Review
Most Jerusalem Post readers today know Riskin primarily as a leading figure of Israel's Anglo-Orthodox community, founding father of the Gush Etzion community of Efrat, head of the several Jewish educational institutes he has developed here and, of course, author of this paper's weekly Torah portion column.
Prior to his making aliya, though, Riskin was the precocious boy-wonder of American-Jewish modern Orthodoxy. Abramson has now penned A Circle in the Square: Rabbi Shlomo Riskin Reinvents the Synagogue, a biographical study of how Riskin developed his revolutionary style of Orthodox-Jewish outreach at New York City's Lincoln Square Synagogue (LSS) during the 1960s and '70s, and the huge impact it eventually had on the American-Jewish community as a whole (including myself indirectly, though I never stepped foot inside the place).
"Steven" Riskin came from outside the Orthodox fold, born and raised in a non-observant Brooklyn household, but deeply influenced by more traditional relatives and some of the Judaism teachers he encountered in adolescence. A Torah prodigy at YU and a favorite of the renowned scholar Yosef Soloveitchik, he initially envisioned for himself a future spent more as an academic than a congregational rabbi.
Fate intervened though when a new shul on New York's Upper West Side sent out word it was looking for a rabbi. In a fascinating chapter, Abramson details how LSS was initially created as part of an ambitious urban-renewal real estate scheme (only in New York!). In 1964, the developers of a new condominium complex called Lincoln Towers, built as part of a larger municipal effort to gentrify what had become a moribund slum area, decided it would be advantageous to provide a location for a small, fledgling local congregation in the hope of attracting more upscale Jewish tenants....
LSS became a local phenomenon, and Riskin was hailed in the press as the "Stevie Wonder" of New York Jewry. While the synagogue's success was a major factor in the transformation of the Upper West Side into the beating heart of the city's observant Jewish community, it's impact as a template for other shuls went out far beyond Manhattan. As Abramson writes:"Orthodox synagogues in the mid-1960s... were failing miserably at revealing the inherent spirituality of Judaism and the compelling force of Jewish law to young, non-Observant Jewish professionals. Therefore, the survival of modern Orthodoxy on any serious scale was in jeopardy.
"Without the Lincoln Square 'happening,' the future of modern Orthodoxy in America might have been severely threatened. This is true not just because of the numerous young (and some older) professionals at Lincoln Square who became religiously observant. It is true because Lincoln Square Synagogue was responsible for an unprecedented breakthrough in modern Orthodox thinking. For the first time, outreach to the uncommitted become part and parcel of an Orthodox synagogue's planning, thinking and programming."
That's a heavy claim to make, and for the most part Abramson backs it up; his book is written with deeper research and far more scholarly rigor than the usual rabbinical hagiography. --Calev Ben-David, Jerusalem Post
What Rabbi Riskin was able to do was... to make the synagogue a haven and a heaven for people. The haven was a place that protected them, that allowed them to rethink the way they embraced society, and a place that gave them the energy to embrace society in a very creative way.... You felt a certain warm embrace because you had all these different individuals finding some form of cocoon in the institution. The heaven part was teaching them that religion was more than just the prayer experience. It was an intellectual rendezvous with God. --Rabbi Kenneth Brander
Anyone interested in the biography of a rabbi credited with helping to spark a renaissance in American Orthodox Judaism or in the story of how a small group of Conservative worshippers came to found a vibrant Orthodox shul -- or both -- will be rewarded with this compelling portrait of Lincoln Square Synagogue and the man who made it happen. --New York Jewish Week
About the Author
Rabbi Edward Abramson served a congregation in Saratoga Springs, NY from 1973 to 1976, and was the principal of two Jewish day schools in the New York City area. He and his family moved to Israel in 1983, where he served as educational director of the World Union of Jewish Students. Rabbi Abramson, who has also pursued business interests in Israel, served as an advisor on North American affairs for the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel.
Through speaking, teaching, and writing, he has reached out to many audiences uninitiated in Torah study, and sees himself as an appreciative beneficiary of the Jewish outreach movement of the 1960s.
Rabbi Abramson has a B.A. in English literature, an M.A. in Jewish history, and semicha (rabbinic ordination) from Yeshiva University.
