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AUGUST 27, 2020 | The Jewish Home
100 Years
1,000S DAILY BY ARIEL VALE
Life
for a Shabbos-observing Jew in the early 20th century was not easy in America. Friday after Friday, men would be fired from their jobs. It took a courageous group of men to make the move upstate where it would be easier to find an occupation that would not interfere with their values. In the summer of 1920, the Woodbourne Shul was founded. The shul was not just a place where people came to daven. It was an active center for an active Jewish community. What better place to hold a slaugh-
terhouse for kosher meat than the back room of the shul? The years passed with much victory and advancement for the Shabbos Jew. The city boasted large communities with many job opportunities. Slowly, the children of so many ended up moving back, seeking their fortune there. Across America, hundreds of shuls were forced to close their doors, boarding them up or selling them to others. The glorious Woodbourne Shul did not escape that fate. At the turn of the millennia, eighty years after opening, saturated with thousands of teffilos and
dozens of bar mitzvah celebrations, the shul had no choice but to close its beautiful doors forever. The board members were adamant that a holy edifice as such should not be sold or defiled. For ten long years, the shul sat boarded up in silence, waiting. There was an elderly woman, well into her eighties, devotedly caring for the kever of the Menuchas Asher, Rav Asher Anshil, of blessed memory. When asked what prompted this, she replied: “When I was in my forties, the doctors had already given up on my life. I prostrated myself on the kever and tear-
