Y E

N

R E V I E W

Thousands rallied at Shaarey Zedek to support the United States and Israel against Iraq.

A Night In January
A Year To Remember

PHIL JACOBS

Managing Editor

ometimes the dynamics of
a situation are
unforgettable.
How many of us
remember where we were
during an event of major
consequences, such as the day
President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated or Martin Luther
King Jr. or Robert Kennedy?

S

For several hundred Jew
attending the Jewish Federation's
Jan. 17 Allied Jewish Campaign
opening at Shaarey Zedek, the
night perhaps best symbolized a
year of massive world events and
how, in our part of the world, we

40

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1991

reacted. That wintery Thursday
night we all expected conservative
thinker Alan Keyes to talk to us
about the flux of the Middle East
situation and what role individual
players would have in dealing with
Iraq.
Instead, a lobby television became
the center of all of our hearts and
minds as much as we wanted to
listen to Mr. Keyes. It was in the
lobby that we learned that Saddam
Hussein had hit Tel Aviv with Scud
missiles. It was in the Shaarey
Zedek lobby that local Israelis ran to
the nearest pay phones, tears in
their eyes, to try to call home.
It was in the lobby that a piece of
all of us was touched by tragedy. The
following Sunday, Jan. 27, 3,000
Detroit area Jews returned to the

Shaarey Zedek lobby, rallying in
support of Israel and the U.S.-led
allied coalition. This was a commun-
ity that had raised tens of millions of
dollais for the Allied Jewish Cam-
paign and Operation Exodus, and
here it was responding once again.
While the war wound down in the
Middle East, the organized Detroit
Jewish community did its best to
confront the recession hitting the
nation. The Federation, for the first
time, required its agencies to budget
on a priority basis with a minimal
cutback in services.
There were issues that affected
schools, synagogues, people, agen-
cies and other areas of Jewish life in
Detroit. Some of those issues even
overlapped, especially when it came

to the concern over the Jewish
future of Southfield.
A further analysis of the Federa-
tion's Jewish Demographic Study
showed that between 20 and 40 per-
cent of Southfield's Jewish commun-
ity was looking to move out of the
city. Beth Achim, a longtime Con-
servative synagogue in Southfield,
then announced it was looking into a
possible merger and move to West
Bloomfield with Congregation B'nai
Moshe.
Congregation B'nai Israel did
merge with Shaarey Zedek while
Temple Beth El celebrated its 140th
anniversary and Temple Israel its
50th. Temple Israel continued its ac-
tivity of social action, starting a pro-
gram between some of its teen-agers