Not too many grandfathers have traveled from Maine to be the sandek (godfather) at their grandson’s brit milah in Yeroham.
But my father, Harold Silverman, from Calais, Maine, journeyed to Israel with my mom in late April to do just that. Amidst the COVID-19 regulations and constant communication with the Israeli consulate in Boston to get entrance approval, my parents were able to get to Israel a day before I gave birth to their first grandson.
For my father, 87, the brit was the moment he had been looking forward to after a cold Maine winter on the St. Croix River, filled with snow flurries and coronavirus worries.
“It seemed like the clock stopped ticking the moment I got to hold my grandson,” my father said of the brit, which was a small family affair, held in our home in Yeroham.
While my father is no stranger to Judaism’s traditions, having married my religious mother nearly 40 years ago and adopting a religious lifestyle ever since, he had never heard of the term sandek before.
“I didn’t even know what a sandek was until I got to be one,” explained my father, a former Maine state senator, in his Downeast Maine accent.
While growing up in Calais, a small town on the Canadian border, there were many things about Judaism that my father didn’t know. Indeed, the most significant Jewish event of his childhood was his bar mitzvah celebration in the local town synagogue, having been raised in a secular Jewish household that saw religion as something medieval.
His parents, Herman and Ada Silverman, were both born in Maine and moved to Calais after they were married and my grandfather opened a successful sporting goods store. Herman was a former mathematics instructor at the University of Maine in Orono, while Ada taught German at the same university. Ada came from the Cohen family, who had lived in Bangor, Maine since 1880, seeking a more quiet life after escaping the pogroms in Lithuania. Both came from fairly religious backgrounds but adopted a secular approach to life. Although Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Passover were part of my dad’s childhood, that was about it for Judaism. Fishing, hunting, camping, working the blueberry fields and in his father’s store made up the central landscape of his childhood.
Except for the bar mitzvah. Over 74 years ago, my father’s bar mitzvah celebration left an impression on him, just as fulfilling his recent role as sandek of his Israeli grandson impressed him.
My father likes to reminisce about the past and it was his bar mitzvah experience in small-town Maine that came up in a recent conversation following the brit.
“I spent almost two years studying the Torah readings for my bar mitzvah with the rabbi of our town’s synagogue, Rabbi Jacob Kalcheim,” he told me. “ The rabbi was a good teacher but he had to start with the basics. It took me a while to master the Hebrew letters; aleph, bet, gimel and so on. Then I had to learn to read the text with the melody. I didn’t understand anything that I was saying. ”
The only Jewish boy in his grade at school at the time, my father would spend a few hours each week after school studying with Rabbi Kalcheim.
“I don’t know what that rabbi was doing out there in the Maine countryside. He was a learned man and there were only a handful of religiously observant families out our way. The rest were like my parents. But the community needed a rabbi and he served our community until he moved to Israel.”
“A bar mitzvah was a big event for the Jewish community in those days,” said my father. The community synagogue in Calais, Chaim Joseph Congregation, was the only synagogue for miles around that served the Jewish community of Calais and several Jewish families from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada. The synagogue was in operation from 1924 until 1974.
“My father got the best whiskey and rye on the Canadian side for the celebration,” remembers my father. He has kept a bottle or two stored away in the liquor cabinet for decades as a memory from his bar mitzvah. “There was lox, cream cheese, bagels, potato salad, and a lot of herring. But no clams or lobsters,” he joked.
“I can still remember Rabbi Kalcheim’s smile on his face, after I finished reading my parsha. I knew I had done a good job. The rabbi and my father were proud of me.”
Fast forward to Yeroham, Israel, seven decades later, my father is carefully holding a newborn baby on his lap as my husband, Elyakim, says the Hebrew blessings in the Moroccan tradition during the brit milah ceremony. Outside, there’s a war raging; sirens warning of incoming Gaza rockets in nearby Beersheba, but this doesn’t worry my father.
What concerns him is holding our baby boy, Meron Haim, safely and steadily so he “won’t get hurt during the circumcision.”
“I knew the IDF was out there protecting Israel and its citizens,” my father said later. “But I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to hold Meron the way he should be held. Remember, I never did this before.”
When Elyakim smiles at him and the mohel nods his head, my father relaxes. He knows he’s done a good job – again.
The author made aliyah from Maine in 2004. She lives with her family in Yeroham and works as an English-language teacher in Midreshet Ben-Gurion