A spiritual tour guide
Rabbi Norman Patz retires, having led his congregation in more ways than one

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

The pictures are down from the wall in his office. The books are half packed.

“It’s certainly an unusual, novel experience,” said Rabbi Norman Patz in a recent interview. The religious leader of Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove for 37 years, he will retire at the end of June to become rabbi emeritus.

“I have a lot of mixed feelings. It’s the end of an era. I’ve grown up with a whole group of people here,” he said. “I’m going through a series of ‘lasts,’ and each one has a bittersweet quality. I’ve tried to be an honorable and useful rabbi. How do you evaluate that quantitatively?”

Rabbi Laurence Groffman, senior rabbi at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, will succeed Patz.

When Patz arrived in 1969, the congregation had 147 members, and the area was still so rural that, as Patz recalled, “When we went to sleep at night, I could hear the cowbells tinkling from the last dairy farm in Verona.”

Today the synagogue has about 440 member families, and the congregation is known for its creative liturgy written by Patz’s wife, Naomi, as well as for its friendliness. Patz is particularly appreciated for bringing his international perspective to the congregation, whether through his involvement with the issues of Soviet Jewry early in his tenure, through the frequent congregational trips he led to Israel and Europe, or through his sermons. Many of those interviewed for this article used the same word to describe him: “brilliant.”

“He’s brilliant. I think he’s a modern-day rabbinic sage,” said Joan Fisch, a member of Temple Sholom for 15 years. “His interpretation of Torah, his philosophy about world events and how they’ll impact us as Jews,” she said, are so prescient. “And you can ask him a question about anything. He never says, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ He knows the answer.”

“Norman is a brilliant guy. His knowledge, as far as Jewish interests are concerned, is unparalleled,” said Joel Weinstock, who joined the synagogue shortly after Patz arrived. He recalls being part of “a new wave” of members who made the congregation “more dynamic.”

The rabbi “has brought speakers, scholars, politicians to our synagogue who would have positions and fresh ideas to stimulate us,” said congregation copresident Judy Wilson. “His sermons were interesting, challenging, timely, often political, always literate.”

Wilson, along with several other congregants, helped prepare for publication a book of Patz’s sermons that was presented to him at a celebratory Friday night service held in his honor June 2. The evening also included a surprise exhibition of photographs taken by Patz, an amateur photographer. Matted and mounted, they were available for sale (and signing) as a fund-raiser for the synagogue. The weekend culminated with two busloads of congregants traveling to New York City Sunday morning to march in the Salute to Israel Parade at Patz’s request. The parade was once a staple of congregational activity.

On the road

Norman Patz grew up in Boston, attending the Conservative synagogue Temple Beth Hillel in Dorchester. He sang in an Orthodox High Holy Day choir, graduated from Boston Latin School, and went on to Harvard. He was preparing for a career in the State Department, with hopes of working at the Middle East Desk, until he spent a year in Jerusalem. “I discovered two things that year: that the State Department does not hire Jews to work at the Middle East Desk and that I was a Reform Jew by philosophy.”

By the time he returned to the United States, he knew he would become a Reform rabbi. (Years later, he pointed out, things had changed dramatically, and the State Department’s Middle East Desk not only hired Jews, it was headed by one.)

To get through rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, he took jobs teaching Hebrew at Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston and Temple B’nai Abraham when it was still located in Newark. (One of his colleagues there, a master Hebrew teacher, introduced Patz to her daughter, Naomi, who would become his wife.)

After ordination, he served in the United States Navy and held pulpits in Cherry Hill and New Milford, Conn., before coming to Temple Sholom.

Shortly after arriving in Cedar Grove, Patz began to share his enthusiasm for traveling with the congregation. “There’s no travel guide like the rabbi,” said Wilson, who traveled to Israel on one of the groups he led. “He personally selects the hotels and guides. We were taken not only to the standard tourist sites but we were as likely to stop suddenly on the bus at some cave dating way back that contained maybe 10,000-year-old arrowheads. He knows what to look for and where and how to explain a biblical site,” Wilson said.

Weinstock also traveled to Israel with Patz as well as to Prague and Amsterdam. “This is a kind of trip you just can’t go to a travel agent and buy,” said Weinstock. “He knows the territory. He knows the history, whether it’s an old synagogue or even if it’s not a Jewish thing.”

And then there were the people the travelers met. Everyone who traveled with him has a story about doors opening to them as the result of an introduction by Rabbi Patz, or of sitting somewhere and having people approach, asking if they are with Rabbi Patz’s congregation. Wilson remembers her grown daughter being called to the Torah for an aliya in one Prague synagogue, thanks to Patz’s friendship with the rabbi there. “It was a thrilling experience in this old, wonderful synagogue.”

Patz also developed an ongoing close relationship with one particular town in the Czech Republic, Dvor Kralove; in 1975, Temple Sholom received a Torah scroll that had belonged to the town’s Jewish community, which was destroyed during the Holocaust.

But it isn’t just his intellect that has drawn people to the synagogue. Members say he is spiritually inspiring and exudes a warm presence that makes them feel at home. When Fisch and her husband moved to New Jersey and had a second child, they were looking for a congregation to join. “We walked into temple with the baby, and I said, ‘Oh my God, this is the strangest thing. I feel like I’m home….We met Rabbi Patz, and he offered the most beautiful baby naming. I felt spiritually so connected. I knew Rabbi Patz would be my rabbi.”

“His presence on the bima — nobody compares,” said Weinstock. “He conducts services with dignity and warmth.”

He has also made the congregation a family. “When he blesses someone, we all feel the simha,” said Fisch.

As Patz himself looks back, he said he feels gratified, although he is not afraid to recall the failures as well as successes. “It’s a humbling experience, dealing with the same group of human beings. You deal with them in a pastoral way, with life-cycle events, teaching, services, reaching into the community.”

One highlight for him was the summer that two teenagers in the congregation enlisted his help in finding them a program in Israel. He sent them to Rishon Letzion to help less fortunate residents of the town by renovating apartments; teaching tennis, swimming, and English; and just by being an American presence there. The teens’ enthusiasm upon their return was infectious, and over time, the congregation community became more and more involved and inspired by the UJC MetroWest Rishon Letzion project, known as Project Renewal.
Eventually, a cadre of activists was drawn in and developed strong relationships with the Israeli community.

Meanwhile, Patz became involved in the Soviet Jewry crisis and enlisted the involvement of the congregation. When the exodus of Russian Jews took place, several of those involved with Project Renewal called their counterparts in Israel and arranged for the community to directly absorb 50 Russian families. “Who knows whether this might have started somewhere else if we hadn’t done it?” said Patz. “But it was the first of its kind, and it changed the pattern of the absorption of Soviet Jews into Israel.”

Although Patz will retire as senior rabbi at Temple Sholom, he will continue teaching courses at the synagogue as well as at two nearby institutions, Caldwell College, where he has taught for 30 years, and Montclair State University, where he is an adjunct professor.

He said he also plans to remain active in communal organizations, including the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, which he helped found, and the Society of the History of Czechoslovak Jews. He also plans to continue leading congregational trips abroad.

Patz has several long-term projects awaiting him, including assembling a handbook explaining the connection between the weekly Torah portions and the haftara readings and working with a new translation of a recreated script of The Last Cyclist, a play put on at the Theresienstadt ghetto, with the aim of developing a children’s story from it.

Patz has accepted a six-week stint next April as rabbi of a Reform congregation in San Juan. After that, he said, “We’ll see.” High on his agenda is his granddaughter, who lives in Colorado. “I hope to be able to visit her more frequently,” he said.

If congregants remember him for his intellect and for his capacity to imbue their life-cycle events with special warmth, he said he found “ongoing pleasure in the individuals and families who discovered a sense of Judaism, Jewish identity, Jewish pride, and knowledge through me. It’s a source of great joy to me to connect people to the wider Jewish world and raise their consciousness about the worldwide Jewish community.”

As Wilson said, “He’s a man of principle, and he has encouraged us to think of ways to use tzedaka to enrich lives, not only in our community but beyond.”

Most of all, Patz said, “I will miss the day-to-day interchange with congregants.”