Then And Now

Crisis intervention,
security measures
are honed today.

Barbara Lewis | Contributing Writer

S

Rabbi Adler with his young daughter, Shulamith

wife, Goldie, and daughter, Shulamith, at
his side. He was 59 years old, at the peak of
his career as a leading light in Conservative
Judaism.
Richard Wishnetsky was taken to
Providence Hospital, where he died on
Feb. 16.
This month, on the 50th anniversary
of Rabbi Adler’s death, longtime Shaarey
Zedek members are recalling that horrific
morning and remembering the rabbi who
brought so much to the congregation.
“Everybody ran,” said Orley, a past
president of Shaarey Zedek who now lives
in Bloomfield Hills. He
and his cousin hid in the
mini-golf course next to
the synagogue.
“Some Junior
Congregation children
were just coming out of
the small chapel to go
Gregg Orley
into the sanctuary,” said
Cantor of Bloomfield
Hills. “Some were crying,
‘I’ve got to get to my grandma,’ or ‘I want
my mother.’ I’m a teacher by training so I
just opened my arms and told them, ‘We’re
all going to stay here and we’re all going to
be safe.’”

At the cornerstone dedication at Shaarey Zedek in Southfield: Rabbi Adler, Cantor
Reuven Frankel, David Miro, Louis Berry, Max Fisher, Cantor Jacob Sonenklar, Dr.
Samuel Krohn and Mandell “Bill” Berman.

The rabbi was
still wearing his
rabbinical garb
and his tallis,
which were
both heavily
bloodstained.

“

AMERICAN JEWRY’S LOSS
The shooting deprived Shaarey Zedek and
the greater American Jewish world of one of
its preeminent rabbis.
Morris Adler was born in Slutzk,
Russia, in 1906 and came to New York
with his parents in 1913. He studied at
Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, but
transferred to the Conservative Jewish
Theological Seminary of America, where he
was ordained in 1935.
After serving a congregation in Buffalo,
N.Y., he came to Shaarey Zedek in 1938
as associate to Rabbi A.M. Hershman. He
quickly earned respect in the Jewish com-
munity and the larger civic community.

”

— Dr. Lenny Lachover, a surgeon at
Sinai Hospital on the day of the shooting

He was a champion of the labor move-
ment and worked with Walter Reuther, who
appointed him to the UAW’s Public Review
Board and the UAW-backed Community
Health Association.
Later, he became active in the Civil
Rights Movement, earning the respect of
Detroit’s African-American clergy and their
congregants. He served on the Michigan
Fair Elections Practices Commission, the
Governor’s Board of Higher Education and
other community groups.
He served on boards almost too
numerous to recall, including the Zionist
Organization of Detroit, the Detroit Round
Table of Christians and Jews, the Jewish
Welfare Federation, United Hebrew Schools,
Wayne State University’s Department of
Near Eastern Languages and the Citizens’
Committee for Equal Opportunity.
Rabbi Adler helped organize the first
exhibit of Jewish ceremonial art at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, and worked

with Gov. G. Mennen Williams to enact
legislation permitting absentee voting in
Michigan, just in case an election should
fall on a Jewish holiday, said Cantor, who
has coordinated Shaarey Zedek’s archives
for the past 30 years.
Harold Schachern, a religion writer for
the Detroit News and a friend of Adler’s,
noted, “Like most busy men, Rabbi Adler
has had difficulty saying no to those who
would have imposed on his time. His desk,
about which visitors often joked, has always
been piled high with correspondence,
pamphlets, magazines and other literature,
which he always insisted on reading before
disposing of. At each visit to his office, he
always insisted on teasing visitors that the
pile was a new one.”
Adler left the pulpit temporarily during
World War II to serve as a chaplain in the
Pacific. (See sidebar for more on his mili-
tary service.)
In 1954, he was named Shaarey Zedek’s
rabbi for life.
During another leave from Shaarey
Zedek in the mid-1950s, Adler served as
a professor of homiletics at the Jewish
Theological Seminary. A collection of
his sermons, The Voice Still Speaks, was
published posthumously in 1969. Another
book, The World of the Talmud, published
in 1958, was widely read. He became
known as “America’s most-quoted rabbi.”

ADLERS’ COMPASSION
Wishnetsky’s suicide ended a promising life.
The shooter’s story has been told in great
detail by T.V. LoCicero in his 1970 book,
Murder in the Synagogue.
A Detroit Mumford High graduate,
Wishnetsky was a brilliant student at the
University of Michigan. He became a mem-
ber of the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society
in his junior year and, before graduating in
1964, won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson
fellowship, which he planned to use to
study comparative religion at the University

ecurity in synagogues and Jewish
organizational properties has
come a long way since 1966, when
Rabbi Morris Adler was shot on the
Congregation Shaarey Zedek bimah.
Shaarey Zedek, for example, now has
multiple security guards and video cam-
eras in the building and parking lot, said
Rabbi Aaron Starr, and administrators
have taken some other steps that are less
visible.
The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit has a director of community-wide
security, Gary Sikorski,
whose job is to train
staff and volunteers
who work for Jewish
organizations.
It’s a three-step pro-
cess, he said: aware-
ness of safety proto-
cols; physical facility
Gary Sikorski
security, such as locks,
guards and cameras;
and response, assuring
that staff know what to do if there is a
security incident.
Sikorski is available to do security
assessments for synagogues and other
Jewish facilities.
On March 29, Federation, the Jewish
Community Center and the West
Bloomfield police department are
cosponsoring a security conference on
Site Protection through Observational
Techniques (SPOT).
“Instead of looking at reactive
approaches, we’re looking to be more
proactive, to do threat mitigation,” he
said. “The idea is to avoid security con-
cerns, rather than respond to them.”
And what of the aftermath? Some par-
ents whose children witnessed the shoot-
ings at Shaarey Zedek say their children
were traumatized.
Bryna Frank says her children couldn’t
go back to Shaarey
Zedek for years, and
her son Steve, whose
bar mitzvah was the
day of the shooting,
made some com-
ments that seemed
to indicate he felt the
shooting was some-
how his fault.
Ronelle Grier
Ronelle Grier, a JN
contributing writer,
lived down the street

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continued on page 12

March 10 • 2016

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