A table served as a makeshift bier to carry the three Torah scrolls through the crowd that had gathered in a parking lot Sunday to mourn the destruction of the synagogue of the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe.
On Friday night, a suspicious fire reduced the synagogue at 6335 N. California Ave. to heaps of rubble and heat-twisted glass. The handwritten Torah scrolls, which contain the basic laws and teachings of Judaism, were burned into blackened chunks of parchment.
Sunday’s program, which drew more than 2,000 people, was a funeral for the scrolls, a traditional ceremony that will conclude Monday with their burial in a cemetery.
The largely Russian emigre congregation grieved not only for the loss of these symbols of faith and strength, but for the loss of a place that, for many, had served as their first refuge in this country. And in the faint odor of ashes from the scrolls, some smelled the stench of the religious persecution they thought they had fled.
“These are people who have escaped anti-Semitism, who have escaped being harassed for practicing their religion,” said FREE executive director Rabbi Shmuel Notik. “These are people who have just found a religious home. Now, they are on the streets again.”
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Although the blaze is still under investigation by the Chicago Police Department’s Bomb & Arson Unit, fire department officials said it appeared to have been set.
Notik said a number of computers had also been stolen from FREE’s offices, which adjoin the synagogue, and that a special effort had been made to burn religious items. He estimated losses at $500,000.
The rabbi locked up the empty synagogue three hours before the fire started about 9:30 p.m., following Sabbath services and a class to discuss the inspiration of Hanukkah.
The eight-day festival of lights, which begins Dec. 9 this year, symbolizes victory of God over evil.
In this, Notik found solace.
“This is the light that burns even on the darkest day,” he told the gathering Sunday. “This is the light that burns for me and my community today.”
The community extended far beyond the 250 members of the synagogue’s congregation. FREE has operated as the city’s largest social service agency for Russian Jews, helping an estimated 25,000 emigres settle into their new lives since 1973.
Among them was Adena Puysin, who stood behind the yellow police tape blocking off the charred shell of the building and cried.
She, like the others, had filed into the alley behind the synagogue after the speeches and the prayers, after the scrolls were carried on the bier to a hearse, with the crowd following behind. After that, there was nothing left to do but look.
“When we moved here from Leningrad five years ago,” said Puysin, 38, “we didn’t look for an apartment, we didn’t do anything. We came here first. This was a real home for the beginners.”
Later, she and her husband, who were denied a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony in the former Soviet Union, celebrated it there.
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Raizel Hershkovich, whose husband, Naftoly, is FREE’s educational director, pointed out the bits and pieces left of the hard-to-find Russian and Hebrew language books she had brought to the synagogue from a trip to Montreal. Brocha Wolf, a native of France, struggled to explain the fire to her 8-year-old daughter, Rivka.
“It looks like garbage,” the girl said.
“I look at this and I see rumbles of the ghetto,” Wolf said. “I don’t know what to say to her. We’ve always said there’s freedom in America to be a Jew. It’s very hard to know what to say now.”