Synagogues Miss Usual Holiday Festivities
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Tonight on the Upper West Side, for the third year in a row, there will be little in the way of dancing in the streets.
Simchat Torah, a Jewish celebration marking the end of the year-long reading of the Torah, typically involves much dancing, singing, and general merry-making in the streets. Up until September 11, many of the most prominent synagogues on the Upper West Side turned West End Avenue into a veritable outdoor festival.
But after September 11, the city withheld permits for such public gatherings. And now, three years later, police have advised rabbis of the Upper West Side congregations that such a public display is still not advised.
According to Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, a rabbi for Lincoln Square Synagogues, rabbis of various synagogues on the Upper West Side did not even try applying for permits this year.
“The general feeling is that it’s too bad that we have to give into the terrorist threat, but this is really something that we can’t ignore,” Rabbi Buchwald said. “This holiday is certainly less joyous than it used to be. The festivities in the streets were really wonderful and they will be missed.”
But Rabbi Naftali Citron of the Carlebach Shul on West 79th Street, which is holding an indoor celebration from 7:30 to the wee hours of the morning, expects that 5,000 people will drop by throughout the evening. And while there will be no dancing in the streets, Rabbi Citron noted that the lines of people waiting to get into the synagogue tend to create something of an “outdoor party atmosphere.”
The West Side Institutional Synagogue was one of the only synagogues on the Upper West Side that obtained an outdoor event permit for Simchat Torah, but the celebration will in no way rival or attract as big of a crowd as the West End Avenue celebrations of yore.
Outdoor festivities or not, Simchat Torah remains a vibrant singles scene for the city’s single Jewish population. In addition to local singles who flock by the thousands to the Upper West Side, vast numbers of out-of-towners descend upon Manhattan in hopes of meeting their mate. “All the hotels on the Upper West Side are booked,” Rabbi Citron said. “We have people flying in from Canada and we have observant Jews walking all the way to the Upper West Side from Park Slope and the Bronx.”
