A month after Israel had become a state, the city’s Bureau of Jewish Education decided to hold a bikkurim (first fruits) festival starring thousands of school-age children from the New York metropolitan area.
There were baskets and more baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables which were used in the many pageants that day.
Was I there, you may rightly ask? Since I was only nine years old and lived in Atlanta, that would have been impossible. However, in my random reading of old newspapers, I found very large pictures in an Israeli weekly Hebrew newspaper for children from 1948. When I realized that it all happened at Central Park Mall, I felt compelled to get the story. What follows is what I learned.
“I WAS dressed as a pilgrim of the Second Temple period,” a native New Yorker, my age, living in Jerusalem, recalled. “I was a student at the Beit Hayeled school, very progressive for those days. Dr. Israel Chipkin, the headmaster, advised us exactly how to dress for the occasion. He emphatically said that we were reliving exactly what our ancestors experienced in Jerusalem, almost 2,000 years ago. He stressed to us, practically in tears, that now the Jewish people had its own state of Israel and so we could really celebrate.”
Working together with the education department of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund, Dr. Samuel Citron, director of programming of the BJE of New York and a noted author of Jewish drama epics, planned out the entire event.
In material I located from the JTA, Citron explained that “there was a desire on the part of American Jewry to identify publicly with the struggles of the new state of Israel. I suggested that the best way to link our two communities was through a natural bridge, the Bikkurim-First Fruits Festival.
“The Jewish state was only a few weeks old,” Citron continued, “so we decided to hold the program at a well-known New York site, the Central Park Mall. There, young and old might express deep feelings, with gusto, for the new-old homeland.”
Over 2,000 schoolchildren and youth-group members were invited to be the bearers of the first fruits. Leading Jewish actors were asked to don the garb of the kohanim, priests, and Levites of the ancient Temple. The grand march by the children was accompanied by the music of a small orchestra. Basket after basket of fruits and vegetables were brought forward and placed as an offering on the well-constructed and decorated platform before the kohen gadol, high priest, Paul Muni. He was a very famous Jewish actor who had been fighting antisemitism in US through the 1930s and 1940s.
Judge Morris Rothenberg, chairman of the event and American president of KKL-JNF, proudly read a letter from US Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Branson.
Those words from the federal government stressed that “the harvest this year will be one of the most important in world history.” Both symbolically and realistically, the point was made.
“We are here to rededicate ourselves,” Rothenberg asserted proudly, “to the higher ideals the Festival of Shavuot-Bikkurim stands for. With great vigor which all Americans can see, we register our solidarity and support for our fellow Jews, those brave freedom fighters in Israel.”
The crowd went wild. The Central Park Mall resounded with the cheers of the 20,000 people in attendance, according to The New York Times. That reenactment of the Bikkurim Festival, publicly in the center of the city, center of the United States, elevated the spirit of American Jewry. How very tightly the bonds linking Jews on both sides of the world were tied that day in June 1948.
AS EARLY as May 14, 1772, Michael Gratz of Philadelphia wrote to his Christian partner in Western Pennsylvania as follows.
“Please be advised that I cannot see you on the date you suggested, because it is the Jewish feast commemorating the giving of the Ten Commandments (Shavuot).”
The Festival of the First Fruits, Festival of Weeks, has been celebrated widely in the US since the colonial period. As southerners, we turn to our community newspapers to see what they had to say.
Not long after the Civil War, May 27, 1868, the Savannah Daily News reported under the headline “The Feast of Weeks” as follows.
“Today the Israelites throughout the world celebrate the Feast of Weeks, the anniversary of the revelation on Mount Sinai, the great event of the giving of the first written law,” and the writer added, “still the foundation of all laws and the base of all constitutions.” What praise for the Ten Commandments, the 600 Jewish residents of Savannah felt that day.
Now the article continued with chronology. “The event transpired in the third month after the Israelite departure from Egypt about 1509 BC and still so ‘fresh’ in Israelite memory that it annually assembles the people in their houses of worship to render praise and adoration to Him who gave the Law.”
Our sister and brother Jews on the Atlantic Coast of Georgia had such pride back then.
For some unknown reason, the Savannah paper decided to amplify the story with a lengthy quote from the Nashville Banner. “Not only in its synagogue but also in the bosom of each Jewish family, that beautiful feast brings men gladness and joy.” The Tennessee paper added, “It is the feast of spring, of flowers, the time of roses, when every heart is inclined to joy and pleasure.” Then a spiritual emphasis with Hebrew words transliterated: “the day when Israel exclaimed at the foot of Sinai, ‘Na’aseh venishma,’ ‘We will do it and we will hear it.’”
Personally, I wish that I had the name of that writer in 1868, because he or she truly perceived what our responsibilities are. “For 33 centuries they have adhered to this promise.”
It was adumbrated that May day how Jews had continually aspired to their promise of fealty until three years after the terrible battles on American soil. “Mankind has no other systems of doctrine to show and no other people to point to – which have thus outlived all revolutions of history; all changes of the globe and all the successions of empires, religions and philosophies.”
A truly incredible statement made by my fellow southerner.
YET FOR most of us, Shavuot is linked to confirmation. We are fortunate that the Breman Archives in Atlanta has preserved pictures of confirmation classes in Albany, Savannah, Atlanta, Macon and Rome. A selection will help us see changing fashions, and a few texts will highlight what confirmation was meant to be. Confirmation in the US was initiated in Reform temples in San Francisco and New York in the 1820s.
In the 1950s approximately 750 confirmations were held annually on or around Shavuot in Orthodox, Conservative and Reform synagogues. That number has dropped dramatically because of two significant factors – bat mitzvah for girls and Jewish high school education. Some may also argue that the frills of confirmation are no longer needed to dramatize a teenage commitment to Judaism after the big events celebrated at 12 and 13 years of age.
The Atlanta Georgian is a fine source of information about the Atlanta Jewish community in the first two decades of 20th century. Since that daily newspaper, until the end of 1911, is online via the free Georgia Historic Newspapers site, its pages provide a rounded picture of what was happening in Atlanta.
On May 20, 1907, we find the story of the confirmation at the temple, the day before, Sunday, May 19. The headline read in large letters “Feast of Weeks Observed by Ceremony of Temple Confirmation Class.”
The writer was impressed by what he saw. “Practically every pew in the handsome Jewish temple on South Pryor Street was filled Sunday when six young ladies and two young men were formally and with impressive ceremony confirmed into the Jewish faith. The entire Jewish congregation of the city was in attendance, as well as many friends of the young confirmands who are not members.”
The question we can ask almost 110 years after that confirmation is whether the “friends” referred to were youngsters from the other synagogues or Christian youth. I would think that these individuals in attendance were Jews and Christians. The temple was the major institution in the Jewish community because the members were among the financial leaders of Atlanta, movers and shakers.
Confirmation was defined as “the most important event in the religious life of the Jew. It is the stepping-stone from childhood into adulthood, the day on which the cloak of responsibility... falls from the shoulders of parents or guardians to [the confirmand’s] own. And it is the declaration of faith.”
The writer had an advanced scientific view how the Ten Commandments, traditionally identified as being given on Shavuot, were transmitted to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. “Ten Commandments flashed to Moses on Mount Sinai.... Light of right and wrong, the Ten Commandments were flashed by the Lord through the minds of Moses and the fathers.”
The assumption is that “fathers” was used to identify the Jewish people at that momentous spiritual moment.
Rabbi David Marx was master of ceremonies for the confirmation. The girls wore white and were carrying bouquets. The young men mostly dressed in black. The eight confirmands marched down the center aisle.
I actually found their names and their roles in the confirmation ceremony.
Gussie Cronheim and Gussie Abraham presented the floral offering. Roslyn Abraham and Harry Schlesinger (girl) led the service from the “Jewish prayer book.”
Clara Hyman, Walter Sonn and Clara Hoffman conducted the Torah service.
Milton Cronheim gave the closing prayer. The charge to these confirmands by Marx was “fired with feeling.”
I do not want to forget my fellow confirmands. On a May 1952 Sunday night at Shearith Israel synagogue on Washington Street in Atlanta, our families and friends celebrated with us. May those living and those who have died be blessed: Rebecca Arnoff, Perry Alterman, Teddy Britton, Harvey Charvin, Gerald Cherkas, Harriet Enenstein, Walter Gordon, Leon Kingston, Jo Ann Idov, Murray Solomon, Stanley Taylor and Freddy White.