By Beverley Siegel
JUF News, October 2000
Rodfei Zedek and the Hyde Park Jewish Community Center have joined together in a new building, the first synagogue and JCC to do so.
Remote from the daily lives of most Chicago-area Jews, Hyde Park, on the city's South Side, has always had cachet, either for material wealth (in the 1930s and '40s wealthy Jews lived there) or for intellectual capital, owing to the University of Chicago and its many well-known Jewish faculty members and Nobel Prize-winners. Now it has another source of Jewish pride.
Congregation Rodfei Zedek, one of the oldest Conservative synagogues in Chicago, and the Hyde Park Jewish Community Center have opened a jointly owned new building, at 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd. September's dedication weekend featured a Shabbat family program, services, a festive gala and community-wide open house.
Said synagogue President Ed Hamburg, "It's a milestone in the history of both institutions." "It's the first time in Chicago that a synagogue and a JCC have partnered to create a building," said Marty Levine, associate general director of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago.
It may also be the first time in the city's history that a congregation, after much collective soul searching, decided to tear down its building and rebuild on the same spot. "Most synagogues establish a new building because they've moved to a new neighborhood," said Norman Schwartz, past president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society. "It's rare that a synagogue rebuilds in the same neighborhood, let alone at the same address."
The Jewish presence in Hyde Park reaches back at least as far as 1892, when Rabbi Emil Hirsch was among the first scholars named to the faculty of the University of Chicago; he was also among a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen who helped avert a financial crisis that threatened the university's existence.
"Without the Jewish community's support at that critical juncture, the university may never have come into being," said U. of C. Provost Geoffrey Stone. German Jews began to move into the Kenwood area, just north of Hyde Park Blvd., around the time of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Following the migration of their members, synagogues arrived in the area in 1923, with the laying of cornerstones by Reform congregations Kehilath Anshe Maariv (KAM) at Drexel and 50th and Isaiah Temple at Hyde Park Blvd. and Greenwood.
Jews from Eastern Europe founded Rodfei Zedek in 1874, outside the city limits, west of Halsted and south of 39th Street, in a frontier outpost that was studded with gambling halls and saloons and rocked by frequent gunfights. The congregation's founders, able to speak English, took advantage of business opportunities outside the Yiddish-speaking Maxwell Street ghetto. Their first move south and east came in 1906, to 48th Street and Grand Boulevard.
After World War I, as Chicago was emerging as one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, Rodfei Zedek once again followed its increasingly prosperous members, breaking ground in 1924 in Hyde Park, at 5426 S. Greenwood Ave. In 1950, in response to a booming post-WWII demand for Sunday School, children's services and High Holiday seats, the congregation erected a spacious new building at 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd.
But by the end of the decade, the Hyde Park Jewish population, which had reached about 15,000, and had supported nine synagogues of all denominations and a thriving Jewish cultural life was rapidly dwindling. Racial changes and the subdivision of housing stock on the western edge of the neighborhood propelled many Jews to South Shore and other parts of the city. By the time the university stepped in to help stabilize the area, the South Side's Jewish community had decamped to far-south suburbs and the North Side. Lincolnwood resident Elise Ginsparg, who was born and raised in Hyde Park and whose father owned a kosher butcher shop there, fondly recalls the tolerant Jewish atmosphere and the intellectual influence of the university, where she frequently attended public lectures. "I loved it and I'm proud to have lived there," said the popular book reviewer and speaker on Jewish communities around the world. The current Jewish population of Hyde Park is about 5,000.
"We knew we either had to make the place smaller or move out of the area," said Sara Segal Loevy, a Hyde Park resident and long-time Rodfei Zedek member. Drawn to the synagogue's egalitarian-Conservative approach that encourages participation, Loevy found that she felt "diminished" at regular Shabbat services, with 50-to-100 people in a sanctuary built to hold 900.
Members also chafed at seeing dues and endowment siphoned into maintenance and repairs on a building that no longer met the community's needs. And yet, they cherished the spirit of the synagogue and didn't want to lose it. Loevy, a health-care consultant, loves the congregation's mix of young, old, single adults, and families, as well as the feeling of commitment to contemporary city life. She also appreciates the feeling of rootedness in the past. "I draw strength from knowing my history, and this place is steeped in that."
Thea Crook, who arrived in Hyde Park with her husband and children just weeks before her son's bar mitzvah in 1988, was impressed by the absence of "high glitz." The native of South Africa also valued the congregation's "low-key approach to dogma and an openness to Jewish spirituality." For her, the warmth of the congregation made up for the absence of old friends and extended family at such an important time in her life. "The members treated us like family, and that hasn't changed," she said.
Feelings of affection for the synagogue came to the aid of members when they decided to take on a $2.5 million commitment, as part of a $5 million building project. "Even past members gave generously," said Rabbi Elliot Gertel, spiritual leader of Rodfei Zedek since 1988. As part of the joint construction, the JCC committed $1 million, which it paid with a loan from the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. Another $1.5 million was raised through the sale of the synagogue's school buildings to its former tenant, the Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School.
Changes in the city once again stand poised to affect Hyde Park, this time positively, as the development of the South Loop and Dearborn Parkway areas bring a new generation of urban Jews into new, old parts of the city. In addition to Hyde Park residents, the synagogue attracts families from around the city whose children attend the U. of C. Lab School, as well as families from as far north as Lakeview, whose children take bar/bat mitzvah instruction at Rodfei Zedek's North Side affiliate, Moadon Kol Chadash, which is housed at the Heller JCC.
Meanwhile, the Hyde Park JCC, which was founded in 1950 and with the new building acquires its first permanent home (it had previously rented space from other neighborhood institutions) is already feeling the excitement of new people and energy. The J has a dedicated gym for basketball and volleyball; three program rooms for early-childhood and after-school enrichment programs, book groups and bridge, and a second-floor circular track for indoor walkers and runners. The new building will also house the J's popular summer and vacation-day camps. Said Hyde Park JCC president Amy Gelman, thrilled with the new facilities and prospects for growth, "We've already had eight teams sign up for our basketball league, and many of the people are new to us." |
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