serving the Orthodox," the rabbi con
tinues. Now there are restaurants,
butchers, take-out places. "They're
catering to a more sophisticated com-
munity?'
Most of Detroit's Orthodox are
professionals in the legal, medical,
engineering and computer fields. The
growth in the community comes from
two sources: from transplants and
from the newly observant, known as
ba'alei teshuvah.
A visit to the Orthodox communi-
ty is not really a tour of a specific
locale. There are, of course, the points
on the compass which make up the
community: the homes, the schools,
the synagogues and the shops. But
they seem almost secondary to their
owners and patrons, as if Detroit
could just as well be Babylon or any
other stopping place in the long
history of the Jewish Diaspora. It is
the dimension of time that really
counts here.
Of time and space, Judaism places
a higher sanctity on time. And the Or-
thodox, who have dedicated
themselves to the sacred, find the
most sublime keys to existence in the
celebration of Shabbat and the holy
days — which occur within the con-
text of time — and from the word of
God — the Ibrah — which is timeless.
-
CAUSELESS HATRED
Six pairs of shoes of various types
line one wall of Alan Steinmetz's of-
fice in the Renaissance Center.
"Before you can understand who the
consumers are, you have to stand in
their shoes," he explains.
Steinmetz, 35, is the director of
marketing and business development
at the Young and Rubicam advertis-
ing agency. It is early on a Monday
morning, and as the traffic on Jeffer-
son Avenue passes under his office
window, Steinmetz talks about the
reasons behind his decision to try to
bring local Orthodox and non-
Orthodox Jews together, to stand in
each others' shoes.
"My family and I spent two
months in Israel and I saw a lot of
things I didn't like in the relations
between the charedim (ultra-
Orthodox, but literally "God fearers")
and the secularists. We decided to
work in the (Detroit) community to
show what the Orthodox are really
like."
It is sinat chinam — causeless
hatred among Jews — which
theologians give as the reason for the
destruction of the second Temple in
Jerusalem and the collapse of the
Jewish commonwealth in 70 C.E.
Steinmetz says he is determined to
head off such hatred and
misunderstanding among the Jews of
Detroit. "Our common bond is chari-
ty," he says.
Earlier this year, Steinmetz wrote
letters to 50 friends, mostly young Or-
thodox Detroiters, asking them to
man the phones on the Allied Jewish
Rabbis Chaskel Grubner and Leizer Levin: "There is always a place for improvement."
Higher and Higher
Iv
hen Rabbi Leizer
Levin visited De-
troit for the first
time, 50 years ago
last month, there
was no organized Orthodox com-
munity — neither an organized rab-
binate nor any major Orthodox
institutions.
"In fact, in the beginning, my
children had to go to public school
for awhile," he remembers.
Ever since, Rabbi Levin has
worked to organize his community
and to hold it together. Now in his
80s, he is, as many have described
him, the titular head of the Or-
thodox community.
As president of Vaad Harab-
banim, the Council of Orthodox Rab-
bis he helped to found, Rabbi Levin
— together with Rabbi Chaskel
Grubner, the Vaad's director — seeks
to raise Orthodox Jews and Jewish
businesses to a uniformly high
observance of "Ibrah mitzvos."
With an annual budget of more
than $200,000, the work of the Vaad
includes supervising the kashrut
observance of local kosher butchers,
restaurants and catering services;
regulating marriages, divorces,
adoptions and conversions; serving
as a bet din, a court of religious law,
in disputes between individuals and
organizations; and guiding Jews in
the intricacies of observing
Halachah in the age of technology.
The Vaad recently began an in-
formation campaign on shatnes,
that enigmatic proscription in the
book of Exodus against the mixture
of linen and wool. A "Shatnes Lab"
recently opened to serve the
community.
Rabbi Levin sees two reasons for
the recent push to expand Orthodox
services such as the lab and the hir-
ing of Rabbi Mordechai Wolmark as
kashrut inspector.
One reason relates to the growth
of the community and the increas-
ed strain it puts on Orthodox ser-
vices. The other concerns the quali-
ty of Detroit's new Orthodox. "We
have young families, they studied in
yeshivah. They want everything
should be strict. We think-we should
be organized better and better," Rab-
bi Levin explains.
He says it was the lack of
organization in earlier years which
caused the Orthodox community to
nearly disappear after the first
generation of observant immigrants
gave way to the second generation of
Americanized Jews.
Rabbi Grubner agrees. "There
were no yeshivahs, no schools, no
places for the children to go. Unfor-
tunately, we lost two generations."
Rabbi E.B. Freedman of
Yeshivath Beth Yehudah says that
about 75 families formed the core of
the community. "Those people were
going against the tide. Keeping your
kids religious was totally swimming
against the mainstream?'
It was the refugees from the
Holocaust who replenished Or-
thodox ranks and spiritually re-
juvenated the community.
And although a new and confi-
dent generation of Orthodox Jews
are taking the reins of leadership in
the community, Rabbis Levin and
Grubner have seen too much history
to forget either the triumphs or the
disasters of the past.
In their attention to the details
of Orthodox life, Rabbi Levin and
Grubner offer a firm and old-
fashioned challenge to today's obser-
vant Jews. Says Rabbi Grubner,
"God's policy is that a Jew should
never be satisfied with his ac-
complishments. He should go higher
and higher. There is always a place
for improvement."