About two or three o`clock on a Friday afternoon, the already busy tempo of life along Devon Avenue kicks up another notch or two.
School boys, yarmulkes perched on the back of their heads, suddenly let go of their teasing and horseplay and start to hurry home. Last-minute shoppers scurry into the bakeries for a challah, a braided loaf of egg-dough bread, to serve as the centerpiece for their Sabbath table. Other late comers plead with the butcher to put up one last order for their family`s weekend meals. Then the merchants start to lock up, waving off the last frantic shoppers by pointing to the hand-lettered sign in their windows: Closed Friday at sundown.
Finally, even the most persistent customers have to admit defeat. The shop lights go out, and once again the peace of the Lord`s Day comes to West Rogers Park–the latest center of Chicago`s Orthodox Jewish community.
Thirty years ago, you could have seen that same scene each Friday along Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park; 40 years ago on Roosevelt Road in Lawndale;
and at the turn of the century on Maxwell Street. For hundreds of years before that, it was re-enacted weekly in all the shtetls and ghettos of Eastern Europe. These days, though, it is played against a unaccustomed backdrop.
Turn north or south of Devon, along streets like Francisco or Sacramento, and the bungalow-lined blocks run on for as far as the eye can see. Yet Chicago`s older Jewish neighborhoods were inevitably covered with huge tenements and courtyard apartment buildings. Nor did many shtetl dwellers enjoy amenities like two-car garages or tidy, evergreen-bordered front lawns. Which is not to say that such things come cheap on Chicago`s Far North Side. William Rosenbloom, proprietor of the Schwartz-Rosenbloom Hebrew Book Store, reports that his nephew is desperate to move into the community, and also enjoys the kind of disposable income that usually allows such dreams to come true. ”Yet he just can`t seem to find a four-bedroom house in Petterson Park for $250,000,” Rosenbloom says, nodding his skullcap-covered head in the direction of the next neighorhood to the south of his Devon Avenue shop.
That young man`s dilemma is a by-product of the community`s escalating values–religious no less than real estate. Like many of his fellow merchants, William Rosenbloom came to Devon Avenue via an earlier pilgrimage through the community`s predecessor neighborhoods. Before bringing his collection of Talmudic volumes and religious goods to West Rogers Park, he tended similar bookshops on Lawrence Avenue and Roosevelt Road. Yet for all the intensity of their Jewish life, each of those neighborhoods was somehow different from the pre-World War II, Central European community where Rosenbloom himself had come of age.
In his native Munchak, Czechosolvakia, religious Orthodoxy was situation normal for the town`s 20,000 Jewish inhabitants. On the Sabbath, he remembers, you wouldn`t find 10 stores open in the whole city. All week long, meanwhile, the rabbis gathered together from dawn to dusk in the sessions of the khila, or religious court, where they rendered the decisions that helped maintain the purity of the community`s ancestral traditions.
American life, on the other hand, makes different demands. The United States offers economic opportunities virtually unknown in the Old World, Rosenbloom discovered when he took refuge here from the Nazis in 1939. But there is cost to be paid, nonetheless. So over the years, Rosenbloom watched as many of his fellow Jews shed one after another of their religious obligations as the price of advancement up the social ladder.
By the time the community had moved through Lawndale and Albany Park, its days almost seemed numbered. After the war, the Orthodox cause gained a few new recruits from Holocaust survivors, like ”Midwest Eddie” Ferst who opened a fish store just down from Rosenbloom`s bookshop. A few more came to Devon Avenue from Israel, like Rafi Salinas, who with his Lawndale-born wife, Sandy, operates the nearby, and strictly kosher, Jerusalem Restaurant.
But the handwriting could be seen on the wall. In a generation or two, their version of Judaism was bound to pass into the history books, as their successors moved out to suburbia and into the American mainstream. Then in the last few years, that tide began, ever so slightly, to reverse itself.
”Lately, there`s been a swing back,” reports Rabbi Herman Schusterman of Congregation Bnei Ruven. ”Not so many young people are running to the suburbs. Instead, it`s the other way around: some suburban-raised young couples are opting to start their own families in West Rogers Park.”
Indeed, an increasing number of them are showing up at Rabbi Schusterman`s synagogue, which descends from the Chasidic movement, the most Orthodox version of Orthodox Judaism. Saturday morning, the congregation`s older members can be seen going down Devon Avenue to Sabbath services, dressed in the same long black coats and hats their turn-of-the-century ancestors wore when Chasidism was transplanted from Eastern Europe to inner-city Chicago. Now a younger generation of American-bred Jews wants to join their weekly parade. Why? As Rosenbloom sees them, this generation of young people hungers to find their way back to the same traditions their parents were so quick to abandon. ”They come into my shop,” he reports, ”looking for the sources of Judaism. They might have grown up with a smattering of tradition. Now they want to get back to the original thing.”
Indeed, if a person is searching for roots, he couldn`t pick a better place to start looking than in Rosenbloom`s neighborhood. Other communities might celebrate the passing trends of contemporary pop culture. But lately, Devon Avenue shop windows have been lined with posters advertizing a gala commemoration in honor of the 850th birthday of Moses Maimonides, Judaism`s greatest theologian.
Mordechai Dubin understands the lure of those posters. Today he lives on one of those bungalow-lined streets near Devon, where his biblical name hardly stands out from the ones on his neighbors` mailboxes. But when he was growing up in Wilmette, his school mates knew him as ”Mitchell,” the English-sounding name his parents had given him. Yet even then, Dubin had a sixth sense that his own destiny lay with his people`s past rather than the suburbanized version of their contemporary situation.
So during the summer between graduating from New Trier High School and going off to college, Dubin signed up to work on an Israeli kibbutz. After a few weeks there, he had to admit to himself that life in a communal agricultural settlement wasn`t what he had expected it to be. So he cut short his stay, intending to recoup what was left of the summer by hitchhiking his way back through Europe.
Then as he was passing through Jerusalem, on his way out of the country, he happened upon the Wailing Wall. Until that point, he hadn`t even focused on the fact that fate had brought him to the ancient capital of his people. But as he was standing there, a man in religious garb approached him to ask: ”Are you a Jew?” It was, Dubin acknowledges in retrospect, a question for which he had no ready answer.
No matter, his newfound friend said, inviting him to a Torah study class. Almost as a lark, Dubin took up the invitation, and finding the evening`s discussion intriguing, he went back for a second session. After that, one thing led to another, and before he knew it, he had stayed on too long to make it back to the U.S. for the fall semester.
In fact, by that point secular education no longer ranked very high on Dubin`s priority list. Instead, he entered a yeshiva, a Talmudic academy, and wound up putting in three years there poring over the same volumes of religious lore that line the shelves of Rosenbloom`s bookstore.
Long before he returned to Chicago, Dubin was faithfully following the dietary prescriptions and all the other regulations of Orthodox Judaism. So when he finally came back, West Rogers Park was a natural place for him and his bride–who had similarly found her way back to the religious observations of her ancestors–to find a home in which to start rearing a family of their own.
How did Dubin`s family taken to his Wilmette-to-Jerusalem-to-Devon-Avenue pilgrimage?
His mother, he reports, was initially not too happy about it. ”You`ll wind up a chicken-plucker!” she said, her mind filled with memories of the menial jobs her immigrant-parents` generation once had to content themselves with. But then a representative of that generation entered his own, dissenting vote to that proposition.
It turned out that as a young man Dubin`s grandfather had come to Chicago from an observant, Old Country community. Over the years, though, he had shed his Orthodoxy in order to be able to move his own family out of Lawndale and into the American middle class. Still, for Morris Dubin the tug of the traditions he`d learned at his parents` long-ago dinner table was still there. So when his grandson came back from Israel to take up residence within the Orthodox fold, it was like seeing his life rewound once again back to the days of his own youth.
”When I saw the nachas (joy) my grandfather had, those last years of his life,” Dubin says, ”then I knew for sure that I`d made the right decision.”
