Oral Histories
This project focuses particularly on the havurah movement, which represents a signal effort to reinvent Jewish communal worship and social life outside the framework of traditional synagogue denominations and structures. The first such institution, Havurat Shalom, was established in Boston in 1968, in the wake of Israel’s Six-Day War and at the height of America’s cultural, social and political ferment. In his study of American Judaism, historian Jonathan Sarna emphasizes that havurah members consciously set out to “jettison the bourgeois middle-class values of suburbia and to re-imagine Judaism” as a liberating force capable of revolutionizing personal and religious relationships as well as politics and society. (Sarna, American Judaism, p. 319). Related efforts sprang up in other cities, such as Fabrangen in Washington, D.C., the New York Havurah, as well as havurot in the mid-West and California. With the spread of radical Jewish cultural movements came distinct trends and independent organizations: the Jewish renewal movement, P’nai Or, the Jewish Student Network, and related self-identified Jewish secular political activism, like Jews for Urban Justice, Breira, Ezrat Nashim and Jewish Feminism, Jewish Gay culture, Jewish music and the Klezmer revival, and Jewish Back-to-the-Earth agriculturalists.
As we approach the half-century mark since the founding of Havurat Shalom, this project seeks to contribute to building a documentary record of these diverse forms of Jewish counterculture through a pilot effort to interview approximately twenty-five key members of the havurah movement. We intend to focus primarily on Havurat Shalom as well as on the New York Havurah and Fabrangen in this initial phase of the project. It should also be noted that each of these havurot had their own particular structures and outlooks and were not in their early years part of an organized movement. The history of the havurah and of the Jewish counterculture more generally remains to be written, and indeed, at the present time, archival collections are being assembled at Brandeis University, the University of Pennsylvania, the American Jewish Archives, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the University of Colorado—just to name a few institutions. This project aims to further the current effort already underway by documenting the experiences and reflections of early havurah participants through oral history. These oral histories will ultimately be made available to the public as part of an open, pluralistic, and cooperative endeavor to gather and disseminate information. Thus, this initial and limited oral history project represents an important piece of a larger effort to collect information about and begin to interpret this important moment in American Jewish history.
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Jewish Counter Culture Oral History Project Highlights
Multiple narrators
This video presents highlights from the more than two dozens interviews with members of the founding generation of the earliest American havurot.
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Jewish Counter Culture Oral History Project Overview
Clara Phillips
An overview video describing the Jewish Counter Culture Oral History Project.
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Havurat Shalom: Reflections at 50
Sharon Strassfeld, Art Green, Barry Holtz, Joe Reimer, Michael Paley, Mona Fishbane, Michael Fishbane, Richard Siegel, Joel Rosenberg, David Roskies, and Michael Strassfeld
Short video containing clips from the Jewish Counter Culture Oral History project interviews shown at the 50th reunion of the founders of Havurat Shalom during Memorial Day weekend, May 2018.
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Interview with Judith Plaskow and Martha Ackelsberg
Judith Plaskow and Martha Ackelsberg
Caption to photograph (supplied by narrators):
The one labeled Sharom and Ilana as babies has (from left to right) Sharon Sperling (toddler), Phyllis Sperling, Dina Rosenfeld; in back row: Martha Ackelsberg, Liz Koltun, Ilana Sugarman [later Ruskay] (in baby seat), Shira Sugarman
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One Change, Three Stories: Women in the Minyan at Havurat Shalom
Mona Fishbane, Michael Fishbane, Barry Holtz, and Art Green
Short series of clips from three Jewish Counter Culture Oral History interviews used as part of a conference presentation by the filmmaker, Jayne Guberman.
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Interview with Joseph and Gail Reimer
Joseph Reimer and Gail Reimer
Captions for photographs (supplied by Joe and Gail Reimer)
1. Joe and I got married on Labor Day September 1971 at the newly built Lincoln Square Synagogue in NY. (I think ours was the first wedding held in that space.) Rabbi Art Green co-officiated with Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. The wedding photographer was Fred Marcus. I believe he is no longer alive, but the Fred Marcus studio in NY is still operative.
2. Women dancing prior to bedecken. At far right: Kathy Green; next to her Janet Holtz. Woman in short white dress: Bella Savran. Woman in short green dress: Debbie Fine.
3. Seated at right: Kathy and Art Green; Standing behind Art - Liz Vitale with Steve Mitchell; also standing: Bella and George Savran. Seated on left - Janet and Barry Holtz; Burt Jacobson.
4. Seated on far right: Richie Siegel; next to him Danny Matt; Next to him Arnie Cover.
5. Art Green dancing with Joe Reimer.
6. Joe Reimer dancing with Richard Siegel.
7. Richard Siegel and Art Green holding Joe Reimer aloft.
8.George Savran in center; Joe Reimer at left of photo; Richard Siegel at right of photo.
