Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 28, 2022

In 1942 Nazis gathered religious objects from synagogues across Czechoslovakia and shipped them to Prague to be cataloged.

Among those ritual items were 1,564 Torah scrolls. Three decades later, one of those sacred Hebrew scrolls came to Fort Worth. Join Hollace Ava Weiner, director of the Fort Worth Jewish Archives, and Rabbi Emeritus Ralph D. Mecklenburger of Beth-El Congregation to learn about the journey of this scroll that left the Czech village of Uhnves in 1942, spent over 20 years in a drafty warehouse and arrived at a Fort Worth synagogue in 1971 to begin its mission anew.

About Hollace Ava Weiner

Hollace Ava Weiner, a native of Washington, D.C., is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Maryland. For a decade, beginning in 1986, she worked as a news reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She left the paper in 1997 to finish a book, Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work, published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was followed by four others, among them the centennial history of River Crest Country Club. Hollace contributed chapters to the book Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Civil Rights; Grace & Gumption, Stories of Fort Worth Women; and to the award-winning book Texas Women and Ranching. Her chapter in the ranching book is about Fort Worth native Frances Rosenthal Kallison, the only Jewish woman in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. (Hollace nominated her!) As one book led to another, Hollace enrolled at UTA for a Masters Degree in history and Archives. For the past 20 years she has been volunteer director of the Fort Worth Jewish Archives, which has offices at both Beth-El Congregation and Congregation Ahavath Sholom. During the pandemic, the Star-Telegram re-hired her to write a monthly local-history column. She loves writing for hometown readers.

AboutRabbi Ralph D. Mecklenburger

Recognized as a peacemaker and mediator, in 1984 the rabbi was drawn into a clash over busing and desegregation. Years later, in 1999, an African American minister who led years of protests against the public schools agreed to meet with the School Board only if the rabbi was part of the mediation team. An advocate for equal rights, in 1991 the rabbi quietly sponsored a gay man, the director of the Aids Outreach Center, for membership in a high profile service organization. When the civic group rejected his nominee, the rabbi worked for change from within and years later was elected to its board of directors. Rabbi Ralph is everybodys rabbi, remarked a police officer assigned to the mayors office.

Within the Jewish community, Rabbi Mecklenburger mended fences, diminishing rivalries among local congregations. He established a joint worship and scholar-in-residence program over Selichot, the weekend prior to the High Holidays. He The Temple board approved associate memberships, so that congregants at the Conservative synagogue could join Beth-El with half-price dues and enroll their teens in the Temple Youth Group. When Chabad-Lubavitch established a Hasidic house of worship in Fort Worth, Beth-El loaned its rabbi a Torah. Never territorial toward other Jewish denominations, Rabbi Mecklenburger wrote in the Texas Jewish Post in 1999, We all know Orthodox Jews who have become Reform and Reform Jews who have chosen Orthodoxy. That is healthy and has served to keep disaffected Jews in the fold. . . . Pluralism is not only ethically right, it is good for us.

The rabbis pen proved prolific and provocative. When Sunday newspapers published a B.C. comic strip in 2001 that pictured a menorah melting into a crucifix, he slammed the cartoonist in an op-ed column for portraying one of the worlds major religions as extinguished. When the movie The Passion of the Christ premiered in 1998, he critiqued it for the Star-Telegram, writing that it represents the worst of Hollywood pop-culture, glorifying violence rather than the best of Christian spirituality. When presidential candidates railed against Muslim immigration to America, he countered with a newspaper column that stirred online debate.

With a gentler pen, the rabbi has written more than 400 eulogies over the past three decades, warmly describing the strengths and even the quirks of the dearly departed. Masterfully, he delivered sermons, with gravity and levity, linking current concerns to passages from Torah and Talmud. All the while, he was synthesizing his thinking and theology into a landmark book, published in 2012 and aptly titled Our Religious Brains.

Over the past 32 years, the congregation has watched the rabbis thick fringe of black hair turn gray, his son and daughter grow from grade school into adulthood, and him and his wife, Ann, become globetrotting grandparents. Beth-El, once a Classical Reform synagogue where few knew Hebrew, has turned into a Temple that teaches the Alef Bet to kindergarteners, enjoys Cantorial music, and annually sends dozens of children to camp and to Israel. With a burgeoning religious school, a growing endowment, a stable staff, and consensus within the congregation, Rabbi Mecklenburger has guided Beth-El back to the future and into its second century.

This event will be held in the Tandy Hall in the East Wing of the Central Library

Fort Worth Public Library - Central,500 W. 3rd,Fort Worth76102 View Map

32.754011,-97.3349468

500 W. 3rd, Fort Worth76102

500 W. 3rd, Fort Worth76102

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Special Holocaust remembrance program Welcome to the City of Fort Worth - City of Fort Worth

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