Two elderly Russian immigrants, one man wearing a baseball cap and the other a fedora, stood by the entrance to Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue at 5029 N. Kenmore. The man in the baseball cap looked north on Kenmore and then south, waiting. Gradually a few more men showed up at the temple. “Good shabbos,” said the man. It was a Saturday morning in August, and traditional Jewish law requires ten men–a minyan–for a service to get under way. By 9:40, five minutes before the scheduled hour of worship, more than ten had gathered at the entrance, and they headed inside for sabbath prayer.
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“When I came to this country I was so depressed,” said 67-year-old Basya Pulis a few days later. A biochemist in her native Ukraine, she migrated to Chicago with her family in 1992. “For me, at home in Kiev, I was never religious–you really couldn’t be. But when I first put my hands to the Torah, at the Free Synagogue on Devon, where we first went, I felt a strength come to me. I don’t know why, but my feelings were even stronger at Agudas Achim. I was home.”
Natives of Austria and Hungary founded the First Hungarian Congre-gation Agudas Achim on Maxwell Street in 1884. It later moved to Polk and Marshfield, where Rush-Presbyterian-Saint Luke’s Medical Center now stands, then in 1922 it merged with North Shore Congregation Sons of Israel and settled into a single-level building at the North Kenmore site; two years later the building was enlarged with second and third stories. The architect of the addition, Henry Dubin, is best known today for the “battledeck house,” the groundbreaking steel-frame residence he built for himself in Highland Park, but he designed many synagogues.
Philip Lefkowitz had been an Orthodox rabbi in New Jersey and in Manchester, England. He was working for a funeral business when Turk offered him the pulpit at Agudas Achim in 1994. Turk had to persuade his small board to revert to Orthodox Judaism in order to hire Lefkowitz. “There was opposition, but because of what I had done they went along with me,” he says. By the time Lefkowitz took over, the member-ship was predominantly Russian. “On the eve of that first Rosh Hashanah, 250 people showed up, and they didn’t know a word that I was saying,” says Lefkowitz. “The second day I put in some Yiddish, which I knew somewhat and which they knew somewhat, too. The Russians started to cheer. On Yom Kippur I spoke in Yiddish for ten minutes and ran out of nouns, but there was a connection.”
“The reality is that there are never enough resources to meet community needs,” said Jewish United Fund president Steven Nasatir in a written statement. “We can’t in good conscience renovate buildings when there are waiting lists for human serv-ices in our community–like subsidized housing for seniors and respite care for families of kids with disabilities.” The JUF, he says, has helped Agudas Achim by distributing its marketing materials and sending over volunteers to scrub floors and scrape plaster.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Kathy Richland.
