This essay analyzes Congregation Brith Emeth (1959-1986), whose existence only lasted the tenure of its founding rabbi, and it analyzes the rabbinate of Philip Horowitz (1922-2002), who was not nationally renowned. To the rather obvious question: why bother to study this congregation/rabbi? there are three principal answers. Firstly, the family of the late Rabbi Horowitz insured that this congregation’s legacy would be preserved by cataloguing two major manuscript collections at Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society. Thus, along with the interviews conducted by this author or by a research assistant, and the taped sermons of Rabbi Horowitz, the historian has a rich, yet manageable, body of evidence with which to reconstruct some unique features of this congregation. Secondly, there ought to be, in principle, some merit to studying a congregation/rabbi whose level of success falls within the normal rather than the extraordinary range. Finally, it is rare thing when participants in an institution a quarter-century defunct insist that their story be told. For the bottom line is that the former members of Congregation Brith Emeth (hereafter CBE) maintain that despite its short life, CBE exerted an enormous impact on hundreds of Jewish Clevelanders, many of whom have gone on to lead major agencies, win awards in Jewish education, become activists in the general community, and gone on to successful rabbinates in other cities.

This project was generated, then, by a simple question. How did so much good come from the seemingly unexceptional?

I will attempt to unravel this enigma in three stages by exploring: 1) the nature of the congregation 2) the nature of its central figure, Rabbi Philip Horowitz, and 3) the legacy of its participants, with a distinction between the experiences of the founding generation and that of their children.

I. The Nature of the Congregation

In Cleveland, the decade preceding the founding of Congregation Brith Emeth in 1959 followed the national pattern, when the national Jewish population was still growing and moving rapidly out of the city and into the suburbs. The already venerable and large Reform congregations - Anshe Chesed - Fairmount Temple (founded 1841) and (The Temple - Tifereth Israel (founded 1850) would be joined by two new smaller members of UAHC (now the URJ): Temple Emanu-El in 1947 and Suburban Temple in 1948.

Congregation Brith Emeth, formed a decade after these two, reflected a further population shift east, from the inner-suburbs (the three "Heights" of Greater Cleveland) to the outer suburbs. Although for the first five years of its existence Brith Emeth met weekly at the First Unitarian Church and for the High Holy Days at Byron Junior High School, both on Shaker Boulevard in Shaker Heights, it built what it hoped would be its permanent home more than two miles east in Pepper Pike, Ohio, a fashionable Cleveland exurb.

The population of Jewish Cleveland was still on the rise, and even lightly affiliated Jews belonged to synagogues and spent their charitable dollars establishing Jewish institutions.　

Brith Emeth had members who were lawyers, doctors, and business owners, but also blue-collar Jews and Jews of modest means. Considering its demise, mainly the result of financial stresses, it probably had too few wealthy benefactors on its membership rolls. One last factor helps place CBE among Reform congregations formed in that golden era. Michael Meyer has identified the phenomenon perfectly: CBE had none of the German-Jewish versus Russian-Jewish tensions of older Reform congregations for the simple reason that its founding members were mainly second and third generation descendants of Eastern European Jews. Moreover, in a frankly oligarchic Jewish city, where multi-generational membership and deep pockets count for much, CBE took a decidedly democratic approach as to congregational governance.

The meeting for the creation of a possible new Reform congregation took place on April 30, 1959 at Richmond Elementary School. According to Dr. Jane Avner, the original processor of this archive at the WRHS, eight families had already taken the initiative to encourage Rabbi Horowitz to explore the viability of a new congregation. Since it was locally and nationally recognized that existing Reform congregations in Cleveland had reached their membership capacities, the overwhelming response was not so surprising in retrospect. Nevertheless, Rabbi Horowitz’s daughter, Ilana Ratner, remembers vividly her father’s excitement when he returned home after the meeting and reported the large turnout. The name Brith Emeth (in English "Covenant of Truth") was chosen by Horowitz and congregational president Martin Friedman. By Rosh Hashanah of 1959, Congregation Brith Emeth had 300 member families. This would rise to at least 435 families by the mid-1960s. At Rosh Hashanah 1960, Horowitz could claim 500 students enrolled in the religious school.

The early years had an informal feel to them, more like a havura than the staid Reform Temples of the early 1960s that one conjures up in one’s mind.

By the early 1960s, CBE decided to build a permanent home and enlisted the services of the world-famous architect Edward Durell Stone, designer of the New York Civic Center, the United States Embassy building in New Delhi, and the Huntington Hartford Museum in Lincoln Center According to Clevelander Sheldon Gross, an architect, Stone’s initial response was that CBE could not afford his services. After some cajoling, Stone agreed to help with design, but have locals, including Gross, also a CBE activist, supervise the actual planning. This too turned out to be complicated, since the Pepper Pike City Council was none too eager have a Jewish house of worship in its domain. Several years earlier, Fairmount Temple had won a zoning war with the city of Beachwood. Now, Brith Emeth would also emerge victorious over an opposition animated in part by anti-Semitism.

The JIR, located in the heart of Manhattan, had been founded in 1922 by Rabbi Stephen Wise, at that time America’s most famous rabbi. Although Wise was Reform, most of his faculty members were not, and the overall Jewish atmosphere at JIR certainly differed from Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, founded by Isaac Mayer Wise back in 1875 and led by the anti-Zionist Julian Morgenstern until his retirement in 1947. Although Wise could not attract a permanent faculty – hard to do without adequate funds – some famous figures in American Jewry taught there. By the time Horowitz graduated, the JIR had combined with HUC.

Before founding Brith Emeth, Rabbi Horowitz served as educational director for Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens, New York and as Associate Rabbi and Religious School Director at Anshe Chesed - Fairmount Temple in Cleveland from 1952-1959. Fairmount Temple, though classical Reform in its liturgy, also enjoyed a long tradition of distinguished Hebraists in its employ, particularly in its religious school. Horowitz probably found more like-minded thinkers among his fellow-educators than his congregants. On Yom Kippur in 1955 he sermonized as follows:

Whether Jews in the 1950s wanted to hear that their own Jewish education needed improving may be doubted, but at CBE Horowitz had the opportunity to test his views. In any event, following the tragic death in an auto accident in Spain of the venerated Rabbi Barnett Brickner, who had served the congregation for 33 years, Fairmount Temple gave the top job to Arthur Lelyveld, then head of national Hillel and active in the American Jewish Congress. Lelyveld went on to a distinguished rabbinate, providing American Jewry with an iconic civil right image just behind Abraham Joshua Herschel’s marching arm in arm with Martin Luther King. On a voter registration march, Lelyveld had his head staved in by some toughs. The picture, in all major newspapers, made him a national figure of courage. And indeed, that kind of image, that kind of rabbi, was what a progressive Reform congregation wanted.

Horowitz was, as we shall see, quite interested in civil rights. But his passion was educating Jewish children – always a less noteworthy and remunerative task. Probably, Lelyveld’s national orientation and reputation was not the whole reason he got the nod for Fairmount’s top post. Horowitz had served Fairmount for seven years, long enough to acquire enemies as well as admirers, and the phenomenon known as "no prophet in his/her own city" operates very effectively in rabbinic hires as well.

Like most of liberal rabbis of that era, Horowitz was involved in interfaith dialogues. In 1964 Rav Joseph Soloveitchick, a former teacher of Horowitz’s at Yeshiva College, published "Confrontation," an influential call for Orthodox rabbis to be very circumspect in any such endeavors. Soloveitchick’s essay had a chilling effect within the ranks of Orthodox Rabbis. This issue was a clear dividing line between Orthodoxy and Liberalism in that era, and there is zero doubt as to where Horowitz stood. He spoke at many churches and schools and was honored by Shaker Heights High by giving the commencement benediction, the same year one of his three daughters graduated. He received letters asking about his views on Church–State relations from school officials, ministers and other rabbis.

Horowitz had an interesting career – I do not know how typical of that era. There were several trips to Israel, a visit to Russia and teaching Judaism in Poland. He corresponded with some notable figures in the Jewish world including Maurice Eisendrath (1902-1973), Jacob Raeder Marcus and Lily Montague. Horowitz also led Farm Worker Sabbaths, visited Jewish prisoners in the Chillicothe, Ohio jail (and received some moving thank-you notes for doing so), and would weigh-in on a flurry of local controversies from the pulpit.

Summers were time off, often spent at Camp Kutz, where Horowitz served as rabbi-in-residence. Terry Pollack, a teacher at Shaker Heights High, television personality, and former director of the ADL’s "World of Difference" program, also led the CBE youth group and taught in the CBE religious school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He remembers how Horowitz would mesmerize campers with stories from the Hasidic masters and of his struggles at Americanization.

Horowitz also taught at local colleges, including John Carroll University, which has a long-standing tradition of offering classes in Judaic studies. He was Visiting Professor of Theology 1968-1978, and must have taught hundreds of JCU’s predominantly Catholic population.

Horowitz certainly had a global view of the Jewish condition and lobbied on behalf of Soviet Jewry, the "Jews of Silence." Although it seems hard to believe today, American Jews needed plenty of cajoling to aggressively demand freedom for this oppressed Jewry, most particularly the right to emigrate. The Cleveland campaign for freeing Soviet Jewry was a grass-roots initiative started by some NASA scientists on Cleveland’s West Side, the wrong end of town from a Jewish perspective. Horowitz seems to have been the only rabbi to be an initial signatory on what became a slew of publications calling the oppression of Soviet Jews to the attention of the Cleveland Jewish Federation, and ultimately to national prominence. Their activism on Soviet Jewry’s behalf began in the early 1960s and plenty of Horowitz’s Friday night sermons in these years were devoted to publicizing this cause. "Silence on the Soviets" (December 15, 1963) was vintage Horowitz — the 14-page sermon was part legal brief, part call to action.

Like his stand on unilateral disarmament, his extreme anti-John Birch and anti-HUAC/anti-McCarthy jeremiads, I suspect some of his congregants must have found Horowitz too political. Rosh Hashanah sermon 1965 — Civil Rights; Rosh Hashanah sermon 1968 — Vietnam; most years, Horowitz used his High Holy Day sermons to address the questions of the day. Like all of his sermons, including the October 17,1969 "Is the Negro Equal?" the aforementioned show Horowitz a careful student of the issue, usually marshaling statistical evidence, historical context and traditional Jewish sources. This seems almost to have been the typical Horowitz pattern, although I have no indication that he thought of it as a sermonic "formula."

At the end of the day, though, Horowitz was a "stay at home rabbi" whose magic was performed within the circular walls of the Temple in the Round. Horowitz gave a lot and demanded a lot. He enjoyed his bima and sometimes spoke at too great a length (what good rabbi doesn’t), but commanded enormous loyalty from his congregants. His first wife, Sophie Horowitz, was not a Type-A rebbetzin. Their marriage, between a comfortable German Jew (Phil) and a poor Russian Jew (Sophie), was what was once considered an intermarriage in Jewish circles. Gracious and beautiful, she stayed largely in the background, despite being active in the Sisterhood and despite the proto-feminist character of the religious school (the couple, after all, had three daughters and no sons).

A rabbi once told me that there were ‘cat rabbis’ and ‘dog rabbis’ – the quiet introspective listeners, and the boisterous, know everybody by first-name talkers. In public, at least, Horowitz fell into the latter category, and most congregants remember a leader who always had a quip, a word of greeting, or a joke readily at hand. But those closest to Horowitz remember an introspective man who liked his "quiet time." Still others remember a rabbi with pastoral abilities – not always the case in rabbis who came up in the 1940s-1950s, who rarely received formal training in counseling, although, increasingly in this era, congregants leaned upon the rabbi for such services.

Horowitz put his early immersion in Jewish sources to good use. We possess letters in his hand in both Yiddish and Hebrew, though the language of his boyhood home was probably a Yiddish-inflected German. His sermons and letters display profound learning and are often crabbed with biblical and rabbinic phrases in his own hand, usually deployed with an interesting twist. He studied traditional sources regularly, often by himself, and then, later in his career, with Rabbi Stanley Schachter, Rabbi Emeritus of the large Conservative Synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun. As Schachter recounted, he and Horowitz shared an enjoyment both of the minute analysis of the argument "yeshiva-style learning" combined with sudden lurches into grand areas of theology, psychology, and religion.

Early in his career, Horowitz officiated at intermarriages, but as he became more displeased with results (plenty of marital strife and plenty of broken promises about raising children Jewish), he stopped doing so. In 1965 Horowitz was still delivering sermons stressing the importance of both halves of an intermarriage attending "choosing Judaism" classes. By the late 1970s we have letters from Horowitz politely, but firmly explaining that he did not conduct intermarriage. In this changed attitude, Horowitz was not alone. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbinical assembly, debated intermarriage and came down in 1973 with statement discouraging, though not banning, the practice.

His letters to and from Jacob Raeder Marcus, the founder of American Jewish historiography as a serious discipline, are side-splitting funny, as each man tried to out-do the other in a melitzah—the practice of writing a letter by stringing together citations from Bible and rabbinic literature.

Given his traditional upbringing and the growing willingness of Reform congregations to experiment with ritual, it comes as no surprise that Horowitz proposed a Reform Shulchan Arukh, law-code, in a Yom Kippur sermon. The sermon, by the way, provides a good indication of why some interviewees felt that Horowitz spoke above their heads—the sermon runs eighteen pages, involves statistical evidence, presumes a thorough knowledge of Jewish history and sources, and culminates in the following tripartite acronym, presumably echoing the three-fold division of Tanakh (The Shulchan Arukh is organized into four principal parts):

Horowitz was fond of coining these acronyms and also of coining gematriyah, the playful assignation of meaning based on the numerical value assigned every Hebrew letter and word. I do not know if his congregants enjoyed these displays or were simply baffled by them, but most of my interviewees expressed pride in having a learned rabbi, who they characterized, somewhat unfairly on this point, as "not really Reform." (The Silvers father and son were both very capable Judaic scholars by any measure – I am less familiar with the Jewish learning of other Cleveland rabbis of that era.)

Reading Rabbi Horowitz’s sermons was a good reminder that even golden eras have ominous clouds. The specter of nuclear annihilation was fading by the end of Rabbi Horowitz’s tenure, but the core of it took place during era of under-the-desk nuclear drills, an exercise presumably making it easier for surviving, irradiated janitors to sweep up human remains. Horowitz proposed unilateral disarmament, which must have been unpopular with his congregants and Cleveland Jewry, but he argued it just the same. In an undated Yom Kippur sermon, Horowitz took the Book of Jonah to press his case for world peace. The sermon ends on a note that combined the Reform Mission ideology with a call for activism:

Civil rights was, sometimes literally, a burning issue, and though he did not bear bloody bandages on his head as did Arthur Lelyveld, or march with Dr. King as did A. J. Heschel, Horowitz spoke forthrightly about equal rights for Negroes and CBE adopted a lengthy statement supporting equal treatment in the workplace, entitled "Importance of religion in Everyday Life: Program for Racial Justice."