bar mitzvah. He was four years older than I. It was only at my parents, I’m sure, insisting that he have a bar mitzvah so that all of our relatives from Chicago could come for that. 

Rosenthal: Did they?
WEIL: They did, of course. But there was no such thing as a bat mitzvah. Everybody was confirmed. I had a confirmation I think when I was 14 years old. After I was confirmed I taught kindergarten in the religious school. I had no training whatsoever. I was given a few children’s books and things to teach from. I had to make up my own lesson plans. We did the holidays. We did craft projects. It was by the seat of my pants I taught religious school. Nobody taught me how to do that. It was kind of a fun experience.

Rosenthal: You were in high school at the time?
WEIL: Yes. It was interesting. Being in youth group was interesting. It taught me a lot of things. It taught me about social action. We did social action projects. We got together as a youth group once a month, the four cities together. That was a real learning experience.

Rosenthal: You didn’t learn Hebrew?
WEIL: I remember studying it very briefly, but no I never formally learned Hebrew.

Rosenthal: For your brother, where did he get the training to do the bar mitzvah? Do you remember that?
WEIL: That’s a good question. I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t. As I said there wasn’t a lot of Hebrew in our services. Maybe he just memorized the portion in the Torah to do it in Hebrew. I don’t think he had to do much else but make a speech.

Rosenthal: After high school then you went off to college?
WEIL: I did. I went to Indiana University. The first week I was there I met my to-be-husband –blind date. It was very important to me and my parents that I do Jewish things and meet Jewish people. I had requested a Jewish roommate when I went to Indiana University. I had a roommate from Evansville, Indiana. It turned out that she grew up with my husband David and she introduced us. It was a blind date. We had a blind date a week after I arrived on campus.

Rosenthal: Wow. That was it? You didn’t date anybody else then?
WEIL: That was pretty much it. Two years later we got married. He was a junior when I met him.

Rosenthal: Okay. What did you major in?
WEIL: I changed my major three times. I was never happy with what I was studying. I went from psychology to speech therapy, I can’t remember what the third one was. Then David graduated when I was finishing my sophomore year. Because of the Vietnam War he was going to have to enlist because he was being called by the draft board. So we got married then because that was a deferment. He did not go and I quit school at that point. We moved to Evansville, Indiana where he had grown up. A year later they took away that deferment. But if you had a child you got another deferment. That’s when we got pregnant with Jeff. So he never had to go. I didn’t go back to school for five years. There was a five-year hiatus. At that point we went back to Bloomington, Indiana for David to do a year of pre-med. He had been in business. He decided that he wanted to do medicine. So we went back with one child and lived in married housing. And did a year of pre-med and then moved to St. Louis where he did medical school. 

Rosenthal: You didn’t work at that point, right?
WEIL: I wasn’t working but I went back to school to finish my degree. He did one year of pre-med and I was working on my degree. The second year I did student teaching in Indiana. And then moved to Missouri with David and I had had another child by then, so the two boys went with us to St. Louis. I finished my degree in St. Louis.

Rosenthal: And then did you teach?
WEIL: I did. I taught for five years in the Ladue district in St Louis. I was an elementary school teacher. 

Rosenthal: Did you ever teach religious school again?
WEIL: No. I never did teach religious school. No I don’t think so. No. I had my hands full. I had another child when we were in St. Louis. We had the three boys. I was working as a teacher and David was finishing his medical degree.

Rosenthal: Did you belong to a synagogue in each of these communities?
WEIL: We certainly did. When we were in Evansville David’s family had been very active in the Reform congregation in Evansville. It was called Washington Avenue Temple. We belonged there. David actually taught religious school in that congregation. We also worked in the youth group. We were youth group advisors when we were there. When we left Evansville and moved to St. Louis we became very active in a large congregation, reform, called Shir Emeth. They had a young adult congregation within the congregation. Even though they had a young rabbi, they also had a young assistant rabbi. He was the head of the young adult congregation. We were busy with them. David was vice-president of the group. We did all sorts of activities with them. Jeff did religious school there. I guess Brent started there as well because we moved away when Brent was seven. 

Rosenthal: How big a congregation do you remember?
WEIL: I think it was like 1500 to 2000 families. Big. Yes, all of them in St. Louis were big. And it was unusual to be in St. Louis because it’s a large Jewish population. To come from a small community and go to where so many people are Jewish. The school where I taught so many families were Jewish that there were hardly any kids that went on High Holidays to school. It wasn’t a problem for me to get off for the High Holidays. That was a whole new world to me. I had never been in a place where so many people were Jewish.

Rosenthal: Wow! Okay. So you were raising your children Jewish and immersed in a Jewish community there. In the youth group did you find that your leadership in your group of NFTY helped you lead the group and what kinds of things did you do that were interesting for you guys? I mean as a team leading.
WEIL: I loved NFTY. Because living in a small community you’re connected to other Jews, other Jewish teens in the region. And not just in the region. I went to camp in Oconomowoc Wisconsin. It was a NFTY camp called Union Institute. I went for a few summers there. That was really part of CFTY, Chicago Federation of Temple Youth. I had friends in a large region. When you go to conclaves in other cities you meet kids from different parts of Indiana, different parts of Ohio, Kentucky, even West Virginia. I had friends all over that were Jewish. I remember we learned lots of songs that I would use. Social action work. That’s where I really felt like I learned so much that I wasn’t getting in my home community. You know what it meant to give to other people. Yes, I guess I used that information. You don’t know quite where you get your learning from. It seems to sort of be there when you need it. When I look back on my life I have always been involved in Jewish organizations.

Rosenthal: Okay. So let’s talk about Havurah now a little bit. So you moved here what year?
WEIL: In 1977 and we belonged to Temple Beth Israel. We had always been Reform, both of us. We couldn’t imagine joining anything but Reform. When we got here we belonged for that one year. We just felt there wasn’t enough there for young families. I remember distinctly taking our kids to Sukkot, thinking this would be a child’s holiday, only to find out that our kids were the only kids there. They did have a sukkah on the bima but the kids were not invited up. There was really nothing for them at that service, and people kind of kept shushing us that our kids were making too much noise. That was a problem. The other problem was that Shabbat school was on Saturday morning, which was the time that the boys played soccer. And how could we ask them to give up something so important to them to go to religious school? For those reasons, we were really kind of looking around for something else that we could do religiously and we were considering joining another congregation. But there was not a whole lot available in Portland in 1978. We had become friendly with Isensteins, Axmans and Kadners and a lot of young families at that time. We heard about this meeting at Lesley and Ken’s Isensteins home, which was in May, late May of 1978. I remember so clearly being at that meeting. There was such excitement in that room. There were so many people there and when I counted them up at least 40 families were represented at that meeting. Nobody was talking about starting a congregation, but people were talking about doing something together as families and something that our kids would enjoy going to. From that meeting it was decided we would do two things. The first thing was that we were going to do a Havdalah service early July that was going to be held at Gabriel Park. The second thing is that we were going to do something for High Holidays. It wouldn’t take the place of other congregations but it would be like a supplement. And children would be encouraged to come. It came time for the first Havdalah and it poured; it was raining so hard that we couldn’t imagine that anybody would go. But we decided to drive over to see if anyone was there. A few people were there and we invited everybody back to our house to have their picnic dinners on the floor in our living room. And to do a Havdalah service. And so that’s what we did. I don’t remember how many families were there. Maybe six or seven?

Rosenthal: Yeah. I would say seven or eight. Yeah, I remember being there very well.
WEIL: There was such excitement so that even on a day it was obvious there couldn’t be a picnic people wanted to get together. I just think a lot of forces came together at the same moment. It didn’t just happen in Portland. It happened all over the country. You heard about havurot beginning all over the country. I think back and I wonder about the forces that brought that together. Part of it I think is camp. I think several of us in the group had gone to camp. Jewish camps where we had enjoyed being together as Jews, we learned together as Jews, we sang Jewish music and we danced. That was part of it. And I think part of it too is that we had been raised where we had been taken to Sunday school and dropped off and picked up at the end. Our parents weren’t involved in any way in what we were learning. It was sort of like this is something you have to do, you don’t have to like it, but you have to do this. I think we all felt that we wanted something different for our kids. We wanted them to enjoy being Jewish and enjoy knowing other Jewish kids and interacting with them. Thinking about things Jewishly and singing songs and whatever. So I think that was the impetus for so many young families to come together and start that.

Rosenthal: I also think that many of us were both working–the husbands and wives. To be away from your kids on the weekend and send them to religious school or to leave them at home and come to Friday night services, which is sort of what the thing was at Beth Israel. You rarely brought your children to the service. So, I wonder if that was a part of it too. 
WEIL: Well it could be. We were a very homogenous group when we started. We were all in our early 30s, I would say. All of us were professionals in one way or another. And we all had young kids. It wasn’t for several years that we became a more diverse community.

Rosenthal: Do you remember why the meeting got called? It was at Lesley’s house, so she must have had something to do with the calling of the meeting.
WEIL: Well she did have something to do with the calling of the meeting. Maybe there were other people that were as dissatisfied with the options in town as we were. And were just looking for something that we would be happier with.

Rosenthal: You met many of the Jewish families that you met because of David’s work, right?
WEIL: Yes we knew the Axmans, the Nussbaums. I’m trying to think who else was involved. Yes, some of it was through work, but mostly it was through—when we first moved here we put our kids in camp at the JCC that first summer. We wanted them to have something to do and to meet other Jewish kids. And so we got to know Jewish families in the neighborhood.

The Liebreichs lived near us and the Wassermans. We had started making friends with Jewish families. We had met people at Temple Beth Israel too. It wasn’t until Havurah formed that we felt we had a community. That we felt we really got to know people well and became a family. A lot of us didn’t have family here. A lot of us had moved from somewhere else. To have people to celebrate your holidays with or Shabbat with. When I look back at the calendars I had during those first years of Havurah, it was not unusual to have four or five Havurah events in one week. It wasn’t just that we were doing services; we were doing adult education; we were planning what we were going to do with the kids. We were writing a newsletter. There were so many activities that went on it was like all consuming. Almost every day we had something to do with Havurah and it was very exciting.

Rosenthal: What were the things that you were either leading or doing—what were the areas that you, in those first few year, your energy toward?
WEIL: I was on the steering committee in the very early years and I worked on membership. In the early years we wanted to grow and needed to grow in order to hire a rabbi, for instance. We worked very diligently on getting members at that point.

Rosenthal: How did you do that?
WEIL: How did we do that? We would get in touch with different people that we knew who might be interested and invite them to come to something. We would introduce them to other people in the congregation. We would get them to — we would get members to invite other people to like a Shabbat dinner and bring them to a service or something. You know the early services were at Neighborhood House. I remember getting together and ordering pizza and having a service and then pizza coming in and eating and playing and singing. Those kinds of services. Then when we were at West Hills Unitarian it was little more formal than that. Still we were all doing our own services. Lots of times, even when we had a rabbi, we were doing services at least every other week. We were just making them up [laughs]. I would pull stuff from camp to try and figure out what to do for a Friday night service.

Rosenthal: How did that, the assigning of who was doing Friday night services, in your recollection, how did that go? Because we had services every other Friday night, didn’t we?
WEIL: I think so.

Rosenthal: It may have started as once a month, but then it…
WEIL: Right. I guess people just volunteered. Everybody realized from the beginning that if we didn’t do it ourselves it wouldn’t get done. From the very beginning it was a participatory group. Whether you called it a congregation or not, it was participatory because it had to be; we had not hired anybody. You had to do it yourself. People would volunteer. If you hadn’t volunteered in a while people kind of looked at you like maybe it’s your turn. Everybody did services, led services one way or another, invited other people to join them to lead a service, decide together what you want to put in the service or how you want to do it. People volunteered to do study sessions. When Alan [Berg] joined us of course we had someone with some real Jewish knowledge.

Rosenthal: Okay. Do you want to say a little bit about Alan Berg?
WEIL: We were fortunate to that he was taking a hiatus from Temple [Beth Israel] from his duties as Assistant Rabbi, to spend time with us at Havurah. We hired him I’m sure at a very nominal salary. He stayed for maybe eight months or something. He was such a charismatic person. He exuded so much knowledge and enthusiasm about the knowledge that no matter what he said, whether you understood it or not, you were enthralled. You’d be hanging on his every word, they were so interesting.

He would throw something out completely off the wall. He did that Al Het on the piano. Things that were just not done. It made it fascinating and wonderful and exciting. I remember when Joey [Wolf] first came and he talks about this still. We were meeting at the Jewish Community Center. We had a service in a racquetball court because we could sing and it resounded in this racquetball court. It was the most exciting fun thing. These are things you don’t do in a large congregation that’s staid and has been there for a hundred years. We were just trying anything and everything. We had Alan for a short time.

Mr; Even though Alan was there, the congregants still led the services and Alan…
WEIL: They did. At least we had someone who was more knowledgeable who could lead us and let us know what a service consisted of kind of thing.

Rosenthal: What were the services like?
WEIL: They were different every time. They reflected the people who put them on. Sometimes they would have a lot of Hebrew in them. Sometimes they would have no Hebrew in them. I remember doing some where we experimented with choral reading. All the men would read and all the women would read and responsive reading back and forth. Certainly there was a lot more Hebrew than we were used to. Because a lot of people came from more traditional backgrounds than we. They came from more Orthodox or Conservative backgrounds and knew more about the order of the service, knew more about certain things being in Hebrew. Even though we hadn’t done that before, we learned to do that and enjoyed doing that. This group sort of congealed from all these different people who came into it. Every service was different. That’s what made them interesting and exciting and fun to go to.

Rosenthal: Okay. So then you were going to go to…
WEIL: Alan. Alan was there for something like eight months I think. We sort of thought he was going to be there for longer. When he came and told us he was going back to Temple it was a like a punch in the gut! We just didn’t know where we were going to go from here. Here we had all this enthusiasm and excitement and suddenly we were leaderless. So we decided we could sort of go it on our own for a while, but we would start looking for a rabbi. I guess that’s when we started saying the “C” word, congregation. Looking at the Reform Movement. There must have been a Reconstructionist movement at that time, but it was not on the west coast or not in the northwest. So all we knew were the three branches. We knew that we wanted women to be as much as part of the service and the congregation as anybody else and that pretty much meant that we were to go with the Reform Movement. We approached the Reform Movement and they sent us this regional rabbi to come and tell us how we would go about becoming a congregation. I think his name was Morris….

Rosenthal: I think Hershman.
WEIL: He was impossible to work with. He expected us to be like every Reform congregation that he had ever known. He expected us to follow a certain path. He told us exactly what we would be now and what we would be in five years and what we be in ten years. He didn’t understand this group at all. It really rubbed people the wrong way. But we felt like we had no other place to go. So we did join the Reform Movement.

Rosenthal: But we joined mainly in order to get a rabbi. Right?
WEIL: Right. We were looking for a rabbi. Now I’m trying to remember. Was Roy [Furman] from the Reform Movement?

Rosenthal: Yeah.
WEIL: Yes. So that’s how we got him.

Rosenthal: Right. But first we interviewed and didn’t pick anybody. 
WEIL: Right, we didn’t find anybody and so we did it ourselves for a least a year or two.

Rosenthal: At least two.
WEIL: It wasn’t so bad. We learned a lot and we took a lot of responsibility for what had to happen in a congregation. Newsletters got done, we had study groups, we had religious school, things went on. We had services. It was draining to do that for that long without a leader. So we were very happy when we found Roy. As I recall one of the things we were interested in Roy about was we thought that he would be good in dealing with families. He had some kind of background in that, in social service or something. We had had some very serious illness in our young congregation. We were just reeling from it. Ken Isenstein, Ben Green, Mike Nussbaum – these were young men who got seriously ill and died in this young congregation. We were trying to figure out how to deal with this Jewishly and we thought Roy would be able to help us with that. Actually I don’t think that was his forte. But that’s one of the reasons that we picked Roy. During Roy’s time with us, I think he was with us for five years, there was a group of people who were very involved with Saturday morning services. They wanted a different type of service. My impression was that he was bending to those people. It was becoming a little bit off the wall. They were doing a lot of hand motions to songs. It became sort of like a hippie type feeling in the congregation and I think that turned some people off. Then Roy left at the end of five years and again we were looking for a rabbi and had some trouble finding one. I think it was at that time we found out that the Reform Movement was telling people who wanted to come, who maybe were interested in our congregation, that we were sort of a weird group. So we didn’t get the people that we thought we needed for this congregation. I think that was maybe an impetus to look beyond the Reform Movement. Because Joey [Wolf] was not in the Reform Movement. But I don’t think he was Reconstructionist either. I think he came from the Conservative. But eventually we found Joey. I think that was a good fit. Joey’s been here for a long, long time now. Not everybody thought he was the perfect rabbi for them, but I think for most people he was just right. I think Joey’s first bar mitzvah was Brent, my middle son. 

Rosenthal: Oh I thought it was Rachel [Rosenthal]. See there you go. 
WEIL: Oh –So when was her bat mitzvah?

Rosenthal: It was after Brent [both laugh] But he definitely was there for….
WEIL: Oh no wait. Joey did Todd’s [Weil]. That’s right. 

Rosenthal: Rachel was before Todd.
WEIL: It was Todd’s. Joey thought we were doing it at 8:00 pm and it was 7:30 and we were waiting and waiting for him because we did bar mitzvahs on Friday nights then. 

Rosenthal: Rachel’s was not on Friday night. Rachel’s was on Saturday. 
WEIL: So it was Friday night and we’re waiting and waiting for him and he came in late [laughs] so that’s what we remember about Todd’s bar mitzvah. You know in the years that we were waiting for a rabbi we were doing our own thing. I think that made us stronger as a congregation. People step up that you never expect and do amazing things when they need to. I think we had wonderful presidents, I think we had wonderful steering committees. People really took it seriously.

Rosenthal: What were in your mind the things that other than the initial fact that we were like-minded and of the same age and generally homogeneous in our grouping but beyond that as the community grew what was the thing that held it together? Was it because it was participatory?
WEIL: I think part of it because it was participatory and part of it was because it was different from the other congregations. It was very welcoming to gays and lesbians, to singles…

Rosenthal: Intermarried families.
WEIL: And intermarried. Absolutely. I think people gravitated to us for those reasons.

Rosenthal: Were there negatives? In thinking about had you stayed at Beth Israel or joined another of the shuls, were there negatives?
WEIL: There was a lot of infighting. I remember our congregational meetings were just wild. One person would get up and say something and everybody else would say ‘no, that’s not right’. Everybody felt like they had a say. I think in the other congregations it’s more controlled by a board. Everything goes through the board. At Havurah everything’s out in the open pretty much. At congregational meetings you can say what you want. If you don’t like something you can let people know that and you can change it. And if there’s not something going on that you want to have going on you can do it. Those are positives and negatives. You have to work a lot harder at it. Nobody’s doing it for you. You don’t just show up. You have to take part or it doesn’t happen. That’s true of fundraising too. Fundraising has been difficult. I’ve been involved in a lot of the fundraising. I’ve been involved in auctions. We were having auctions every other year to pay for the rabbi and the staff and the building and all the things we need to pay for. 

Rosenthal: And why is that? Why don’t the dues cover that? 
WEIL: I guess because we don’t have enough people and the people we have some of them don’t have the money. So we’ve always had a sliding scale. If you can’t afford it you talk to somebody and you’re given a reduced amount to pay. We feel that’s important, so there’s not enough to go around for everything we want to do. 

Rosenthal: Do you want to say anything about the building or any of the other….?
WEIL: [Laughs] The first time we saw our building, Pam Webb, bless her heart, was an architect and a very dynamic person. She was driving by the building when the sign went up that it was for sale. Now not many people would have stopped and looked because it was actually two small buildings that were used as a repository for films. She saw something that the rest of us didn’t see. She walked in and immediately called people to a meeting at this building. We went in and looked at this dark, dingy building and couldn’t imagine what she saw. But she drew out her vision to combine the two buildings. It had a wonderful arched ceiling. She had a way of figuring out how all of this could come together and this could be the sanctuary and this could be the social hall. You could put a kitchen here, you know, somehow she saw something in this building. We had been looking for a while. We had looked at churches. I remember the church we saw on the eastside of town. I think it was Unitarian maybe –I don’t know —

Rosenthal: There was one off of Hawthorne we looked at—-
WEIL: Right. Which was a nice building. But there was always something wrong. After you look at so many and you only have a certain budget and you’re trying to figure out how you could afford it and all of that. I guess it made Pam’s vision more palatable, more realizable. It still was a big problem for us to raise the funds. So we did it in two parts. So we only worked on the first building for the first three years or something. I thought it was ingenious the way came up with funding it, where we all made loans. We all offered money. The congregation was taking the loan and paying up back. I was involved in going around to people, telling them this is what we have to do to have a building. We all need to take part. I think almost everybody did. It was very successful. Then we moved on to Phase II and we joined the other building. We still didn’t have enough room for Shabbat school. For years we’ve been using the church down the street for Shabbat school. Not ideal. I remember when our little Sonya went to Shabbat school there she wondered who that man on the wall was, was that Moses? No that man was Jesus [both laugh]. It was not an ideal situation. But I think the building suits us well. I like where it is in the city because it’s not that hard to get to from either the eastside or west side. It’s on the streetcar line. Parking is a real problem, but I think it has served us well.

Rosenthal: Are there other things that you want to think about adding or have we pretty well covered?
WEIL: Let’s talk a little about why we didn’t go with the Reconstructionist Movement. We were Reform and a lot of people wanted to go with the Reconstructionist Movement. Everybody felt at that point that we fit better into that kind of organization than the Reform Movement. Our family was one of them that was on the line. Because we had a child who was ready for camp. And my whole being in this community I felt was because I had gone to Jewish camp. And I really wanted him to go to the NFTY camp in California which was Camp Swig. But if we weren’t part of the Reform Movement he couldn’t go. So a very heated congregational meeting discussed this and voted. We were one of the families that voted not to go with the Reconstructionist Movement, just so Jeff could go to camp. At that point we stayed with the Reform Movement and then it came up again maybe a few years later. And so we went with the Reconstructionist Movement then. Sort of ironically Jeff did go to Camp Swig, I think he may have gone two years, but it never meant to him what it meant to me. So you can’t make your children relive your life, but to me it was important that he have that opportunity. 

Rosenthal: So Havurah doesn’t have an affiliated youth group. There isn’t a youth movement in the Reconstructionist, right?
WEIL: Not to my knowledge. They have youth group within the congregation. I think it’s active. I’ve been there on Wednesday night. The place is buzzing. So there’s a lot going on. I hope that’s going on. Several times I have taught in the religious school with my kids. I had to that with Brent and I had to do that with Todd and then we have this Russian adopted daughter and I had to do it with her too. It is a responsibility. It is difficult to do especially if you have more than one child in the religious school. But to me it’s important that we continue to do that because it’s part of our values of participating and being part of our children’s Jewish education.

Rosenthal: Anything else on that list there?
WEIL: We’re doing this history committee. That’s my new thing in Havurah is working on this history committee. As a founding member it’s very appropriate to take stock and to get down somewhere how this group started. So the people who come behind us and who don’t know any of this history can learn it. A couple of times I’ve been asked to speak at new members’ get-togethers about the history of Havurah. People are fascinated with our history. Usually when you move to a new city you join a synagogue that’s been there for a hundred years. It never occurs to you how it started or who the people were who started it and why and all that. Ours is really young. It’s like thirty- seven or thirty-eight years ago we decided to get together and do something Jewishly together. It’s momentous. It was the first congregation in this city for how many years, fifty years or something to start. That’s something to be really proud of. I’m glad we’re doing the history committee. That we’re taping people’s interviews because someday a hundred years from now they’ll look back and say oh wow this is really interesting.

Rosenthal: I also think it’s interesting that since Havurah started multiple small communities have started.
WEIL: So many that you can’t even count them.
 
Rosenthal: Right
WEIL: Yes. So we’re like the forefront of that. 

Rosenthal: Right. Okay I think I’ve asked all the questions that I had. I appreciate all the information and thank you for your time.
WEIL: Thank you.