A little more than 50 years ago, on December 6, 1975, a makeshift Shabbat prayer service was held in the cavernous ballroom of Lincoln Square Synagogue, which was then located on West 69th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. The prayer service, which became known as the Lincoln Square Synagogue Beginners Service, attracted only three people – two men, each by the name of Steve Reich, and one woman, whose name was Beryl Korot. One Steve Reich was a budding young composer, and the other Steve Reich was a very tall accountant. Beryl Korot, at that time, was an up-and-coming weaver. I was a young rabbi who had been married only a week before, on November 23, 1975, and was serving at that time as the Educational Director of Lincoln Square Synagogue.
As many of you may know, Lincoln Square Synagogue started in about 1964 as a Conservative congregation on the Upper West Side. Corresponding with the opening of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a high-rise community – the Lincoln Towers residential complex – had been built to replace the tenements that were once there. Lincoln Towers consists of nine giant buildings, 30 stories tall, and about 60-70% of the people who moved there were Jews.
Two men, who had recently moved to Lincoln Towers, decided independently to attend High Holiday services at one of the local synagogues. One of the men could not get into the services without a ticket, the other was not pleased with the services that he had attended, and each decided to try to find a better place to worship the following year. They realized that they both had the same idea, and decided together to rent a local hall and hire a retired Conservative rabbi to lead the services.
For two years, this small congregation met only on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. By the third year, the Conservative rabbi had fully retired, and the two gentlemen were left without a rabbi to lead the prayers.
Because they were so late in finding a rabbi, the only rabbi that they could recruit at the last moment was a young 23-year-old rabbinical student at Yeshiva University. Because he was Orthodox, he insisted that he could not pray with them, but he nevertheless agreed to lead the services.
One of the gentlemen was so annoyed by this choice that he angrily declared, “An Orthodox rabbi? Over my dead body!” But Rabbi Steven Riskin was a winner and a charmer, and by the end of Yom Kippur, they asked the young rabbi to stay on as their permanent rabbi. Rabbi Riskin said that he could not officiate in a synagogue without a mechitzah (a separation between the men and women), but he agreed to stay for a year, without pay, in the hope of convincing them to install one.
Within six months, a makeshift mechitzah was installed – and the rest is history. The new Lincoln Square Synagogue, with regular services, opened in an apartment in the Lincoln Towers complex, at 150 West End Avenue, and soon expanded to two apartments. By 1970, their new building was completed on West 69th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The new synagogue could seat 600 people in its main sanctuary. Even though the temporary location in the apartments had only been able to accommodate 200 people, Rabbi Riskin’s extraordinary reputation was already well known, and people flocked to the new house of worship.
On the first Shabbat in the new synagogue, the sanctuary was already filled to capacity and overflowing. Soon, it was known that if you were not in your seat by 10 a.m. on Shabbat morning, you were not allowed into the synagogue. The fire department let it be known that they were concerned that the people sitting on the steps were creating a fire hazard.
Looking for a way to relieve the overcrowding, in 1974, Rabbi Riskin approached me and asked if I would lead an overflow service for the people who could not get into the main synagogue. I was flattered, but it was not my thing. So when Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, who were students in my Tuesday morning Bible class, suggested that I should conduct a Beginners Service for Jews like themselves, who had little or no synagogue background, I quickly agreed. And that is how the idea was hatched.
It was a bold idea, but its success was very improbable, because the new service would be competing with the best show in town, with “Stevie Wonder” Riskin and the incredible Cantor Sherwood Goffin leading the service in the main shul. After all, who would ever come down to the ballroom to something known as a “Beginners Service?” It sounds below one’s dignity – even the “Beginners” name is embarrassing.
Those who come to the Beginners Service are usually taught to read Hebrew in a crash course or are given the pink transliterated sheets for the songs until they master the Hebrew reading. The service is abridged and features the main parts of the Hebrew prayers with selections read in English. Instead of a rabbi’s sermon, a different Beginner delivers a Dvar Torah every week. The Torah portion is read in English with a running commentary by the rabbi. The service can be interrupted at any time for questions. Participants are told when to stand and when to sit, which songs to sing, how to cover their eyes during the Shema, how to hold their tzitziot, when to bow, and when to take three steps forward and three steps backward.
For the first six months, the service usually consisted of the four of us. People often came into the room for a few minutes, took a peek, and walked out. There was even one “character” who often came in on roller skates and with a tennis racket, and asked, “How do you know there is a G-d?”
Slowly, the service caught on. By the end of the year, it had moved up to the second floor of Lincoln Square Synagogue, to a small room that accommodated about 50 people. Within five years, the room was full. In March 1981, the New York Times caught wind of this new service, and decided to publish a feature story in its Saturday newspaper, front page, second section, with a staged picture of the service that was taken on Sunday.
From then on, it was really standing room only. The service was soon featured in newspapers and magazines all over the city – in fact, all over the world. New York Magazine called it “The Best Thing to Do on a Weekend.” Cover stories in major magazines and newspapers were written about the service and the people who attended it. The service was so popular that attendees often “graduated” after six months, or sooner, if they had heard the rabbi’s same jokes three times.
On September 30, 1984, the mother of one of the Beginners authored a story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine section, with a banner headline: “America Jews Rediscover Orthodoxy.” The writeup had a profound impact on American Jews. The article featured successful, famous American Jews who had started becoming observant, including a number who had started at Lincoln Square Synagogue, such as the leading financier Sanford C. Bernstein, who became known as Zalman Chaim Bernstein, and the Emmy Award-winning writer Allan Leicht, of Kate & Allie fame.
Originally, I had no idea who Steve Reich was. I knew that he was very diligent about his Torah studies. Even when he traveled overseas, usually to Europe, he would send me little notes assuring me that he had reviewed the material that he had missed and had studied the weekly Torah portion. One day, while walking up Broadway, I saw a sign posted on one of the lampposts, “Steve Reich and Musicians to play at Columbia University.” I had a feeling that it was Steve Reich from the Beginners Service, so I suggested to my wife, Aidel, who has hosted and fed over 15,000-20,000 Beginners over the past 50 years, that we buy tickets to the concert. Of course, we had no idea what “minimalist music” was, and what kind of music Steve composed. When we entered the auditorium, we saw several hundred young people who were transfixed and mesmerized, because the music has an ability to hypnotize. Everyone was flying high.
At the end of the performance, many were greeting Steve and the musicians on stage, so we shyly walked up the steps. When Steve saw me, he gave out a big shout, “Excuse me, my rabbi is here!” and gave me a very warm embrace. Of course, I was embarrassed, but I was also inwardly thrilled.
Steve Reich has gone on to become one of the world’s most famous composers. He was actually called by the New York Times “among the greatest composers of the century.” He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Award in Music by Japan, which is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He has also received prizes from the Royal Swedish Academy, and the Pulitzer Prize as well. Almost all his music, since that time, has been on Jewish themes, such as Tehillim, and he spent extra effort studying Biblical Hebrew with a teacher. “Trains” is about trains going back and forth from Auschwitz. “The Cave,” an opera that he wrote together with Beryl Korot, who is now a famed video artist, is about Me’arat Hamachpela, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and “Daniel” is about Daniel Pearl, the Jewish news reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was murdered by Islamic terrorists. He and Beryl are a walking Kiddush Hashem.
Many extraordinary people have attended the Beginners Service: actors, writers, publishers, New York Times correspondents, world-famous financiers. There are probably now half a dozen “graduates” who are rabbis, and at least two dozen rebbetzins. One Ph.D. physicist eventually joined a kollel in Israel and recalibrated the Luach Hazmanim, the calendar of the Jewish people, and developed the app that is used by El Al today so passengers will know when to daven while in flight.
It was about 1980 when I approached Rabbi Riskin and said to him boldly that there is one thing wrong with Lincoln Square Synagogue. By that time there were many auxiliary prayer services, an early hashkama minyan, a children’s service, a teens service, and half a dozen others. The educational program attracted 1,500 people a week. Rabbi Riskin’s Wednesday night lectures alone attracted 500-600 people every Wednesday night. Fifty classes were offered weekly, ranging from Aleph–Bet to advanced Talmud. Some young instructors, rabbis, and women educators who cut their teeth at the Lincoln Square Synagogue Joseph Shapiro Institute Educational Program have gone on to become world-famous. I told Rabbi Riskin that the “tragedy of Lincoln Square Synagogue” was that there was only one Lincoln Square Synagogue, and that there should be Lincoln Square Synagogues replicated all over the United States. Rabbi Riskin looked at me and said, “It’s a great idea, but I’m making aliyah.”
In 1983, Rabbi Riskin moved to Israel and built what is now the Ohr Torah empire of schools and educational programs.
Never having really fundraised, I was fearful to start out on my own. But, in 1987, I bit the bullet and started what is now called NJOP (National Jewish Outreach Program), which replicated many of the outreach programs that were developed at Lincoln Square Synagogue. The Hebrew Reading Crash Course, now called Read Hebrew America, has taught over 275,000 people how to read Hebrew in North America alone. Turn Friday Night Into Shabbos, which started in June of 1980 at Lincoln Square Synagogue, has now been renamed “Shabbat Across America,” and more than 1.1 million Jews have been hosted at these annual programs. The Crash Courses in Basic Judaism and Jewish History are among the acclaimed NJOP programs, and Beginners Services have been launched all over North America, which are especially popular around the High Holidays. Many NJOP programs have been replicated in a total of 45 countries throughout the world, with tens of thousands of participants.
As we look back over the past 50 years, we feel enriched that the Almighty has given us this opportunity to provide something that has proven to be so successful and so influential. What started with only four “lonely” people in a cavernous ballroom, who learned how to take three steps backward and three steps forward and how to bend your knees and bow at the waist, has achieved improbable acclaim. Of course, along with Aidel Buchwald’s great hospitality, the Beginners Service at Lincoln Square Synagogue has spawned a revolution, and hundreds of thousands of North American Jews, and many more the world over, have been profoundly spiritually enriched.
And we’ve only just begun!