Welcome to My Shtetl—or is it a Shtot?

  If I do a Google satellite search to my house in the very heart of Beachwood, then pull back perhaps a mile in each direction, I will have, in the camera’s eye, what is perhaps the most impressive aggregation of Jewish institutions in the Western world.

  Welcome to my shtetl, or, to be more technically and historically correct, my shtot. 

  There is something enormously impressive, yet curious, about, what has become of this very small area of the Greater Cleveland Metropolitan area in a relatively few short years. Not long ago this same community found itself angry and deeply divided over what seemed to be happening. The New York Times included us in a major Jew vs. Jew Sunday Magazine special. Perhaps the time has come for that gray lady and the story’s author to re-visit my shtetl.

   (This is not, of course, by any stretch, your classic, fondly remembered Eastern European Shtetl. But as one searches the Web for shtetl talk, the similarity of the lifestyle, the cluster of Jewish institutions, the high regard for learning and caring in both large and small communities, the similarity is striking. In larger cities, like Budapest, I have learned, they were called “Shtots”. Perhaps that word better and more accurately defines what we have created here in the 20^th and 21st centuries.)

  Jews of Greater Cleveland, some with considerable wealth and influence, others deeply spiritual and following their Torah wherever it took them, have built numerous structures for prayer, learning, community togetherness, fitness, history, health and caring for the elderly and aging among our people . All of it right here in this small, relatively confined portion of Greater Cleveland.

  Something very special has emerged in this shtetl-like neighborhood, perhaps unnoticed by the general community.  The thought struck me recently when Susannah Heschel, the former Abba Hillel Scholar of Jewish studies at CWRU, and now holding a similar position at Dartmouth, declared in a talk here that there is nothing quite like Cleveland for Jewish life in its finest sense. “I would like to return here with my family every year for the holidays. It is precious to me,” she said. Her father, as many know, was the great teacher, philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel.

  More recently, my lifelong friend Dr. Larry Coben, wrote and published a new book entitled “Anna’s Shtetl,” (University of Alabama Press) which I helped edit, while becoming somewhat educated in the life and times of the 19^th and 20^th century Eastern European lifestyle.

Alan Levenson’s classes at the Siegel College have, in recent years, expanded my understanding and appreciation of shtetl life as it was lived in Eastern Europe.

  Let’s examine, as briefly as possible, what has happened:  When the Beachwood Kehilla, an orthodox congregation, recently built and opened a new synagogue down the street adjacent  to the existing Cleveland Hebrew School and the Fuchs Mizrachi Preschool my mind became alerted to the diversity of what was happening without, as far as I know, so much of a whisper of apprehension in the neighborhood.

             Around the corner on Richmond Rd. there has emerged the architecturally interesting and now nationally renown, Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. East down Shaker Blvd. at Brainard Circle there is the magnificent new eastern branch of Park Synagogue, with its outstretched copper coated hands welcoming worshipers and students.  West of the freeway on Shaker Blvd., is the Laura & Alvin Siegal College of Judaic Studies, The Agnon School, The Temple-Tifereth Israel, and the Gannon Gil Preschool.

  The new Ratner School opened last year in the former Brith Emeth congregation’s round building across the circle designed in the 1960’s by architect Edward Durrell Stone.  Around the circle is Congregation Bethanyu located in what was a very Western Reserve style church, Shaarey Tikvah is down Fairmount along the freeway off Fairmount Blvd.  Also located on Fairmount are B'nai Jeshurun formerly known as Temple on The Heights, Solomon Schechter Day Elementary School and Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple which history tells me was a shtetl pioneer in a once pristine Protestant environment.

   Then down the street a very long block to Green Road is an aggregation of Jewish institutions each tastefully styled and set back from the road: The stately Waxman Chabad Center, a replica of the Brooklyn Chabad headquarters, the Green Road (Modern Orthodox) Synagogue, the Beatrice Stone Yavne High School for Girls, and on Chagrin, west of Green is Suburban Temple-Kol Ami.

  Up Cedar Road near I-271 to that incredible campus of housing for the aged, The R.H. Myers Apartments, Menorah Park Center for Senior Living, Stone Gardens, Montefiore, and Wiggins Place, all virtually next door to a Cleveland Clinic facility. Out front is the Peter B. Lewis Aquatic & Therapy Center. Nothing like this can be found anywhere.

  And last but not least, The Mandel Jewish Community Center, off South Woodland near Richmond Rd., is a center of Cleveland Jewish community life.

  Yes, when you stop to think about it, we have created something special here. This of course is not the dream of the Melting Pot that kept bubbling up in the post war mid 20^th century, and yet it is something incredibly 21^st Century American and incredibly Jewish at the same time.

  Now that we all are much more comfortable in our respective ethnic and national origin skins, our offspring will be the beneficiaries of this Shtot, hopefully for generations to come.