An ‘embodiment of hope’

Rabbi Jehiel Orenstein is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth El in South Orange.

Sister Rose Thering died May 6 in Racine, Wis., among the sisters she had joined in her teens. Seton Hall University, the South Orange / Maplewood community, indeed all of New Jersey, is in an intensive mourning period of 30 days known as shloshim. We are just beginning to fully realize the immensity of our loss. A unique life force has been taken from our lives.

I last saw Sister Rose at a meeting of the Sister Rose Endowment Fund, a group of 20 dedicated Jews and Christians who raise money for scholarships so that teachers throughout New Jersey can study the Holocaust and transmit their insights to their students. Sister Rose, who chose to live in the Jewish federation housing, asked us all to her apartment. She said to me, “Rabbi, I am going to die soon, and I want you to take something from my apartment to remember me by. Choose something significant. Take anything you want.”

I naturally protested and said to her, “Doctors never know how long one has to live.”

But she, drawing on the long oxygen tube that she took everywhere, smiled and said, “The doctors are not saying this. I am.”

I walked around the apartment filled with many awards and mementos of her dedicated life and finally upon her urging, I chose a picture of a rose. “This will remind me of the midrash I gave when I spoke in your honor.” The midrash is a parable that seems almost created for Sister Rose Thering: A beloved King of flesh and blood was honored by his people. They had imported a magnificent, precious stone and it was being presented by the Prime Minister to the King. As the Minister walked forward he tripped. The stone hit the marble floor and a crack was formed in the center of the stone. “Your Majesty, allow me to repair the stone for you.” The Minister brought the stone to an artist who worked in jewelry. “This crack can be the stem of a rose which I will engrave around it.” And so it was that the people presented their King with a beautiful rose carved in a magnificent precious stone.

Sister Rose Thering found a crack in American Catholicism. It was anti-Semitism that had entered the catechism and curricula of Catholic schools and faith. She spent her life fighting it, bringing ecumenism and tolerance to Catholics, to Jews, and to the pope himself. She made a jewel, a rose, out of an injustice. And she did it without any hidden agenda. She opened her heart to every Jew, every Catholic, every human being that she met, but woe unto you if she felt any injustice in your actions. She protested when Kurt Waldheim rose to power in Vienna, she protested when Russian Jewry stood against the Russian government, and she applauded and encouraged Israel in her 54 trips there, showing the country to Christian and Jew alike.

I came to South Orange three decades ago from the sheltered Jewish world of Brooklyn and Long Island. Sister Rose Thering was the first Catholic that I really came to know. I came with much baggage, I came with misapprehensions, and I came with distrust. She conquered me and convinced me that the interfaith dialogue could create the same feeling that one has when one sees, touches, or smells a beautiful rose. She was extraordinary. She was a powerhouse. But above all, this girl, the sixth of 11 children from a Catholic family in Racine, Wis., became the embodiment of hope for understanding between faiths.

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