Rising from the flames
Congregation Beth El in Rutherford burns, but community rallies behind displaced rabbi
When a four-alarm fire demolished Congregation Beth El in Rutherford, it took more than a century of memories with it.
The fire broke out in the middle of the night — to be specific, at 2:45 on the morning of Friday, August 8 — in the shul, which was not empty, as most synagogues would be. It included an apartment that housed the Lerman family — Rabbi Yitzchok Lerman, his wife, Bina Lerman, and four of their six children, who range in age from 22 months to 11 years. They were asleep when the fire started. (The family’s two oldest children were in summer camp in Pennsylvania.)
“My wife heard the glass shattering, and we woke up to the fire alarm,” Rabbi Lerman said. “I saw that our windows were orange. We could see the flames. So I shouted to my wife to grab the children, and I ran to get my phone and I called 911.
“We grabbed our children, and we all left together. We ran across the street.
“Then my wife said: ‘The Torah scrolls!’”
The fire moved with both speed and efficiency. The building was completely demolished, and the sifrei Torah it housed were destroyed as well.
“I turned around to get the Torah scrolls, and the entire building was engulfed in flames. It took us about 30 seconds to cross the street. If we had taken 60 seconds, we would have died.
“It was a miracle from HaShem.” From God.
Although authorities do not know what caused the fire yet, a range of factors helped the police chief, John Russo, come to the preliminary conclusion that the cause was “undetermined and not criminal.”
“The investigation is ongoing,” Rabbi Lerman said.
His family is still in shock.
“We are mourning, and we are hurting,” Rabbi Lerman said. “We have to start our lives again from scratch. We all ran out in our pajamas. Neighbors gave us clothes. On Sunday we bought clothes for our kids, and on Monday we got them shoes.
“We literally have nothing except ourselves. Our documents are all gone. Our photos are all gone. I don’t even have my wallet. I don’t have my tefillin. Everything is gone.
“We know where we are going to sleep for the next three nights,” he said on Tuesday morning. “After that, we’ll figure it out. Hopefully, we will have a place for Shabbes. I want the community to be able to gather and mourn. Last Shabbes, we set up a few tents and davened outside. It was very powerful. The community is strong and determined to rebuild better than before.”
He returned to the trauma of the fire. “People don’t understand what ‘zero’ means. We have zero. We are a family of six — of eight, after camp — and we don’t know where we will be sleeping. The school year is starting, and I don’t know where we will be living.”
But really, some things have remained.
The community — both the congregation, whose members come mainly from across southern Bergen County, with a few others coming from Passaic County — and the town have offered material and spiritual support.
“The community has really come together. Klal Yisrael is incredible. People have been reaching out from across the country, and the world,” Rabbi Lerman said.
One of their cars was badly damaged, but the other one is okay; people have been lending the family a car, he added.
As for the neighbors, “they were the first responders,” he continued. “They ran out right away. My wife and children went to a neighbor’s house. People offered us water, food, clothing. One neighbor gave me a shirt and socks.
“And the mayor and council members and the police and fire departments have been extraordinary. They were there within seconds. Rutherford is such a warm community. We all know each other.
“Every Chanukah, we make a gelt drop. The firemen climb up a ladder and throw gelt that we give them. So they all know me and my family. When they came here on Friday morning, they gave me a hug, one burst into tears, and they went to fight the fire.
“That’s what this community is.”
Larry Ames of Fair Lawn is a member of Beth El. “We go there because we love the rabbi,” he said. “He’s amazing.
“We connected with him because my daughter had bought a condo in East Rutherford and she wanted to put up a mezuzah. She went on the internet, looked up synagogues, and saw that there’s only one in Rutherford. Beth El. So she contacted the rabbi, and he said, ‘Of course, I’ll come.’ So he went, they had a nice conversation, he put up the mezuzah, and she called us and said, ‘This is the most wonderful rabbi I’ve ever met. She went to a service, there, and then she said, ‘Why don’t you come?’”
They did, and that was that.
Mr. Ames first heard about the fire at about 5 o’clock on Friday morning. “The rabbi sent out an email to the entire congregation, telling us that there had been a terrible fire but everyone is safe. And an hour later, it was already on the news.
“The rabbi was so positive. He said, ‘We’re strong. We’re tough. We can rebuild.’ He had a service outside that Friday night, right after the fire, in front of the rubble.
“He’s also an Air Force chaplain,” Mr. Ames added.
Adina Podell of Verona is the youngest daughter of Rabbi Lawrence Gerstein and Dr. Sylvianne Lippel Gerstein. Her father was the rabbi of what then was called Temple Beth-El, and his wife was the principal of the shul’s Hebrew school.
Ms. Podell, who is an art therapist, artist, theater director and designer, and costume designer, among many other often but not always related paths, grew up at Beth-El and remembers it with love.
The building — a Victorian house built in 1892, rambling, eccentric in the way those houses tended to be, sitting on a large lot, with odd nooks, unexpected crannies and a somewhat secret entrance that later, when they lived there, only the Gerstein girls, their father, and Mr. Macken, their beloved groundskeeper, knew about— had been the home of a local family headed by Dr. Benedict Wilson.
“It was built at a time when very wealthy people who lived in New York City came out to the country to live.” To those urban escapees, Rutherford was the country. “It had been all farmland,” Ms. Podell said.
The community was very small in 1953, when her father, already a rabbi who’d been an Air Force chaplain in World War II, interviewed for its pulpit. The congregation had just moved into the building; the new rabbi would be the first there.
Ms. Podell’s father was giving his interview sermon on Shabbat when his wife, then pregnant with their second daughter, went into labor. “The police came to the shul to get him,” Ms. Podell said. “They walked in on the service and asked, ‘Is there a Rabbi Gerstein here?’ So he broke Shabbat, and that’s when my sister Aliza was born.”
Despite the drama — or maybe because of it — the congregation offered Rabbi Gerstein the job. “He was exactly what they wanted,” Ms. Podell said. “A young rabbi with a young family, to bring in new young families.”
The Gersteins moved to a house a short walk away with their toddler, Sara, and their newborn, Aliza. Adina was born less than a year later.
Rabbi Gerstein, who was Conservative, was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his wife, who was an educator, earned her Ph.D. in Jewish studies there.
In 1953, when the Gersteins moved to Rutherford, the congregation had just bought the building. The suburbs were booming along with the rest of the postwar economy, and Jews were leaving the cities for those green places. The community in Rutherford bought the house that became its home with the hope that the new-to-them space, which was much larger than where they’d been meeting before, would help the community grow.
It did. “By leaps and bounds,” Ms. Podell said. “Within the first few years, they built a big modern addition, about four times the size of the mansion, with a huge auditorium. It was a dance hall and a theater hall and a catering hall and a community center. It opened up to the Brownies and Girl Scouts in town. There would be galas in the evening there, with groups like the Kiwanis.
“It was the town’s hub,” she continued. “Not only for Jews. For the town. My father would do outreach to the priests and ministers. They would come meet at our home. We’d have big fancy buffets, and we’d laugh at our mom, who’d make things like pineapple upside-down cake, and we kids would try to steal it.”
Despite the synagogue’s firm place in town, it was not immune from the occasional antisemitic incident. Some of them were horrifying. “We had been attacked,” Ms. Podell said. “We had bricks thrown through our windows, with hateful antisemitic messages, when we were kids.
“Once, some KKK members dressed in white came to our house and threw a brick through our window. I was sitting next to my father. We were both reading. My mother was in the kitchen. And then boom!” The brick landed.
“But we’re all really strong,” she said. “We got through it. We can get through anything.”
Ms. Podell remembers the shul as both “serene and exciting,” she said. “There were always cultural events going on. We had plays that we wrote and put on — the adults and the kids together.
“We had a lot of fun.”
There was a gigantic tree on the property, she said. “We attached a sukkah to it. Everything was made of wood in those days, including the sukkah’s walls.”
Like most paradises, this one ended.
The community’s kids — including the Gerstein girls — went off to college, and they came back to visit, but not to live. Rabbi Gerstein, who’d always wanted to make aliyah, did; Dr. Gerstein did not follow him there, and soon the couple divorced. “The congregation dwindled,” Ms. Podell said.
She and her husband and kids moved to Caldwell, where they lived for 40 years, until they moved to Verona. They’re still active members at Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell.
Rhonda Jacobs Kahn of Teaneck grew up in Rutherford. Her family grew up at Beth-El, and she was friends with Ms. Podell’s older sister.
“It was an interesting shul,” she said. “It was Conservative, but the rabbi was very free-thinking. We girls had to go through bar mitzvah training with the boys. Everything that they had to learn we had to learn too.” They were not allowed to read Torah — that was the one exception, back then, to the everybody-must-be-able-to-do-everything-in-public — but girls became b’not mitzvah, in groups.
It’s also an example about how deeply held memories can vary or become fuzzy. Ms. Podell remembers being the first girl, or with her sisters being the first three girls, to become b’nai mitzvah at Beth-El. But Ms. Kahn, who is a year or so older than Ms. Podell, remembers becoming bat mitzvah with her class.
She also remembers that Hebrew school classes were upstairs, in the bedrooms, and she remembers the huge bathrooms with black-and-white tiled floors. “We had free run of the building,” she said.
Like Ms. Podell, Ms. Kahn mentioned the huge tree in the yard — it was a chestnut, she said, and majestic and beautiful — and the sukkah that was built around it. It wasn’t until years later that she realized that it’s unusual to pair sukkot and trees.
Like Ms. Podell, Ms. Kahn has happy memories of Beth-El. The town wasn’t particularly Jewish, she said — she was one of maybe 11 or 12 Jews in her public-school grade — and most of the congregants weren’t particularly observant.
Ms. Kahn got a scholarship to Camp Ramah in Nyack, she said. She was the first kid in Beth-El to go to Ramah, and that took her to a life of observant Conservative Judaism that she might not have found had she grown up elsewhere.
About 35 years ago, as the community changed, Beth-El became modern Orthodox. It struggled but survived.
It was in the news in 2012. That year, a string of attacks against Bergen County synagogues unnerved the Jewish community. Those attacks culminated on January 4, when a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window at Beth El. It set the bedding of Rabbi Nossom Schuman on fire. Rabbi Schuman was in bed at the time.
Rabbi Schuman and his now ex-wife, Pessy Schuman, managed to get their five children out of the house before the fire exploded into something even more dangerous. Two men — Aakash Dalal and Anthony Graziano — were questioned, arrested, tried, and convicted. They’re still in prison, each sentenced to 32 years for terrorism, a concurrent 15 for the arson attacks, and 20, again concurrent, for bias crimes.
The shul was renovated and stayed in use.
“My sister Aliza moved to Israel,” Ms. Podell said. “In 2012, after the firebombing, we went to visit Beth-El. We stood there in the main lobby, with the massive mahogany staircase, and the Tiffany windows, and the ceiling with the white plaster and the angels that we had to cover.
“It was a mess, and it was very painful.”
The Molotov cocktail that landed close to Rabbi Schuman caused heavy damage to the room that once had been Kitah Aleph, the Hebrew school class that her mother had taught, Ms. Podell added.
But the damage was patched up, and the shul limped along for a while.
In 2014 the Lermans moved in, and the congregation moved from Orthodoxy to Chabad chasidim. They head both the shul and Chabad of the Meadowlands, which are intertwined but legally distinct organizations. Chabad of the Meadowlands focuses on outreach, Rabbi Lerman said.
Going back to Beth El once again in 2012 was emotional, Ms. Podell said. So is hearing from so many people she’d known when they all were children. Now, she added; many community members have gotten in touch with her in response to the fire.
That part is good, but it’s been hard, Ms. Podell said. “I had an appointment to go somewhere, and I couldn’t go. I sat in the car and started crying and couldn’t get out. I’ve cried on and off for days. I went to CAI” — Agudath Israel, her shul — “and I just cried.
“There’s no way to rebuild that mansion. I have almost no words for the loss. But the shul is a vision, and it is a vision that will remain beautiful.”
The Lermans have set up a GoFundMe, and the results have been astonishing. By Tuesday, “they already have raised about $200,000,” Mr. Ames said.
To support the Lerman family and help rebuild the shul, go to charidy.com/meadowlandsfire.
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