Local Jewish temple filled with art honors creation, preservation
The first of a series on religious art in Grand Rapids, this article explores the art of Temple Emanuel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the city, including a highly regarded three-dimensional Tiffany window.
Temple Emanuel sits on Fulton Street, in a tree-lined neighborhood filled with brick houses. Recently, I parked my car in the back lot and walked past the playground, noting the stickers on the windows, which depicted Jewish symbols; walked past the inviting patio, where white hydrangea threatened to overtake the benches; and walked up to the entrance, where a single work of art — a sculpture by Calvin Albert — stood sentry.
The dark bronze sculpture, titled “Burning Bush,” did have something fiery in its twists and folds. A nearby plaque advised that Albert was born in Grand Rapids, and that the piece had been commissioned by the Temple, where he and his family worshipped.
Archivist Margaret Tracy-Finkelstein (Peggy to her friends) opened the door and ushered me in. She wore dark, conservative clothing, a contrast to her daughter, Megan Yost, also present; Yost wore summer clothes and a baseball cap. They stood in religious placidity. I sweated.
We were in a showcase room dominated by displays celebrating the contribution of Temple Emanuel congregants to World War II and flanked by two extraordinary works of art: near the entrance, a large, seemingly writhing menorah, incredibly fluid; and across from it, at the other end of the room, a Tiffany window depicting the Biblical Ruth. Only as I got close to the latter did I see that faces were sketched below the glass, and that the window was, in fact, three-dimensional.
Tracy-Finkelstein told me that a Tiffany scholar came and spent days studying it.
“She said it was among the finest examples of three-dimensional Tiffany windows ever produced,” she says.
As we walked among the past, she tossed out fact after fact, story after story, all of them interesting and some fascinating: she spoke of Julius Houseman, businessman and mayor; of the five families who came together to create Oakhill Cemetery, so the first Jew to die in Grand Rapids (a traveler from Canada) could be buried according to the customs of his people; of Lincoln, and his advocacy for allowing Jews to serve as chaplains in the army.
“Do you have to force yourself to go to sleep at night?”
“I do,” she said, laughing. “Everything’s so fascinating!”
Yost admits she shares this fascination of history and stories with her mother, which results in a lot of phone calls.
“Four, five, six times a day,” she says. “‘Oh my gosh, I found out that…’ or ‘Did you hear that…?’”
We went into the main room of worship. The main two rooms, actually; generally, the right half is sufficient for service, but at times the wooden dividing wall is pulled back, as it was when I visited, revealing the full room in all its glory, and a full view of the 1,000 square-foot mural by Lucienne Bloch Dimitroff.
It is magnificent.
The mural is a series of painted panels: crowns, suns, Hebrew lettering, swirls. Gold, white, and brown dominate. The overall impression is of warmth and peace; if art is that which allows us to put down the ephemeral and contemplate the eternal, it is inarguably art.
“It changes,” Tracy-Finkelstein told me. “Depending on the light.” Behind and above us are a row of windows. “I remember being so amazed by how it looks one way in the morning, another at noon, and another at night.”
Yost pulls open two panels to reveal hidden treasures: four Torahs. One was commissioned recently by the Temple. Congregants got to help create one letter apiece; they held the pen, and the scribe moved it.
Another, over 350 years old, is a Holocaust Torah.
Adolf Hitler ordered the confiscation of many Torahs. He hoped that, after the Jews had been purged from the earth, a museum would exist, filled with relics of Judaism: a way to remember all that Germany had accomplished — a perverse mirror image of the work Tracy-Finkelstein and others do. The Torah, liberated from the Nazis, was later given in trust to Temple Emanuel.
W.H. Auden advised against reading the Bible for its prose. Similarly, while the Torahs are very beautiful, it seems wrong to admire them simply as aesthetic objects. They radiate sacredness.
The panels now shut, we completed our tour, following a wing of classrooms. More display cases told the stories of local Jewish veterans. One case honored Oakhill Cemetery, and the (successful) efforts to beatify it, with which Mort Finkelstein, my guide’s husband, was heavily involved.
“What does he think of your love of history?”
“He says, ‘I’ll raise the money and you do all the work.’ It works out well.”
I left understanding that I had only scratched the surface of the art at Temple Emanuel—and of its stories. This congregation, nearly as old as the city itself, has been a center of stillness in lives that are often busy enough to feel frantic. Jewish author Saul Bellow, rightful recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, once wondered if time might not exist in the afterlife. “There is no time in bliss,” he wrote. “All the clocks were thrown out of Heaven.”
