Temple Beth-El celebrates 150 years with new Torah

It's hard to find a more venerable, yet flexible local institution than Northbrook's Temple Beth-El.

One of Illinois' oldest synagogues started with a small gathering of 15 Austrian-Hungarian Jews who met in a Milwaukee Avenue home in Chicago on Oct. 8, 1871. When they left the meeting, the men saw the first flames of the Great Chicago Fire on the horizon.

They regrouped days later for a Shabbat service - the first congregation to meet in Chicago after the fire.

Six times the Reform congregation has changed locations, once because a tornado leveled the building in which it was housed. Its most recent move came in September 1989 to its current home at 3610 Dundee Road, Northbrook.

Temple Beth-El is a community with sixth-generation members.

With each move, Beth-El's Torahs move with it. These are the Hebrew bibles that have been observed and crafted painstakingly the same way for more than two millennia.

To recognize the year of Temple Beth-El's 150th anniversary - plus a year, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people more comfort in assembling - leadership sought to acquire a new Torah, the first in 40 years.

These works, with their ornate scrolls, can weigh 25 to 40 pounds.

"Our lighter Torahs were more heavily used," said Rabbi Sidney Helbraun, who, after coming to Beth-El in 1995, was excited for his first opportunity to be a part of this process.

"While they're still usable they had become less preferred. We wanted our students, particularly when they were becoming bar mitzvahed or bat mitzvahed, to be more comfortable - as well as for it to look beautiful," Helbraun said.

The synagogue contracted a "sofer," or scribe, in Israel. With special ink and feather quill, he wrote by hand, calligraphy-style, the more than 304,000 Hebrew characters in the Torah.

It is a lengthy process, and not cheap.

"It takes in the neighborhood of a year to write, which is why Torahs are expensive," Helbraun said. "Because if you're going to dedicate a year of your life to writing the Torah, your family has to eat."

The sofer in Israel outlined the last 250 letters but did not fill them in with the ink. After the Torah was sent to Temple Beth-El, Orthodox Jew Yochanan Nathan, a professional sofer living in West Rogers Park, was hired for the finishing touches, working with community members in an anniversary project aptly named "The Torah Belongs to Everyone."

Starting May 7, synagogue members or families could sponsor a letter, meet with the scribe and watch him fill in their letters.

Congregants received "a beautiful commemorative certificate" containing a blessing and describing the significance of their letter, said Kelly Kaufman of Deerfield, a Beth-El member along with her husband, Alan, and children, Ethan and Hayden.

"It was a beautiful opportunity," Kaufman said. "It is very special to our synagogue and the community. We're very lucky to be a part of it."

With several hundred synagogue members participating to help Nathan finish the work, on May 12 a celebration at Temple Beth-El heralded the 150th anniversary and the completion of the new Torah.

Congregants formed two rows to accompany the Torah from the small sanctuary where it was completed to the ark in the synagogue's main sanctuary.

Its installation was signified by Cantor Adam Kahan and a blessing of the community by Kahan and Helbraun.

"It was a special moment," Helbraun said.

Beautiful, historic, and for Temple Beth-El members like 12-year-old Ethan and 9-year-old Hayden Kaufman, both of whom will soon observe their Jewish rites of passage into adulthood, practical, too.

"As a 13-year-old, carrying around a very heavy Torah, it's a little burdensome," Kelly Kaufman said.