[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 40 (Friday, March 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3480-S3483]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                            TEMPLE EMANU-EL

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this spring Temple Emanu-El in 
New York City celebrates its sesquicentennial. This vibrant house of 
worship is both the largest Jewish congregation in the world and the 
fountainhead of America Reform Judaism.
  Dr. Ronald Sobel, Temple Emanu-El's distinguished senior rabbi, has 
prepared a brief history of this dynamic temple which I believe will be 
of great interest to Members of the Senate. I ask that this history of 
Temple Emanu-El be printed in the Record.
  The history follows:
               The Congregation: A Historical Perspective

                 (By Dr. Ronald B. Sobel, Senior Rabbi)

       The Jewish historical experience is inextricably interwoven 
     with the history of Western civilization. It is the story of 
     a minority interacting reciprocally with large complex 
     societies and cultures. Therefore, unlike the history of any 
     other people or civilization, the historical experience of 
     the Jewish people cannot be viewed or analyzed in isolation. 
     In this respect there are no historical analogs.
       From the dawn of civilization in the ancient Near East to 
     the post-industrial era of our own time, Jews have been a 
     part of and remained apart from each circumstance encountered 
     in history. They have created responsive forms appropriate to 
     the cultures and societies in which they have lived 
     throughout the globe for almost four thousand years. The 
     Jewish people became experts in creative adaptation.
       However, there was and remains a single constant amid the 
     bewildering responses to changing historical circumstances. 
     The constant is a concept of unity, the affirmation that God 
     is One and omnipotent. Commitment to this idea of oneness in 
     nature and human nature did not breed repetitive conformity 
     century after century, but rather produced creative diversity 
     generation after generation. The concept of God's unity 
     allowed the Jewish people to live, survive, and create amid 
     changing historical realities; the concept of unity allowed 
     for the diversity necessary for survival. It was and remains 
     the mortar with which the Jewish people have built their many 
     houses among many peoples.
       The process of Jewish adaptation to the society and culture 
     of the United States has been defined within the broader 
     phenomenon known as ``Americanization.'' It was a complex 
     process and the many methodologies employed reflect the 
     diversities of Jewish life. The Jews who came to the United 
     States as immigrants defined their destiny as inseparably 
     bound to the well-being of all Americans. They became 
     passionate advocates of the American experiment in democracy.
       Though the first Jews to arrive on these shores came as 
     early as 1654, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century 
     that sufficient numbers of Jewish immigrants were present to 
     allow the forms and shapes of Americanization to emerge. It 
     was during that time that Temple Emanu-El was founded. The 
     Jews who established Emanu-El, and those who joined their 
     ranks during the first decades of the Congregation's 
     existence, were immigrants from Germany who sought to 
     reorient themselves by adapting their individual lives and 
     collective institutions to the new environment of American 
     civilization. The congregation they created and the 
     lifestyles they fashioned were only the most recent chapter 
     in a long history of creative adaptation; what they 
     accomplished was nothing new in the Jewish historical 
     experience.
       From the very beginning the United States provided a polity 
     in which the freest Jewish community the world has ever known 
     was able to develop and grow. It was, and remains, within 
     this unique experiment in democracy that Temple Emanu-El 
     originated and subsequently flowered to world prominence.
       It is useful to understand the nature of Western European 
     immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century in 
     general, and German Jewish immigration in particular, to 
     grasp fully the origins of Temple Emanu-El. The conservative 
     reactions that dominated Europe following the final defeat of 
     Napoleon created a climate wherein many of the dreams set in 
     motion by the Emancipation and the French Revolution were 
     considerably constrained. The climate of rigid conservatism 
     inhibited liberal growth in religion, in politics, and in the 
     social sphere. After unsuccessful attempts to change that 
     conservative trend, many liberals, finding no future in 
     Europe, turned to America. They came to these shores with the 
     hope and dream that in this land the preciousness of 
     personality would be cherished and the dignity of 
     individuality honored. Among those who came from Western 
     Europe in the late 1830s were the men and women who would 
     soon found Temple Emanu-El.
       In September 1884, a ``cultus verein'' (cultural society) 
     was established on New York's 
     [[Page S3481]] Lower East Side, and it was out of that 
     cultural society that Emanu-El had its origins. In April 
     1845, thirty-three members of the society decided to 
     establish a Reform congregation.
       They were not particularly conversant with Reform Judaism 
     and were only vaguely aware of its origins in their native 
     Germany. Seeking advice, they wrote first to Congregation 
     Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, which in 1824 was 
     the first Reform congregation established in the United 
     States; they also wrote to the leaders of the Har Sinai 
     Congregation in Baltimore, Reform Judaism's second 
     congregation in America, which was founded in 1843. They 
     received some responses and proceeded to establish their own 
     congregation, which they called Temple Emanu-El.
       When they banded together as a religious community it was 
     simultaneously the first in New York to be established as a 
     Reform congregation and the third such Liberal congregation 
     in America. It is of some interest to note that the use of 
     the word ``Emanu-El'' as the name of a congregation is the 
     first time in history that we know of that a Jewish 
     congregation adopted this word as a designation. By choosing 
     ``Emanu-El,'' which means ``God is with us,'' the founders 
     were not doubt reflecting their hopes that God would be with 
     them as they came to this new land, and as they put down 
     their roots here.
       Their spiritual hopes knew no bounds, but their material 
     resources were limited. Thus the first place of worship was a 
     rented room on the second floor of a private dwelling at the 
     corner of Grand and Clinton streets. The records indicate 
     that at the organizing meeting in 1845, the men present 
     contributed a total of less than thirty dollars, and with 
     that modest sum began the Congregation. The founders quickly 
     outgrew that rented room, and in 1848 they moved to Chrystie 
     Street, a few blocks west of their original location. The 
     Congregation was still limited by its financial resources and 
     did not possess the means to erect its own synagogue. By 
     necessity, therefore, they purchased an existant building, 
     which had previously been used as a methodist church, and 
     with some changes transformed it for Jewish worship and 
     communal meetings.
       In the first few years, Temple Emanu-El's growth, through 
     not dramatic, was steady, and the members remained modest of 
     means. Yet there was sufficient development that by 1854 the 
     Congregation felt the need to move again, this time northwest 
     to Twelfth Street near Fourth Avenue. As the general 
     population in Manhattan was moving uptown so too was the 
     Jewish population, and thus inevitably the members of Emanu-
     El as well. Again unable to build on their own, they bought a 
     structure that had been a Baptist church and refurbished it 
     as a synagogue. However, their dreams of building a great 
     temple were neither to be denied nor postponed to some 
     distant future. In 1868, three years after the conclusion of 
     the Civil War and twenty-three years after the final meeting 
     of the ``cultus verein,'' the members of Congregation Emanu-
     El were in a position to erect an imposing sanctuary at the 
     northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, 
     which a critic of the time described as ``the finest example 
     of Moorish architecture in the Western world.'' That 
     religious home was to remain the Congregation's place of 
     worship until the latter part of 1927, when construction of 
     the present edifice began.
       It is remarkable that within a span shorter than twenty-
     five years the Congregation that had begun with so few in 
     number and so little in material means was able to erect a 
     building that was judged an architectural
      wonder not only by the Jewish world but also by the people 
     of the city of New York. The first quarter century of the 
     Congregation's history may be viewed as a microcosm of the 
     success of the Western European immigrant in general, and 
     of the German Jewish immigrant in particular.
       The first rabbi to serve Temple Emanu-El was Dr. Leo 
     Merzbacher. Little is known about him, but it seems probable 
     that he was the first ordained rabbi to serve a congregation 
     in New York. Dr. Merzbacher led the Congregation in its 
     earliest encounters with Reform Jewish philosophy and 
     practice and authored one of the first Reform prayer books in 
     America. Following his death in 1856, he was succeeded by Dr. 
     Samuel Adler, who by that time had already achieved a 
     reputation as one of the great philosophical and theological 
     leaders of the Reform movement in Germany. The first three 
     decades of the Congregation's history were thus marked by 
     significant radical reforms in liturgy, theology, and 
     practice. But after 1875, having achieved great eminence, the 
     Congregation tended to become somewhat more conservative. 
     Innovations, ritual changes, and prayer book adaptations 
     thereafter came slowly. Dr. Adler preached in German, as had 
     Dr. Merzbacher before him, and that language adequately 
     served the needs of the first generation of Temple Emanu-El's 
     members. However, it did not serve the needs of the founders' 
     children, whose principal language was English, and thus it 
     was inevitable that this second generation expressed a desire 
     for an English-speaking preacher. That need was satisfied 
     with the election of Emanu-El's third rabbi, Dr. Gustav 
     Gottheil. Although born in Germany, Dr. Gottheil was fluent 
     in English, having served a Liberal congregation in 
     Manchester, England.
       It is not without significance that Emanu-El's first three 
     rabbis were trained in Europe, a circumstance necessitated by 
     the fact that the American Jewish community had not yet been 
     able to establish a successful rabbinic seminary. (However, 
     it was not long thereafter that the need for such an 
     institution was satisfied, two years following Gottheil's 
     arrival in New York, Isaac Mayer Wise created the Hebrew 
     Union College in Cincinnati.) Dr. Gottheil served the 
     congregation until 1900 and advanced the cause of Reform 
     Jewish life in several important ways: he was an innovator in 
     liturgy, particularly by his authorship of a hymnbook, and he 
     was one of the earliest rabbis in the United States to 
     consciously reach out to the Christian community, and his 
     rabbinate witnessed the beginnings of the interfaith 
     movement. Better understanding between Christians and Jews 
     has been an important element in the experience of the 
     American Jewish community, and it significantly began at 
     Temple Emanu-El. Dr. Joseph Silverman, who joined the 
     rabbinic staff in 1888 as Dr. Gottheil's assistant, was the 
     first American-born rabbi to serve in New York and was a 
     member of the second graduating class of Hebrew Union 
     College.
       In 1895, amid great joy and elaborate ceremony, the 
     Congregation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its 
     founding. On that occasion the city's most prominent rabbis, 
     Christian clergyman, educators, and political figures were 
     present. Their participation and the wide press coverage 
     reporting the Golden Jubilee celebration reflected the 
     enormous growth of Temple Emanu-El. A congregation that had 
     begun so humbly on the Lower East Side was now, a half 
     century later,
      being recognized as among the most important religious 
     institutions in the city.
       Gottheil's successor was Dr. Judah Leon Magnes, who was 
     also American born and a graduate of Hebrew Union College. 
     Magnes was an active member of the nascent Zionist movement 
     and also played an important role in bridging the cultural 
     diversities that separated the Jewish community of German 
     origin from those who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. 
     Magnes remained at Emanu-El only a few years and later became 
     the first president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 
     1912, the Congregation called the scholarly Dr. Hyman G. 
     Enelow to the pulpit. His contributions to higher Jewish 
     learning were profound, and his writings are still studied by 
     scholars all over the world.
       When Temple Emanu-El was founded in 1845 there were 
     approximately fifteen thousand Jews in the United States. 
     Thirty-five years later that number had grown to a quarter of 
     a million. In 1881, following the assassination of Czar 
     Alexander II, dread pogroms were unleashed throughout most of 
     Eastern Europe, and with them a great wave of immigration to 
     America began as Jews fled from physical 
     persecution, political oppression, and economic hardship. 
     During the next forty years the Jewish population in the 
     United States increased by an additional two-and-a-half-
     million men, women, and children.
       Recognizing their responsibilities by remaining receptive 
     to a centuries-old Jewish tradition that held that one must 
     ``aid the poor, care for the sick, teach the ignorant, and 
     extend a helping hand to those who have lost their way in the 
     world,'' the members and leaders of Temple Emanu-El responded 
     generously and creatively to the profound poverty of their 
     Jewish brethren who had emigrated to New York from Eastern 
     Europe during this forty-year period. The wealth and talent 
     of the uptown German Jews who worshiped at Emanu-El were 
     generously bestowed upon the newly arrived Russian Jews. 
     (However, even prior to this period of massive immigration, 
     the Congregation had established its own tradition of 
     philanthropic largesse.)
       Although the members of Temple Emanu-El may have felt a 
     sense of noblesse oblige in the performance of their 
     charitable activities, and perhaps their efforts were largely 
     directed toward Americanizing their ``poor cousins'' in order 
     to reinforce their own standing in society, nevertheless what 
     they and other German Jews in America did was nothing short 
     of creating private institutions of philanthropy and 
     education such as no
      community, Jewish or non-Jewish, had ever done before in 
     history. The Temple and its leaders set an example to a 
     world willing to learn about caring, and that caring 
     including concern for non-Jews as well as Jews.
       In 1920, the Congregation celebrated its seventy-fifth 
     anniversary, again with great joy, but this time combined 
     with a thanksgiving celebrating the recent American victory 
     at the end of World War I. The fact that the United States 
     had been at war with Germany caused somewhat of an identity 
     crisis for many Americans of German origin, including some 
     members of Temple Emanu-El. (There were also ambivalent 
     feelings compounded by the fact that Russia, which had been 
     our ally in the war, was the country that, during the 
     previous four decades, was responsible for inflicting such 
     horrible brutality upon the Jewish people.) However, the war 
     was over, the Allies were victorious, and Emanu-El celebrated 
     its anniversary in an exaltation of freedom.
       By the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth 
     century those Jews who had more recently arrived from Eastern 
     Europe were beginning to settle into American life, to define 
     themselves, and to make their own place in their new land of 
     freedom. Less and less were they in need of the kind of 
     assistance they had received for so long from the German 
     Jews. And thus Emanu-El and its membership were now able to 
     begin to address 
     [[Page S3482]] their own inner needs. In the 1920s a call for 
     spiritual renewal went forth from the pulpit, and what 
     followed was the establishment of many of the auxiliary 
     organizations and activities that continue to this day to 
     give so much vitality and meaning to the Congregation's 
     programs and activities. It is also of interest to note that 
     by the early 1920s some Eastern Europeans were beginning to 
     join the Temple. A generation later, by the conclusion of 
     World War II, the majority of the Congregation's members were 
     men and women who traced their ancestry to either parents or 
     grandparents of Eastern European rather than Western European 
     origin.
       In 1868, when the Congregation dedicated its Temple, Forty-
     third Street and Fifth Avenue was at the center of the most 
     elegant residential section of the city. However, by the mid-
     1920s that part of Fifth Avenue and its surrounding streets 
     had undergone a radical transformation. What had been for so 
     long quietly residential had now become noisily commercial, 
     so much so that on Saturday mornings worshipers found it 
     difficult to pray over the cacophony coming from the adjacent 
     streets. Furthermore, until the early 1900s the majority of 
     the Congregation's members lived in the immediate vicinity of 
     the Temple, but by the 1920s the overwhelming majority were 
     residing much farther north, on the Upper West Side as well 
     as the Upper East Side. While the old building at Forty-third 
     Street remained architecturally beautiful, it had serious 
     functional problems. The student body in the Religious School 
     was growing in size, and the classrooms were inadequate. 
     There were insufficient meeting rooms to house the expanding 
     programs of the Temple. Following several years of debate and 
     consideration, the Congregation, upon the recommendation of 
     its respected president, Louis Marshall, purchased property 
     on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth 
     Street. A better location could not have been chosen. The 
     assumption was then, and the reality today remains, that so 
     long as there is a Central Park, this part of Fifth Avenue 
     would be exclusively residential in character.
       It was also in the late twenties that the second most 
     influential Reform congregation in New York, Temple Beth-El 
     (House of God) consolidated with Emanu-El. Possessor of its 
     own distinguished history, Temple Beth-El had been 
     established in 1874 through the amalgamation of two earlier 
     congregations, Anshe Chesed (Men of Mercy) and Adas Jeshurun 
     (Congregation of Israel). Its first rabbi was Dr. David 
     Einhorn, one of the most important architects of nineteenth-
     century Reform Jewish thought. He was succeeded by the 
     equally brilliant theologian Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, who left 
     the pulpit of Beth-El in 1903 to become president of Hebrew 
     Union College in Cincinnati.
       The newly merged congregations combined rabbinic resources 
     as well as lay brilliance into one new great Congregation. 
     The people of Emanu-El left Forty-third Street in 1927, and 
     during the years that it took
      to erect the new building, they worshiped at the handsome 
     Temple Beth-El, which stood at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-
     sixth Street.
       The first religious service at the new Temple at Fifth 
     Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street was conducted in September 
     1929; sadly, that gathering was occasioned by the death of 
     Louis Marshall, the man who perhaps more than any other was 
     responsible for the building of the great new Temple. A few 
     weeks later, services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were 
     conducted. How fortuitous it was that the members of the 
     Congregation decided to build and create this magnificent 
     Temple when they did, for had they delayed, for whatever 
     reason, in all probability this gloriously magnificent 
     edifice that now stands as Temple Emanu-El would probably 
     never have been built. In the latter part of October 1929 the 
     stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began.
       The Temple was formally dedicated in January 1930 in a 
     ceremony presided over by the rabbis of the Congregation: the 
     great orator Dr. Hathan Krass, who had come to Temple Emanu-
     El in 1923; Dr. Hyman G. Enelow, the gentle scholar who had 
     been with the Congregation since 1912; and the equally 
     brilliant scholar Dr. Samuel Schulman, who had been Senior 
     Rabbi of Temple Beth-El. The newly elected President of the 
     Congregation was the Honorable Irving Lehman, Judge of the 
     New York State Court of Appeals (and Chief Judge from 1940 
     onward), whose family had been affiliated with the 
     Congregation since the 1870s.
       Sharply contrasting moods characterized the decade and a 
     half that rounded out Temple Emanu-El's first hundred years. 
     On April 4, 1945, the Congregation entered the majestic 
     Sanctuary for a Service of Rededication, climaxing seven 
     months of Centenary Celebration. It was a decade and a half 
     that began with hope and ended with promise, while the 
     interval was filled with crisis and horror, sorrow and 
     tragedy, such as the human family had never before endured. 
     The Jewish people, schooled in centuries of persecution, were 
     made the victims of an ancient hatred welded to modern 
     technology, and by the time Nazism was finally destroyed by 
     the Allied victory, the virtual annihilation of European 
     Jewry had come to pass. The fortunate few who escaped to 
     America were welcomed to Temple Emanu-El with the same 
     attention and devotion shown by an earlier generation to 
     those who had fled the tyranny of Czarist Russia.
       As a result of the economic catastrophe precipitated by the 
     Depression, the membership of the Congregation was 
     significantly diminished. However, to the credit of the Broad 
     and the congregants of Emanu-El, in the face of burdensome 
     debt they wholeheartedly assumed social responsibility for 
     those beyond the precincts of the Temple. Both to the needs 
     of the refugees from Hitlerism and the call for patriotic 
     service during the war, Temple Emanu-El's men and women 
     responded generously and willingly. In both areas they 
     established and maintained programs of excellence.
       During 1934 Rabbis Enelow, Krass, and Schulman retired, and 
     Dr. Samuel H. Goldenson was selected as their successor. A 
     gentle man, and a champion of Classical Reform, Dr. Goldenson 
     brought to the rabbinate of Emanu-El a spirit of saintliness. 
     Two years previously, in 1932, the ministry of Dr. Nathan A. 
     Perilman had begun; he came to the Congregation with the
      expectation of staying only six months, but remained for 
     forty-one-and-a-half years, making his rabbinate the 
     longest active service in the Congregation's history. Upon 
     the retirement of Dr. Goldenson in 1948, Dr. Julius Mark 
     was elected the Temple's Senior Rabbi. Dr. Mark had won 
     wide recognition for the important role that he played as 
     a Navy Chaplain during World War II. At the time of Dr. 
     Mark's election, Dr. Perilman was made Rabbi of the 
     Congregation.
       The years following World War II saw an enormous growth in 
     the Temple's membership. The 1950s were characterized by an 
     age of significant revival in religious institutions, and the 
     Congregation grew wondrously as America was able again to 
     settle down to a peacetime environment. New programs were 
     introduced, old programs were revitalized, and adult-
     education offerings were significantly expanded. After twenty 
     distinguished years, Dr. Mark retired in 1968 and was 
     succeeded as Senior Rabbi by Dr. Perilman, who remained with 
     the Congregation for an additional five-and-a-half years, 
     retiring at the end of 1973.
       Dr. Perilman was then succeeded by Dr. Ronald B. Sobel, who 
     had come to Temple Emanu-El as Assistant Rabbi immediately 
     following his ordination at Hebrew Union College in 1962. 
     When elected Senior Rabbi at the end of 1973, Dr. Sobel was 
     the youngest spiritual leader ever elected by the 
     Congregation. Today he is assisted by two longtime 
     associates, Rabbi David M. Posner and Rabbi Richard S. 
     Chapin.
       The 1970s and the 1980s have continued to witness further 
     growth in the Congregation, so much so that today Temple 
     Emanu-El is world Jewry's most prominent house of worship. 
     Physically it is the largest Jewish synagogue in the world, 
     and the size of its membership also makes it the largest 
     Reform congregation in the world. Innovative programs 
     continue to be introduced and older programs are expanded as 
     the members of the Congregation reach out more and more to 
     the Jewish world in New York and beyond and to the other 
     communities of which we are a part.
       The past is always prelude to the present, the present 
     forever a preparation for the future. In 1995 the
      Congregation will celebrate its one hundred fiftieth 
     anniversary. We have every expectation and hope that 
     Emanu-El will continue to be a beacon and a pride to world 
     Jewry.
       Although much has changed in the near century and a half 
     since the Congregation was founded at Grand and Clinton 
     streets, the members of Temple Emanu-El continue to be 
     fundamentally committed to a faith that proclaims:
       First, instead of one fixed and changeless revelation from 
     God to Moses at Sinai, the Jewish people have been heir to a 
     progressive revelation, which continues throughout history in 
     the discoveries of science and in the insights of wise, 
     sensitive human souls. The Bible and Talmud are valuable 
     permanent records of earlier and decisive stages in this 
     process. But, since revelation comes from God through human 
     beings, all the documents of revelation are a mixture of the 
     divine and the human, the eternally valid as well as the 
     temporary and transient. Judasiam is a living, growing way of 
     life, evolving gradually from earlier and more primitive 
     forms to the full flowering of its universal spiritual 
     message.
       Second, central and changeless is the belief in the one and 
     holy God, who is to be served through righteousness and 
     mercy. God's law is basically ethical. Ritual and ceremony, 
     as the prophets declared long ago, are not the essence of 
     religion. Moreover, historical study reveals that ceremonial 
     practice has been constantly subject to change. Indeed, 
     ritual is not without value; it is a means of making 
     religious truth more vivid and inspiring to the worshiper. 
     But the forms are not sacrosanct. If they fail to instruct 
     and uplift those who practice them, they may be modified or 
     discarded.
       Third, the universal ethical aspect of Judaism must forever 
     remain primary in the consciousness of the Jewish people. 
     Therefore, the members of Temple Emanu-El do not hope for the 
     coming of a personal Messiah to usher in a period of national 
     restoration, but rather look forward with anticipation to a 
     universal messianic era for all humanity. Neither the 
     establishment of a nation-state in the ancient homeland, nor 
     the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple, nor the 
     reinstitution of the sacrificial cult are necessary 
     prerequisites for the realization of the messianic dream. 
     Thus, we believe that Jews are, and should remain, citizens 
     of the various nations in which they live.
       [[Page S3483]] Fourth, the survival of the Jewish people as 
     a religious group is a sacred and urgent obligation. The 
     Jewish people have a mission to humankind, a mission ordained 
     of God and proclaimed by the prophets of ancient Israel. This 
     mission requires that the people born in, or adopted into, 
     the Covenant of Abraham must persuade humankind through 
     teaching and example that the One and Only God can be 
     worshiped in holiness only as His children serve each other 
     in love. To acknowledge God's unity requires obedience to, 
     and reverence for, His ethical mandates and moral 
     imperatives. The mission of Israel will not have been 
     fulfilled until righteousness and peace prevail everywhere 
     for everyone. Until that great messianic fulfillment, the 
     Jewish people must survive as a ``kingdom of priests'' 
     dedicated to the service of God and humanity.
       These were the principles of faith proclaimed by the 
     founders of Congregation Emanu-El in 1845; they remain the 
     principles to which this generation of Temple Emanu-El 
     constantly rededicates itself.
       The story of Temple Emanu-El is the history of successful 
     Americanization. From 1845 to the present the members of the 
     Congregation have authorized a new chapter in the chronicle 
     of Jewish creative adaptation. Their lives have served as an 
     enviable model of what the Jew could strive to become, and 
     continue to be, in the United States.
     

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