After 43 years at Summit shul, ‘tough Brooklyn kid’ hangs up his gloves

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

In 1962, when Rabbi William B. Horn arrived fresh from the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Summit Jewish Community Center already had a bit of a — oh, let’s say it — reputation.

The Conservative synagogue had been through five rabbis in the previous 10 years, and the congregation had only about 80 members.

“As soon as I started, I realized why they couldn’t be satisfied,” Horn told NJ Jewish News in a recent interview in his office. “Everyone felt he was the president.” Meanwhile, the rabbi had little clout. “I had to go to the post office to pick up the mail.”

More than 40 years later, he’s still there — no longer picking up the mail, but imbuing the synagogue with what many of its 350 congregants describe as a warm, informal, and spiritual atmosphere.

As he prepares for his retirement at the end of July, Horn described how he turned the synagogue around and the challenges he faced in the ensuing four decades.

The Summit JCC is a descendant of the Summit Unity Club, founded in 1923. By 1927 it had a small Hebrew school, and services were conducted by part-time rabbis in rented halls. It was reincorporated as the Jewish Community Center in 1929, affiliated with the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue of America in 1935, and hired its first full-time rabbi, William Weiner, in 1934. He stayed at least eight years.

When Horn and his wife, Dena, arrived, he decided he would not be intimidated by the congregation, its history of rapid rabbinic turnover, or the lack of involvement.

“Fifteen people used to come to Shabbos services on Friday night,” he recalled. “There was no morning service. Ten went for coffee at a diner afterwards and left me alone with two or three other people…. It was not a good congregation, but I felt I had to try because of my situation.”

The situation that had led Horn to select the congregation was the terminal illness of his mother, who was living an easy distance from Summit. Despite the congregation’s difficulties, Horn, a onetime amateur boxer, said, “I figured, I can do it; I’m a tough Brooklyn kid.”

So he told the group who came on Friday night: “You think you’re dedicated to this congregation, but you’re ruining the congregation. You don’t meet anyone. You walk off without even saying ‘Gut Shabbos.’ Why should anyone want to join this congregation?”

Judith Lax, a 45-year member from Summit, remembers meeting Horn in those early days. “I actually told my husband that if he didn’t seem satisfactory, we would move to another congregation. I came back from the meeting and told my husband, ‘I think the rabbi has potential. We’ll stay.’”

Horn set out to exercise that potential and mold the members into a more appealing congregation. The watershed moment came two years later.

“There was a self-perpetuating board,” said the rabbi. “Every year, the same 12 guys came in. I said to the president, ‘There’s a wonderful guy here who I’d like to add to the slate.’ He said, ‘It’s no use. They can’t win even if they run.’ I said, ‘Let’s try. At least we can show we’re an open congregation.’ I got three wonderful members to run. The ballots were sent out. I got my hands on the stencil. I ran off 50 ballots.”

And then he followed the old Tammany Hall credo: “Vote early, vote often.” Horn acknowledged: “I voted 50 times. There were 60 ballots cast altogether. We haven’t had a response similar to that again since I’ve been here,” he quipped, adding, “And we never had to do that again.”

He faced down problems outside the congregation with the same aplomb — from gaining a real place at the table for Jewish clergy on the local Interfaith Clergy Council (of which he would ultimately serve as president) to insisting that the Summit school system close for the High Holy Days. But his legacy to the congregation has less to do with his activism and more to do with his deep commitment to the members of Summit JCC and his ability to connect to them.

“His devotion to this congregation is extraordinary,” said Susan Shapiro, who served as president from 1986 to 1988. “You can call him at 2 a.m., and he’ll be there for you. I don’t think that’s typical.”

“His greatest strength is his person-to-person skills,” said current synagogue president Lew Krulwich. “He’s a tremendous counselor, when you’re sad and when you’re happy,”

Krulwich said that when his grown son needs advice, he still turns to Horn, the rabbi he grew up with.

Over the years, in addition to presiding over life-cycle events, offering pastoral advice, and tending to the sick, Horn has seen the community through the building of two Jewish day schools (he served as first principal of the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County in Randolph when the original administrator hired backed out just weeks before the school was to open), was an activist in the fight for freedom for Soviet Jewry, orchestrated the synagogue’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1973, led countless trips to Israel, established a nursery school and an adult education program at the synagogue, and dealt with the trauma of 9/11.

His wife, Dena, a Jewish educator, arrived with him at the congregation and served the community with the same devotion as her husband. Among other things, she served as lower school principal of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in both West Orange and Cranford; she worked in the Summit JCC religious school; and most recently, for the last eight years, she was a religious school consultant to the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest.

In the last two years, the Horns led their congregation through the rabbi’s own illness: a stroke following open heart surgery in June 2003. Afterward, he could not speak at all for more than two months, and was able to speak in full sentences only four or five months later. Although he acknowledged that speech issues may still arise without warning, he is back to a full schedule.

He was also there during the struggle for women’s rights in the synagogue. He is proud to say that the Summit JCC was among the first Conservative congregations to become egalitarian. In 1972, Judith Lax became the first woman president of a Conservative congregation.

To prepare the synagogue for the transition, Horn invited every congregant to express their feelings on the subject — with one caveat. They had to come for a year to a monthly session on the Jewish laws and customs surrounding the issue. Every month, 50-60 people came.

“Men wanted to preserve their old boys’ club. Women wanted to burn their bras on the bima,” Horn said. He wanted them “to confront the Halacha and its implications.”

After the year of study, participants voted four to one in favor of extending ritual privileges to women. Even then, however, the synagogue took small steps. “I sent out a papal bull saying from now on, women would have the opportunity” to have more responsibility, from becoming a bat mitzva to bentsching Gomel, reciting the blessing of surviving a dangerous situation, from the bima. His edict, he said, “included everything, but there was no blanket approval.” That took another year. Now the congregation has a woman, Janet Roth Krupnick, as its cantor.

When Horn retires at the end of the summer, Rabbi Avi Friedman, assistant rabbi at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, Pa., will succeed him. But taking a seat among the congregants will not be a new routine for Horn, who has regularly sat in the fourth row from the back, on the aisle, during services since his three children were young.

“I didn’t want to give up sitting with them. I would ask them questions. I talked during services. And it contributed to the informality here, and the participation. When I needed to get up and speak, I did.” Friedman, he predicted, will at least start out on the bima, although he already has three children of his own.

While Horn said that he looks forward to saying “No” when the phone rings, something he hasn’t done in 43 years, he will not give up his work as a chaplain with the local police department and at Overlook Hospital.

Visiting the sick, in fact, has been a mainstay of his rabbinate since his first year in Summit, when he began visiting patients at Overlook. “It was a prime motivator in my rabbinate,” he said. And with a master’s degree in counseling, he added, he felt equipped to counsel the ill.

In confronting the events of 9/11, Horn said, he knew instinctively what needed to be done. “I called the police, found out what time the train from New York would arrive, and went to the Summit train station to help passengers” as they disembarked. He was the only clergy there, working alongside members of the fire department and the police department. “I tried to talk to anyone I could. It was terrible, terrible. I hope I don’t have to live through that again.”

Actor, accountant, rabbi

Horn was born in Brooklyn in 1932. As a boy, he told NJJN, he remembers going to synagogue with his extended family. “I thought it was entertaining. We sang and danced.” Although his family attended both Orthodox and Conservative minyanim, he preferred the latter. “They had a youth group.”

His interest in going on the stage led him to the theater long before he ever considered the pulpit. As a teenager he performed on Broadway in the original 1947 production of Kurt Weill’s musical Street Scene, written by Elmer Rice with lyrics by Langston Hughes. Eventually, he headed for a career in accounting. Only after he “was about to flunk out” of New York University, he said, did a mentor steer him to study Hebrew, which eventually led him to the rabbinate, after a brief flirtation with becoming a youth worker.

“Someone said, ‘If you want to devote yourself to the Jewish community, be a rabbi. Then you get to be the boss.’ Made sense to me,” Horn recalled.

Horn holds a degree in Hebrew education from NYU and a master’s degree in counseling from Yeshiva University.

A walk into his office reveals his understanding of children; it is decorated with things they can pick up and play with. “Grownups have to make appointments. Kids can always walk into my office,” he said.

Other objects reflect his interests in music and theater, especially all things Frank Sinatra. A reminder of his other early avocation, a pair of red boxing gloves, sits prominently on a ledge in the office.

As he recovered from his stroke, Horn decided it was time to retire. By late May, 2005 he had started the process of emptying his bookshelves. “I hope the congregation continues to care for one another,” he said when asked what he thought his legacy might be. And he added, “I’m hoping it will be a place that kids and teenagers can come and feel comfortable, and where adults know it is their responsibility to learn and study.”

His congregants believe they’ve had the best. “My feeling is that Rabbi Horn is a rabbi who has it all: intellectual capability, community involvement, counseling skills,” said Shapiro. “He’s a good teacher too. But most important, at least to me, is that he’s the most giving person I’ve ever met. A friend always says, ‘He’s a good person to have in your corner.’”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.