At his home studio, George Greene works on a panel for his stained-glass windows at Agudath Israel.
Photos by Robert Wiener
November 13, 2008
It happened in “prime time” — during morning Yom Kippur services at Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex.
The overflow crowd of 1,500 people in the newly renovated Caldwell synagogue had expected to hear Rabbi Alan Silverstein deliver one of the year’s key sermons.
Instead, he called a devoted congregant, George Greene, to the bima.
For two years, Greene and his wife, Bernice, worked on the centerpiece of the sanctuary in their synagogue’s multi-million-dollar makeover: 12 stained-glass windows along the walls of Jerusalem stone and an enormous stained-glass window depicting a menora behind the Holy Ark.
The 12 windows, each 13 inches wide by 12 feet, 5 inches high, represent the months of the year, the tribes of Israel, and the holidays.
So much research and planning and labor went into the crafting of the windows, and with so many congregants on hand on Yom Kippur, said Silverstein, “I wanted George to give an explanation.”
Sunlight shone through his creations as Cantor Joel Caplan wielded a lengthy pointer to direct congregants’ attention to the details while Greene explained the symbolism of the windows and the process of their creation.
What happened next was beyond the imagination of anyone who had come to worship on the most solemn day of the Jewish year.
“When I was done, everybody stood up and applauded,” said Greene as he sat in the living room of his Caldwell home, a few blocks from the synagogue.
“I certainly didn’t expect a standing ovation. I was totally blown away.”
“Giving up my sermon was the best thing I ever did,” said the rabbi. “When George spoke, you could hear a pin drop. People were not only moved by the explanations but the realization that a Holocaust survivor, 86 years old, and his wife had done this spiritual enhancement. People were mesmerized. We all were blown away.”
Jigsaw puzzle
The project occupied the Greenes’ life for two years, as they worked to complete the windows before the displaced congregation’s return for the High Holy Days and its official rededication the weekend of Nov. 21-23.
The main window behind the ark depicts a menora; George Greene also made the ner tamid.
The first half of the span of the project was spent designing the windows, the second assembling the glass segments.
“It takes me two days to do a panel,” he said a few weeks after the holidays.
“I put in a full day, starting around 9 a.m. Depending on how complicated a particular piece is, I might still be down here at 10 o’clock at night, interrupting just for meals.”
Because a few panels of the front window were not completed before the deadline, a recent visitor had a chance to watch Greene at work. In a corner of his basement, he covered panes of colored glass with a towel to protect himself against flying shards. With deliberate strokes of a hammer, he shattered the glass into random pieces. Using his bare hands, he separated out slivers too small to be used. Then, he explained, just like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, “I just lay them down and try to fit them together” in a design he has drawn on paper.
“I cut myself about once a day,” he said with a smile. “I’m a big customer for Band-Aids.”
This day, working in blue, brown, and green on a panel representing the branches of a tree, Greene put together the missing panel. “It is a hedge, based on the midrash that in order to get to the Tree of Life you have to go through the hedge,” he explained. At the window’s base is a phrase in Hebrew from Exodus: “Build me a sanctuary so I may dwell among you.”
Greene said he has been working with glass “probably for 30 years,” and in 1991 began devoting his energies to projects at Agudath Israel — where he and Bernice have been members for about six decades — volunteering to repair broken panels in preexisting windows. “It didn’t look so good, so we decided to do all new panels,” he said.
Greene also crafted CAI’s Holocaust memorial, its daily minyan ark, the sanctuary’s eternal light, and an outsize hanukkia.
Agudath Israel’s board of trustees needed little convincing to commission Greene for this latest job.
He works without pay. “The congregation covers the cost, but my labor is absolutely free,” he said. “And these are the instructions that I got from the executive board: ‘George, don’t let anybody tell you what to decide, and don’t let anybody tell you what colors to use. It’s all yours.’”
Greene was born in Vienna; his family “barely escaped” Europe in 1939 when he was 16. Together with his parents, brother, and sister, he settled in Parsippany.
During World War II, Greene spent two and a half years in the United States Army as a field artilleryman. He landed at Normandy after the D-Day invasion and saw combat in Czechoslovakia.
He joined Agudath Israel after returning home from the war.
Greene learned the art of glass working at a local adult school and soon discovered that he knew “more than the teacher did,” he said. “I am always searching for things in the libraries.”
He and his wife have traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, examining the stained-glass windows in many synagogues and churches along the way.
“You see what others are doing and you decide, ‘I’m not going to do it that way,’” he insisted.
“What’s next?” he asked rhetorically. “Do a lot of things around the house Bernice has wanted me to do for the last two years. It’s a ‘honey-do list.’”
“I want him to print the pictures from our last several vacations and make a tower for my CDs,” she said. “And then I’ll find some other things for him.”
With his windows a major and permanent part of the refurbished Agudath Israel sanctuary, Greene said, his pride evident, that it will be “a very good feeling to have something there that everybody appreciates. I can’t walk in there without somebody coming over and telling me how beautiful it looks.”
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