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Last Monday evening a large crowd, maybe some 4,000 people, came together at Temple B'nai Jeshurun on 89th St., in Manhattan to mark an event. The twenty fifth anniversary of the "Dialogue" series of the Institute of Adult Jewish Studies, and at the same time, to celebrate the vindication of one rabbi's faith in his city and his neighborhood, the West Side.
"I refused to write off the New York Jewish community." Rabbi William Berkowitz told a caller in his study. People had told him that no one would venture out at night, especially women, into the "jungle" that New York had become.
"The more discouraging they became, the more determined did I become to prove the prophets of doom wrong, he said.
He also refused to listen to those who insisted that adults are too old to be able to learn. "Nothing can be further from the truth," he said pointing out that Gutenberg finished the Mazarin Bible when he was 53, the world's first book printed with movable type; Copernicus discovered the earth's motion around the sun at 56, Thomas Mann wrote "Dr. Faustus" at 73; and Einstein published his field theory when he was 75.
"Too old to learn? Nonsense," Rabbi Berkowitz said.
The adults came in droves -- 2,000 to 4,000 an evening -- and they enjoyed every moment of it, he said. "The number of men and women who come back year after year should be some indication of the value the program has for them." A welcome and encouraging fringe benefit: Sabbath attendance at the synagogue has increased tremendously.
Learning is people-centered
The Dialogue sessions are held eight Monday evenings beginning towards the end of October and run until early in December. Some 250 speakers have appeared on the Dialogue platform since that first evening a quarter of a century ago, and the list of them reads like an elite who's who in Jewish life, in literature, the opera, the stage:
Nahum Goldmann, Abba Eban, Ogden and Mary Reid, Louis Nizer, Richard Tucker, Beverly Sills, Jan Peerce, Freedom Rider Rabbi Walter Plaut, Fannie Hurst, Avraham Harman, Selman Waksman, Cecil Roth, Mordechi Kaplan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Admiral Lewis Strauss, Bella Abzug, some of the stars of "Fiddler on the...