The changing song of the South

A portrait of a declining West Virginian community

BILL ADLER
Special to Jewish News

The Tree of Life synagogue, purchased in the 1930s, was originally a church.

Photo by Bill Adler

Watching a young boy become a bar mitz-vah last weekend brought me back to my special day, in a different time, in a different place, and under different circumstances.

The time was the years following World War II, the place was a small West Virginia town and the circumstance was not just another bar mitzvah but a community celebration. Those memories of my southern Jewish upbringing were tempered by the harsh realization of what I found when I returned to the Tree of Life Synagogue a few years ago.

Clarksburg was a thriving coal mining and manufacturing center in central West Virginia during the first half of the 20th century. By the late 1930s its Jewish community of 65 families founded the Tree of Life Synagogue.

It was not an easy beginning. Although approximately 55 of the families were young Reform households, the remaining "old guard" not only were Orthodox, but were the only ones with the financial ability to support a shul. The Reform group had the minyan; the Orthodox, the money.

As was so often the case in communities like this, the compromise was to form a Conservative congregation.

After meeting in a rented hall for a few years, they purchased a small church. The Tree of Life had a new home, and this thriving, small, tight-knit, Jewish community had a central meeting place. The new shul held Sunday school classes through the sixth grade.

I studied for my bar mitzvah with one of the community lay leaders who had a bit of trouble understanding why a 12-year-old boy would rather be outside playing baseball on a nice summer day than studying Hebrew.

During the High Holidays, except for the dime stores and a department store, most of the downtown stores were closed because the majority of downtown merchants were Jewish. Occasionally, we would have a student rabbi for the High Holidays, but learned lay leaders provided most of our services and education.

The community celebrated all of the major and minor holidays. B'nai mitzvah were special because unlike the holidays, they didn't necessarily happen every year. It was as complete a Jewish experience as possible in a community of 65 Jewish families.

For those who kept kosher, food was bussed in from Pittsburgh. Our community Passover needs arrived when a family or two, with orders in hand, made the three-hour drive to Pittsburgh to shop on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill. During World War II, families would pool their gas ration stamps for the Passover provision run north.

I felt I had a good "Jewish upbringing." To me, as a child, it appeared there was no problem being Jewish and growing up in a southern, Christian community. My brothers and I were the only Jewish children in our small grade school. To a youngster, there was little outward appearance of anti-Semitism in our community.

Following World War II, things started to change in our town. The coal mines began to close and the factories, one by one, shut down. My parents, with four growing sons, started to rethink their future.

With the economic down turn, no university nearby, and a small number of Jewish children in Sunday school, they and many of the other young parents came to the same conclusion. If they wanted to continue to earn a living for their children, provide them with a college education, and give them an opportunity to find suitable Jewish spouses, they needed to move. A new Jewish exodus was about to begin.

In the early 1950s, my father closed his men's clothing store, sold our home and moved us west to a lovely city of 125,000 people and an estimated 4,000 Jews: Phoenix, Arizona. There were three shuls, and they immediately joined Temple Beth Israel, with an unbelievable 300 Reform family members and a beautiful new synagogue on 10th Avenue and Flower Street, with palm trees in the front.

The family thrived and my parents realized most of their dreams for their children. All four sons graduated from Arizona State University, two becoming doctors. We all married - three out of four to Jewish women - and have enjoyed success in our chosen professions.

The fate of the Clarksburg Tree of Life Synagogue was not so positive. When I recently returned on a sentimental visit, there was only one person that I had grown up with still living in Clarksburg. The downtown business community was gone, snuffed out, for the most part, by the Wal-Mart and regional shopping center, located 15 miles out of town on Interstate 79.

A remaining downtown business, a working-man's store, was owned by one of the two Jewish merchants I could find. The owner, now in his 70s, had the keys to the synagogue. He walked down with me to Pike Street to open the building. The shul's outward appearance had not changed much in nearly 50 years. Walking inside brought back strong, solemn and fond memories. The major change was the increased number of memorial plaques that adorned the walls.

What also had changed was the number of Tree of Life members - only twelve. The congregation was barely holding on.

That Saturday a bar mitzvah was scheduled, the shul's first in years. The family celebrating lived more than 60 miles away. This was the price of progress, progress that passed over small southern towns like Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Perhaps this was my last visit to my Jewish roots and the Tree of Life Synagogue, before it fades away into history. The song of the South is no longer a sweet melody for small town Jews.

When the building was recently appraised, the original stained glass in the building's windows, left in place when it was converted from a church, were valued at $500,000. Could the last surviving member of Clarksburg's Tree of Life congregation be the beneficiary of a Jewish tontine?

Bill Adler arrived in Phoenix with his parents and three brothers in June 1953 and has resided in the community ever since. He was recently featured in Channel 8's "Phoenix in the 1950s."

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