Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on June 26, 2017

Leon Resnick, 94, was born a year after the synagogue was built and had his bar mitzvah there.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. The stark building is usually closed tight, but on Sunday balloonsdanced on their strings, music poured from open doors and families came and went,although one family's departure was delayed by the difficulty of getting two childrenout of a tree.

Music and people filled the Sons of Jacob Synagogue during an open house from noon to 3 p.m. Sunday. Regarded as a jewel by groups devoted to preserving Providence architecture, the Smith Hill community and the state's Jewish history, the synagogue at 24 Douglas Ave. is the home of the newly formed Rhode Island Jewish Museum.

Although services are still held inthe basement, where the congregation began meeting in 1906 while they saved up to build the sanctuary, the sanctuary has gone unused for at least a decade, even for the High Holidays.

But the lights were on Sunday as a violinist and two guitarists, one of whom occasionally switched to clarinet, played klezmer music as nearly 400 people sat, visited or roamed around to admire the murals, the trompe-loeil paintings that made wood look like marble or velvet, the chandelier and star-shaped lights, the names written in gold.

One man was surprised to find his great-grandfather's name on a plaque. "I didn't know this is where he went," said Farrel Klein, adding that it made sense because his great grandfather's farm was just down the street.

The Sons of Jacob Synagogue once presided over a vibrant village of houses and shops,bakeries, meat markets and delis. In fact, the refreshments for Leon Resnick's bar mitzvah came from those shops, the 94-year-old said Sunday. Now the village is gone, replaced by a highway interchange and the convergence of Routes 95 and 146. And efforts are under way to preserve the building that testifies to the progress of Jewish families in Rhode Island.

Outside the second-floor sanctuary, Resnick sat near his father's name on the list of members who helped build it in 1922, the year before he was born. He and three Resnick cousins are named on another list, just inside the sanctuary, of members who fought in World War II.

In those days, women and girls sat in the balcony, always with a hat or bow covering their heads, said Joan Tebrow, 70, who remembered sitting up there with her mother, attending Hebrew school and "running around all the different stairwells," where nooks and crannies offered "a lot of places to hide."

Larry Parness, 66, has memories of the synagogue "going back my whole life." His father let him and his brother sit in the main sanctuary, he said, but sat between them. "I remember being pinched by my father if I misbehaved during the service."

Rabbi Yossi Laufer observed that the open house was well-timed, because witnesses to the synagogue's history were able to attend.

"Twenty years from now, they'd be gone," he said.

dnaylor@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7411

On Twitter: @donita22

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Open house at Smith Hill synagogue draws hundreds - The Providence Journal

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