David Edelman remembers walking from the old Dalton High School on Crawford Street to Temple Beth El on Valley Street, about a quarter mile away.
“One day, Rabbi (Max) Zucker was washing in front of the temple doors, and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He walked over and someone had painted a swastika in front of the temple doors,” Edelman said. “I think this was around 1961 or ’62, and so I started learning about it. My great-grandmother lived with us, but her brother was killed in the Holocaust, and an older Jewish woman who went to temple at the time was a Holocaust survivor.”
That horrific history was part of what I learned as a child.
“They didn’t want to force it on you, but you learned as you grew,” Edelman recalled. “That day, Reverend Zucker explained it and said, ‘Bad people did this, but don’t worry, we’ll deal with it.'”
Temple Beth El, which has been closed since 2008 due to declining attendance due to emigration of believers, “was a spiritual place and a place that gave me a lot of a sense of family and community,” Edelman explains. “We celebrated Hanukkah and Passover…we had a Passover service and a big dinner afterwards, a Hanukkah party, and so on. A lot of the Jews were from New York and were pretty well versed in Judaism. They came to Dalton in the 1940s for the chenille and carpet industry. My grandfather, Simon Ginsburg, came here in the early 1920s and was one of the founders of the temple. The temple has been a very integral part of my life.”
Former parishioners of Dalton’s only Jewish synagogue also fondly remember Temple Beth El. The land was donated to the City of Dalton, and in a unique combination, the synagogue site will be transformed into a memorial park that includes a stormwater retention pond that will not only reduce the potential for flooding for some Valley Drive residents, but also serve as a “reflecting pond” that will reflect the temple’s history.
Diane Frank Abramowitz and her sister, Felicia Frank Goodman, said Temple Beth El was a special place for them as children growing up in Dalton, especially during the holidays.
“Every New Year’s Eve we had a dance that was open to the community, and we always left saying, ‘See you next year!'” Abramowitz says. “To me, it was just a total extension of home and part of everyday life. We had services on Friday night, which marked the start of Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), and we ended on Saturday night. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would come, and we would visit each other’s churches. It was a really good way to expose our community to the larger community.”
Goodman recalls that there was also a “community” Passover meal.
“All the holidays were community-oriented,” she says. “We always had a rabbi on staff, but the cantor (prayer leader) was a member of the congregation, so he was familiar with all the prayers and chants. After Friday night services, there was a fellowship time downstairs where the adults could drink coffee and coolers of soda were opened for free, since they aren’t sold on Shabbat.”
“Committed” to Dalton
Abramowitz also noted that church members are “very committed to the Dalton community as a whole.”
“Our father, along with many others, was very involved in establishing the recreation center and bringing culture to Dalton with the Creative Arts Guild,” she noted, “I remember (anthropologist) Margaret Mead stopping by Dalton, and (television news anchor) Walter Cronkite stopping by. There was a great community spirit in the synagogue and a desire to make Dalton, Georgia, the best community it could be.”
The sisters recalled a fundraiser their mother spearheaded, selling flowers from Holland, for which a vendor created bright red “Pride of Dalton” tulips for the event. Women from the temple’s “sisterhood” went door-to-door in neighborhoods, photographing flowers and helping residents plan which flowers would look best on their own lawns.
“As a result, we would drive down places like Thornton Street and Valley Street in the spring and it was full of flowers and it was so beautiful!” Goodman said. “The money raised went to community projects in Dalton. We collected a certain amount of coins for charities, collected them every Sunday and at the end of the year we added up the total and decided where to donate it to.”
Abramowitz said that at first, he felt his faith was different because when he visited friends’ homes, non-Jewish families would serve him beef hot dogs instead of pork.
“I felt very friendly and accepted, and I didn’t sense any of the hostility or anti-Semitism that I might have felt in larger parts of the South,” she said. “Dalton was a great place to grow up.”
“Let’s help Happy Top”
David Frank said, “I don’t remember not going to Temple Beth El. I was part of that community from the time I was born. I left Dalton in my early 20s and lived and worked in Atlanta for many years, but I continued to interact with the synagogue community while they were still there.”
“My earliest memories are of being part of the community. There were kids my age, like Marcia Funk, and a lot of people who were part of the community and the congregation were called ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie,’ like Ben and Bessie Winkler were Uncle Ben and Auntie Bessie,” he continued. “Marcia’s father, Irving Funk, was Uncle Irving, and his wife, Ethel Funk, was Auntie Ethel. It was a very family atmosphere.”
Frank said he was especially impressed by Rabbi Zucker’s “influence.”
“He was from Brooklyn, and he taught us to play baseball,” Frank recalls. “In Hebrew class, he turned learning Hebrew into a game he called ‘Hebrew Baseball,’ where if you could read a sentence without making a single mistake, you could get the runner to first base or wherever. We’d go out on the field on the north side of the synagogue, and he’d always have a baseball bat and a ball, and he’d hit us balls.”
He noted that leaders of the First Methodist Church “sold the land to build a synagogue.”
“I always felt a special connection to the Methodists,” Frank says. “A lot of my friends were Methodists. We weren’t big enough to have a Boy Scout troop, so my sons joined the First Methodist Boy Scouts. We were accepted by them and felt that the Jewish community was important to Dalton. My father, Jack Frank, helped establish a scholarship program at Dalton Junior College for people who wanted to study textile engineering.”
“The kids actually performed the whole service for us” during the Passover Seder meal, Marsha Shrago said.
“We would get up on stage in the ballroom and everyone would be given a part to sing and act,” she recalled. “It was so much fun and a great time. It became a tradition. We did plays for other holidays like Hanukkah. They were all tacky and had puns built into them, so the parents enjoyed our performances. It was very family-oriented, and although I didn’t realize it at the time,[the synagogue]was a social hub for adults and children.”
There were also “community action” activities.
“I remember helping my mother bag groceries and take them to a settlement in an impoverished area of Dalton, then called Happy Top,” Shrago says, “where the women of the Sisterhood would raise funds and play cards and mahjong. It was definitely a place where families celebrated important life events, like weddings, baby namings, funerals and, of course, bar mitzvahs.”
“The large Dalton community has been incredibly tolerant and wonderful,” Edelman said of the Jewish presence in the carpet capital.
Next week: City plans for Temple Beth El property.
