History

Slide Show: Portland's Pan Am Stewardesses

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:14:00 -0700

For a small but tight-knit band of Portland women, the glamorous Jet Set age remains more than a legend. They flew for Pan Am, America's iconic airline, in an era of highballs, high living, and sharp outfits.

How to Make a Mummy

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:31:00 -0700

Image: Nomad

You can make them yourself. “We mummified a sheep and a cat by leaving them out on the roof of a building. You have to make sure they’re covered with natron, a salt-soil mixture that occurs naturally in Egypt and acts as a desiccating agent.”

Image: Nomad

But they might detonate! “If you don’t prepare them correctly, they won’t dry out properly. Gases could build up inside the bodies and cause them to burst. We’ve found Egyptian mummies that
look like they exploded.”

Image: Nomad

Ancient Egypt was plagued by mummy scams. “For religious reasons, people mummified animals. But we find fakes—a specimen might look like a falcon, for example, but inside it’s just mud, with maybe one feather. It could have been a lucrative scheme for priests, who charged people to create mummies.”

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry debuts Mummies of the World—billed as “the largest collection of mummies ever assembled”—on June 14.

Two centuries ago, Egyptian mummies were frequently cut into pieces and sold, often to tourists. These Egyptian mummy heads are part of the Mummies of the World exhibition, the largest traveling exhibition of mummies and artifacts ever assembled.

Image: American Exhibitions, Inc.

The 1946 Portland Rosebuds

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:08:00 -0700

Image: Taylor Callery

When it comes to baseball, Portland has commitment issues. The Spartans, the Monograms, the Pioneers, and the Mavericks all came and went. After 107 years in Portland, the suddenly homeless Beavers shipped off to become the Tucson Padres in 2011. A new single-A team, the Hops, will soon play ball in a shiny new $15.2 million park ... in Hillsboro.

But no part of the city’s hardball history is quite as strange as the one-season-stand of the Rosebuds, the city’s last Negro League team.

On June 4, 1946, the Portland Roses (as they were more commonly called) suited up for their first game at Vaughn Street Park against the Los Angeles White Sox, with 1,500 curious onlookers in the stands. The 12,000-seat stadium’s usual tenants, the exclusively white Portland Beavers, were out of town. The new team’s owner was none other than Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, “the world’s fastest man.” Before the first pitch was thrown, Owens ran and jumped hurdles around the diamond.

The newly minted all-black baseball league based on the West Coast was the brainchild of Harlem Globetrotters impresario Abe Saperstein, who sought to capitalize on the influx of black workers to the Pacific seaboard during the war years. So-called Major League Baseball was still all-white, leaving some of the best athletes ever to play the national pastime in segregated, all-black leagues. The six-team West Coast Baseball Association was the seventh (and last) Negro league to test the market since the late 19th century.

“This is the beginning of a regular colored Pacific coast baseball league.” —Jesse Owens, 1946

Hopes ran high as the new league announced a 110-game schedule. Owens recruited experienced players, including pitcher Al Jones from the Memphis Red Sox, infielder Collins Jones, late of the Birmingham Black Barons, and first baseman Blue Dunn from the Miami Ethiopian Clowns. In 1936, Owens had lost $25,000 promoting another Negro league team, and the sprinter was determined to make it work this time.

“It’s easier to start from scratch on the track than at the bank,” he later mused. “I buckled down and proved to myself that I had talent to think as well as to run.”

By the end of June, Portland was in second place. The Oregonian announced that the Roses “have hit their stride and figure to be strong contenders for the loop title.” As attendance suffered, however, so did the news coverage. By July, the league and the Roses collapsed, destined for obscurity. When contacted for this story, neither Owens’s descendants nor staff at the Jesse Owens Museum in Alabama knew anything about his involvement in the Roses. No photographs could be found.

The team’s demise coincided with a rise for African Americans in the wider sphere of the game. While none of the Roses’ players would break into the majors, less than a year later Jackie Robinson, an alum of the Negro American League’s Kansas City Monarchs, debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers—the first black player to cross Major League Baseball’s color line. And Owens? He became the running coach for the New York Mets in 1965.

Slide Show: Ancient Oddities from OMSI's 'Mummies of the World'

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:04:00 -0700

Mummies of the World is the largest traveling exhibition ever assembled of mummies and artifacts, featuring 150 never-before-seen real human and animal mummies and objects from South America, Europe, Asia, Oceana, and Egypt. The exhibition was developed by American Exhibitions, Inc., in association with the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum (REM). For more information: www.mummiesoftheworld.com.

The Accidental Story of "Louie Louie"

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Oregon Historical Society, Image #Bb003114

Where: Northwestern Inc Motion Pictures and Recording, SW 12th Avenue and Burnside Street When: April 6, 1963 (50 years ago)

Jack Ely, lead singer, The Kingsmen: “Louie Louie” was making the rounds in the Northwest. It started out as a Jamaican dirge. The Wailers recorded a soul version up in Seattle, which is what I heard. Paul Revere and the Raiders recorded it in Portland the week after we did it. But when I taught the song’s intro to our band, we were in a hurry, so ours ended up sounding like hard rock. It was a mistake, but that’s what happened.

The session was 10 o’clock in the morning. We set up in a circle, and played live. I yelled straight up into a microphone hanging down from the ceiling. Before we played, we could see an argument in the booth. We found out later the studio owner was telling the producer, “You can’t put the levels that high—you’ll blow up my board.” The producer sent the guy out for coffee and locked the door behind him.

Then he told us to run through it. About 10 or 12 bars into the song he stops us and says, “OK, that sounds pretty good. Let’s just run through it from the top.”

We thought we were just rehearsing. But when we finished, he said, “Great! Wonderful! What do you want to put on the B side? Make it something you wrote. You’ll make more money.” We didn’t have any real songs, but we’d been messing around with one chord progression, so we recorded that and called it “Haunted Castle.” The whole session lasted about 45 minutes.

“We all hated ‘Louie Louie.’ We thought it was horrible.”

—Jack Ely (middle)

We all hated “Louie Louie.” We thought it was horrible: mushy, with more low end than anything we’d ever heard. The vocals were a complete mess. The producer kept telling us that all made it great, and we thought, well, OK. It’s done.

We pressed 1,000 copies. The five of us got 20 each to pass out at school—I was going to Portland State, one guy was at Lewis & Clark, one guy was still at Cleveland High. The rest went into distribution, and nothing happened for months. That fall, a DJ in Boston was doing one of those shows where people call in to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a song. He said something like, “I know you’re going to hate this one, because it’s the worst record I’ve ever heard.” Much to his chagrin, the switchboard lit up with people wanting to know where they could buy it.

The record sold 12 million copies. And for some reason, of all the recordings of the ’60s, it’s one of the few that’s never disappeared.

The History of Portland's Lan Su Chinese Garden

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:03:00 -0800

Image: Kate Bryant

Ever wondered how Portland's extraordinary Chinese Garden grew in just a few years from a desolate parking lot into one of the finest classical Chinese gardens outside of China?

The next PSU First Saturday Program features landscape architect Ben Ngan offering a free lecture describing Portland's beloved Lan Su Classical Chinese Garden as an example of urban development that worked. In addition to the being a compelling story of collaboration amongst many involved parties, as well as volunteers and donors, the story of the Garden illustrates just what goes into the process of transforming an abandoned piece of land into a place people flock to visit.

Ngan, landscape architect and past board member of the Chinese Classical Garden and Chinese Garden Society will share insights and images of the development of the Garden from its original concept through construction and completion of the project.

Ngan's presentation is part of an ongoing, monthly First Saturday East Asian Program Series sponsored by the First Saturday Program Comittee and the Portland State Institute for Asian Studies in collaboration with volunteers from the Portland Lan Su Chinese Garden. The series offers a diverse array of educational presentations focusing on the art, architecture, gardens and historical culture of China and East Asia, highlighting connections with the Pacific Northwest.

DETAILS

WHAT: Lecture by landscape architect Ben Ngan: The Story of Portland's Classical Chinese Garden

WHEN: Saturday March 2, 2013 from 9:30 to 11 am

WHERE: PSU Urban Building Room 250 (507 SW Mill Street)

COST: Free and open to the public

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The New Shul

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0800

Image: Leah Nash

His iPhone rings on a Friday afternoon. It’s perilously close to Shabbat, but the rabbi answers.

“Rabbi Zucky,” says a sergeant from the Portland Police Bureau, “one of the horses is very sick. The vet says there’s nothing to be done. Can you come?”

Rabbi Zuckerman checks the Harley-Davidson clock on his office wall, with its pictures of vintage bikes in place of numbers. It revs on the hour.

“It’s nearly Shabbat,” he says. “I won’t drive. Can you pick me up?”

“On our way.”

Once, while living on an Israeli kibbutz, a young Arthur “Zucky” Zuckerman watched a traumatized cow and calf die needlessly because those in charge wouldn’t break the laws of the Sabbath and call for veterinary help. The sound of that cow mooing tears at him still. The young Jew swore he’d never let something like that happen again. Today, he would be there for his officers as they faced this heartbreaking loss.

Rabbi Zuckerman is one of the Portland Police Bureau’s chaplains, the first rabbi to hold the post in the history of the bureau, not to mention its one and only former Israeli soldier. He’s also a pescetarian, a pool shark, and, in case you need one, an instructor in WMD preparedness as certified by the Department of Homeland Security. He’s observed a mock sarin gas attack on the Israeli Parliament and helped strategize Los Angeles County’s distribution of cipro during an anthrax attack exercise.

Prepared for anything, Rabbi Zucky never frets.

“Worry is like a rocking chair,” he says, a lot. “I don’t worry. I do.”

Image: Leah Nash

Synagogue Shaarie Torah’s Rabbi Arthur Zuckerman in his office

This mix of true grit and Talmudic smarts is about to come in mighty handy. Like the police bureau, his congregation needs a rabbi who can do more than pray. The century-old Congregation Shaarie Torah is facing a problem likely to demand all the mettle Zuckerman can muster: obsolescence.

For 108 years, the synagogue has survived more than occasional rumors of its own demise. Now they are back with a vengeance, and some worry Shaarie Torah has too much stacked against it to survive. Cash is not the problem, at least in the short term. The challenges are more complex. While some Portland synagogues brag that they’re not your grandparents’ synagogue, that’s exactly what Shaarie Torah is—your bubbe’s shul. The once-proud modernist building on NW 25th Avenue feels ponderous and uninspiring, its interior a tired study in dark hallways, dropped ceilings, and cold light. The intimate sanctuary often has many vacant seats; the balcony’s empty. A little more than a 15 years ago, Shaarie Torah was home to 457 families; today, that number is 259. Two-thirds of its members are older than 65, arguably the oldest demographic among the city’s temples.

“I think Shaarie Torah could go in one of several directions,” predicts Marshal Spector, a devoted congregant and well-known leader in Portland’s Jewish community. “It could thrive with Zucky and continue to provide an option as a smaller, warm, and flexible traditional synagogue. A lot of families desire that. But I also think it’s possible that Shaarie Torah may not be around in five years, and that would be heartbreaking.”

“It would be devastating for us,” says congregant Melissa Mills-Koffel, whose oldest child, Aedan, just celebrated his bar mitzvah. “We have a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old, and we’re hoping they’ll come up the ranks, too. All the things we get there, we’d never get anywhere else. Shaarie Torah is an extension of our family.”

For the rabbi in the purple prayer shawl, it’s time to rev up and do.

Until the brothers Blumauer arrived in Portland by stagecoach in 1851, nobody worried much about synagogues. Other Jewish pioneers had come and gone, but the Blumauers were the first to stay. The five Haas brothers followed, then Mrs. Weinshank, who ran the boardinghouse near the river for nice Jewish men. (To her, they would always be boys.) In a handful of years, the growing community started Congregation Beth Israel; Shabbat services in 1858 were held above a stable and blacksmith shop.

These first synagogue members were irrepressible. An 1880 argument about doctrine escalated into a showdown when black-bearded Rabbi May pulled a pistol on a congregant, shot twice, and missed. (Make that two Jews, three opinions and one mercifully bad shot.)

Oregon’s second synagogue accused Beth Israel of “nihilism and gentilism.” Worse yet, Beth Israel was Americanized. New European immigrants created a third synagogue; by 1900 there was a fourth. Three and four combined names and members, but some congregants resented the merger. They found their home in 1902 and called it Shaarie Torah.

Nothing, it seems, begets a synagogue faster—on desert islands or in relatively remote early Portland—than dissenting Jews. “It keeps us on our toes!” says Rabbi Michael Cahana of Congregation Beth Israel. “We disagree, we struggle. It’s about the passion we have in the way we see the world.”

By the roaring ’20s, eight synagogues represented three distinct Jewish movements (from left to right, if you will): Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. From the ’60s through the ’90s, three synagogues grew to dominate the city: Beth Israel, Neveh Shalom, and Shaarie Torah. Consider these the basic-flavor years of Portland’s Jewish religious practice.

“When I came here in 1953, the Jewish community was very stable with clearly defined elements,” says Rabbi Joshua Stampfer, rabbi emeritus at Neveh Shalom, the Conservative synagogue founded in 1961 when two older shuls merged. “You knew how people would behave and react.” By no means nostalgic, the 91-year-old rabbi now calls those decades “humdrum and predictable.”

Unlike more sophisticated centers of urban Jewry, with longer histories, larger populations, and numerous institutions of Jewish higher learning, Portland stayed Podunk for a very long time. It wasn’t until 1978 that a nascent group of free-thinking families left Congregation Beth Israel to cultivate more intellectually unexplored ground. It would be a decade before these families found their soulmate rabbi, and a few years still before he packed the pews. By the mid-’90s, though, good luck getting a seat during High Holiday services at Congregation Havurah Shalom, now located on NW 18th Avenue and home to 350 households.

“When I arrived, I was shocked by the energy and involvement of the congregation,” says Rabbi Joey, so well-known by that moniker that some may not know his surname is Wolf. “We were avant-garde.” In terms of religious practice, Havurah Shalom was off the charts, Portland’s first Reconstructionist congregation. Turn left at Reform.

“I wanted something out of the norm,” Rabbi Joey adds, “but I couldn’t believe the deep seriousness of the members, boldly engaged, not just sitting on a roster. Producers, not consumers. This was a group that discovered itself and defined its principles before any rabbi got into the mix.”

Thus ended the humdrum years of Jewish practice. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the hierarchy tumbling: The reign of the Three Rabbis was over. Portland was on the verge of a new age in Jewish life, and the Reconstructionist Havurah Shalom was the hip end of the wedge (at least by Northwest standards; the larger Reconstructionist movement itself was already decades old). Increasingly, Jewish groups were demanding more personal and political relevancy from their houses of worship, no more prepackaged goods.

Behold that most quintessential of PDX movements, DIY, and its heady Talmudic offspring, MicroJewry.

Today, the city is ebullient with places of worship—the latest count is 21—serving a community estimated by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland at 47,000 (though by others closer to 40,000). The spectrum of choices is vast, from Lake Oswego north to Vancouver, Washington, and from Friday-night film night with the secular humanists all the way to separate-gender seating among the Chabad-Lubavitch, whose rabbis wear iconic big black hats. Reconstructionist, Renewal, Independent, and just about all the big brands are now busily reinventing themselves in more idiosyncratic and Northwest-friendly ways.

“I love having the dogs,” says Rabbi Cahana, who leads outdoor Friday-night services during the Reform synagogue Beth Israel’s Shabbat on the Plaza, a popular play-and-pray summertime option offered by a number of synagogues at greenspaces throughout the city. To “Dogs Welcome” signs add ecstatic singing, guided meditation, forest retreats, tree-hugging holidays, live-stream services, and spirited praying, whether to ancient melodies, Beatles tunes, or klezmer clarinets. Text your rabbi for Talmudic interpretations. Go to mah-jongg or a meet-up.

“Labels, Shmabels” proclaims Shir Tikvah’s website, to which its rabbi, Ariel Stone, adds, “There’s less weight of history out here, an attenuation of old bonds.” In short, experimenting is easier.

Unused to such a determinedly inventive community, New York transplant Rabbi Michael Kaplan is often taken aback by PDX ways. Says the young rabbi of the Sephardic shul Ahavath Achim, founded by Jewish immigrants from Turkey and Rhodes in 1916, “Here, you have to work harder to findsomeone who will think inside the box.”

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Image: Leah Nash

Shaarie Torah’s sanctuary on a recent Sunday morning meeting of Jews and Christians

Overthrowing the mother ship was the last thing on Frieda Gass Cohen’s mind when she decided to change seats during service at the Orthodox Shaarie Torah in 1942. She just wanted to be near her husband. They were newlyweds, he knew no one in the congregation, and there she was up in the women-only balcony looking down at him all by himself. “I said, ‘This is not going to be,’ so I moved down and sat next to him.”

Just the kind of chutzpah you’d expect from a woman whose parents had crawled through forests of darkness to escape czarist Russia.

“None of the men objected,” says the synagogue’s diminutive doyenne, “not even the rabbi. And when the other young men came back from the war, the women said, ‘We want to sit by our husbands, too,’ and that was that.” Nevertheless, Frieda Gass Cohen would be 91 before her congregation shed the last garments of its traditional orthodoxy and made women full partners in prayer. That happened under Rabbi Zucky in 2011.

Today, Cohen’s shul is fully egalitarian; women and girls can read publicly from the Torah and, unusual given its Orthodox roots, have bat mitzvahs. Such was the mandate from the congregation’s former president and beloved benefactor, the late Harold Schnitzer, who sat down with Rabbi Zuckerman upon his arrival and tasked him with leading his congregation into the future. “And when he told me all the types of things he’d like to see,” remembers Zuckerman, “my response was, ‘Mr. Schnitzer, I’ve been here two weeks! Give me a chance! I’ll get something done!’”

In the five and a half years since the rabbi took the helm, one thing hasn’t changed. Organized religion in this town is a tough sell, whether you’re a rabbi, a priest, or a minister. Portland’s overall Jewish population may be growing, but only a fraction—10 percent and shrinking, according to the Jewish Federation—belong to any kind of synagogue, in or out of the box. The other 90 percent, if they’re involved culturally at all, don’t need a synagogue membership to participate in Jewish life. They can belong to the Oregon Jewish Museum, take classes at Portland Kollel or the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, send their children to the Portland Jewish Academy, distribute organic produce with the organization Tuv Ha’Aretz, or swing hammers and build affordable housing with Tivnu: Building Justice. Lectures, book clubs, concerts, and film offerings have never been more robust.

So where does that leave nonprofit synagogues that specialize in old-time religion? In Yiddish, the term is shvitzing—sweating—over the bottom line. Add a big building or three, assistant rabbis, cantors, plus education and membership directors, divide the cost among too few people, and the burden becomes untenable.

“Are synagogues even attractive or meaningful?” asks provocateur Marc Blattner, head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. Blattner came to town two years ago, an animated, amiable guy from Philly who is no friend of the status quo. He thinks affiliation limits participation. He hears it all the time. “People who don’t belong to temples, they tell me, ‘I’m Jewish. Isn’t that good enough?’”

Synagogue services are too long, he believes. “The chair was the worst thing to happen to Jewish practice.” Services are unvarying, and membership’s too expensive. “It hurts my ears to hear people say they can’t afford to be Jewish,” he laments.

Blattner simply doesn’t see the numbers needed to sustain Portland’s Jewish institutions. “Everyone wants to tell you they’re holding their own,” he says, suspecting otherwise. Then he pops the big one: “Can synagogues afford themselves?”

When they’re light on their feet, yes. “You’re mostly vulnerable,” says Shir Tikvah’s Rabbi Stone, “if you have a large mortgage and fewer people committed to paying it.” She considers herself lucky; her east-side shul rents its space. But Blattner has a more radical solution: open all the synagogue doors and share the wealth.

To that end, he’s proposing a “Chai Life” pass to Portland’s Jewish community, from the Hebrew word for “life”: one fee to attend synagogues, Hebrew schools, day schools, summer camps. The cost would be $1,800 annually, a fraction of what it costs a Jewish family of four to avail themselves of these same services, though similar to what most singles pay for synagogue memberships.

“With the pass, instead of me belonging to A, B, or C, I am now a member of every synagogue,” he says, “and I can go to any one I wish, wherever I feel comfortable. I think this will bring more people walking in the door.”

Families he’s pitched it to love the plan, but community leaders doubt the math.

“From a business perspective it’s a loser,” says Jeff Nudelman, a former president of several local Jewish institutions and a member of Neveh Shalom. “When I crunch the numbers, I don’t see how it would work. For engaging the maximum amount of people into our Jewish agencies and building something bigger than we have now, it’s outstanding. But he hasn’t convinced me. That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to be convinced.”

Rabbi Cahana of Congregation Beth Israel is less equivocal. He doesn’t like it. “To create a system where you jump from one synagogue to the other is to encourage the idea of fee for service,” he says, describing what some argue is the very definition of membership. “I’m going to take what I want from you, and you, and you. That leaves us with no sense of shared purpose or community.”

A close friend and colleague of the rabbi’s doesn’t share his worry.

“Anything that’s going to help bring people in,” says Rabbi Zucky, who thinks the Chai Life pass has potential but needs to be fine-tuned. “We have to consolidate what we’re doing. But it’s not the rabbis or even the families who are going to be the final word. It’s the boards of all the organizations and synagogues involved that have to buy in. They’re the ones doing the fundraising.”

The two men guiding Shaarie Torah’s 18-person board are all about opening doors. For each of them, embracing change is not simply a strategy, it’s a personal imperative, a means to honor their parents’ dynamic commitment to the congregation. One is Rick Cohen, son of the shul’s beloved instigator, Frieda Gass Cohen. (“Shaarie Torah’s in my DNA,” he says. “I can’t separate myself from it.”) The other is Harold Schnitzer’s son, Jordan.

“My involvement with Shaarie Torah is more about my relationship with my father than with the institution itself,” Schnitzer says. “The synagogue was a huge building block in who Harold Schnitzer was. When I would sit there next to him in synagogue with my little tallis on, playing with the tzittzit (the fringes on the prayer shawl), there’d be a peace about him, an inner glow. He was comfortable with his relationship with God.”

Unlike his late father, Jordan Schnitzer, 61, is more at peace with Judaism’s traditions and ethics than its prayer books. (“When I read the translation of what I’m saying in Hebrew,” he says, “I have huge issues.”) Fitting to his generation and the Jewish community at large today, his own commitment is to a more culturally Jewish way of life. Though he hedged about Blattner’s Chai Life pass in particular, he knows for a fact synagogues cannot afford themselves.

“Everybody’s broke. All the synagogues, all the churches. There’s a vast decrease in membership. We don’t need a demographic study to understand that sea change.”

Yet here is Schnitzer, throwing both his expertise and considerable philanthropic weight behind Shaarie Torah, an institution desperate for reinvigoration. Despite cuts that balanced the current books, by Schnitzer’s accounting, the shul still needs a hefty 30 percent increase in membership—that’s 110 more hard-to-find families—in order to be self-sustaining in the long term. Schnitzer knows a wholesale bailout such as his father often bestowed on his cherished shul makes no sense. For the synagogue to have a future, the community must vote with its feet.

So here’s the Schnitzer idea, approved by the synagogue’s board: two years free Sunday school, membership optional; emphasizing philanthropy, rather than membership alone; and most notably, Shaarie Torah has officially laid to rest its Orthodox past and affiliated with the Conservative branch.

The latter is a bid to shore up its identity. It’s a calculated risk. Congregation Neveh Shalom is already the go-to Conservative shul in town, boasting the largest Jewish congregation in the city. It could end up swallowing Shaarie Torah; synagogues merge all the time. But Shaarie Torah congregant and mother of three Melissa Mills-Koffel suggests the two synagogues have little in common.

“We did a lot of shul hopping before joining Shaarie Torah,” she says. “Neveh Shalom has great programs, but you get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t for us. Shaarie Torah is smaller, warm, and welcoming. And oh my gosh, we love Rabbi Zucky.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s hard to resist a rabbi who throws out candy during services and sets his iPhone to bark.

“I see positive things,” says the characteristically unworried Zuckerman. “If people are talking about doomsday for Shaarie Torah, they’re not at my party.”

But they are in his sanctuary, where they see empty seats and a congregation quite literally in a steady, inevitable decline.

“Yes, we have seniors who are passing away,” Zuckerman concedes, “but the fact is people are going to pass on and people are going to join. And when they move to Portland, they’ll go, ‘Oh! Where is that rabbi with the pool table?’”

Not long ago, Jordan Schnitzer addressed members of the Oregon Board of Rabbis, whose monthly meetings take place around that pool table—albeit covered with a three-piece folding wood top. As board president, Zuckerman presided. Schnitzer told the rabbis that if the demographics didn’t change, some of their synagogues would be gone in 10 years, perhaps even in five. Rabbi Zucky agrees, but he’s betting the house Shaarie Torah will be around.

“My father, he should rest in peace, went to three shtiebel, little synagogues, in our Brooklyn neighborhood. He’d be here until there was a disagreement with somebody. Then he’d be over there. Another disagreement and he’d be at the third. Then he’d come back to the original place.”

A picture of the legendary Jewish baseball player Sandy Koufax looks over the rabbi’s shoulder as he leans in to deliver the rabbinic pitch.

“Point is, you always have to have the shul you don’t go to in order to find out where you belong.”

SYNAGOGUE SAMPLER

A Shabbat tour of Portland-area congregations isn’t quite a pub crawl, but in the right frame of mind, it can be intoxicating—or certainly enlightening—since no two brews are alike.

Here are a few on tap:

Image: Leah Nash

NOTE: Organized “left to right” (i.e., liberal to conservative)

Kol Shalom

Check your Deity at the door when you visit this community for Humanistic Judaism. No “supernatural authority” here, so no need for prayer books or rabbis. But first-Friday film nights are a good time to connect with Kol Shalom’s culturally vibrant members as well as the Jewish values you might not even know you had. kolshalom.org

P’nai Or

“We pray with our feet,” says this politically active, two-decade-old Jewish Renewal congregation, where members dance whenever the spirit moves them. This small, learned group, led by the charismatic Rabbi Debra Kolodny, revels in spontaneity. pnaiorpdx.org

Havurah Shalom

This once-renegade Reconstructionist congregation has grown midsize and established, with more muscle to shake up the political and religious status quo. Rabbi Joey’s intellectually vigorous and searching community likes to keep the questions coming. Except during guided meditation.
havurahshalom.org

Shir Tikvah

Until the Willamette River parts for Portland’s Jewish community to cross the divide, the liberal, Independent Shir Tikvah remains the east side’s only full-time shul. Rabbi Ariel Stone’s casual congregation is serious about social justice and Torah study complete with fresh bagels and heated banter. shir-tikvah.net

Beth Israel

In the summer you can bring the dog to Shabbat on the Plaza with Rabbi Michael Cahana. Until then, there’s not a more august space than this Reform synagogue’s main sanctuary, where prayers come wrapped in the voluptuous silk voice of Cantor Ida Rae Cahana. (Yes, they’re husband and wife.) bethisrael-pdx.org

Neveh Shalom

Gussy up a bit before braving the bright lights and big gates of Rabbi Daniel Isaak’s titanic Conservative shul. Close your eyes and nourish your soul at monthly Keva services; time it right and catch the cantor and the band Klezmocracy usher in a high-stepping Shabbat bride. nevehshalom.org

Kesser Israel

A remodeled brewpub is the cozy new home of the city’s nearly century-old Orthodox congregation, the fastest-growing Jewish denomination in the country, distinguished by its separate seating for women and men. The congregation is committed to family values, charitable works, and traditional practice. kesserisrael.org

Bais Menachem

Expect to be showered with attention by black-hatted Rabbi Motti Wilhelm at this tiny, ultra-
Orthodox Chabad shul. The Shabbat service in the yellow house on SW Vermont Street will fly over your head if you can’t speed-read Hebrew, but the dance steps are easy: all you gotta do is sway. 503-977-9947

Tom McCall's Way with Words

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:29:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Oregon Historical Society, Image #bb010260

Many hands shaped Oregon’s green image, but no voice lent that aura a more verdant glow than that of Gov. Tom McCall. Born 100 years ago this month, the Massachusetts native and maverick Republican preserved beaches, fought polluters, and curbed urban sprawl in his two terms (1967–1975) and beyond. In the process, he turned Oregon political history’s most pungent phrases. Some of his best:

“... Oregon is demure and lovely, and it oughta play a little hard to get. And I think you’ll all be just as sick as I am if you find it is nothing but a hungry hussy, throwing herself at every stinking smokestack that’s offered.”

—from a 1982 event, after critics claimed that mccall’s environmental policies hurt the economy

“Sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia ... threaten to mock Oregon’s status as an environmental model....Oregon ... must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land.”

—from a 1973 speech demanding tough new land-use law

“I sense that I’m headed for Valhalla like a bat out of hell.”

—to reporters after a hospital stay in 1982

“On some mornings, when the city should sparkle in the sun, guarded by the clean silver cone of Mount Hood, Portland is shrouded as if by the murk of some filthy twilight in a shadow world.”

—from Pollution in Paradise, a 1962 KGW documentary narrated by McCall

“Some highway engineers have a mentality ... that would run an eight-lane freeway through the Taj Mahal. That is our problem.”

—from a 1970 interview

This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.... But if the legacy we helped give Oregon ... goes, then I guess I wouldn’t want to live in Oregon anyhow.”

—From a successful 1982 campaign to save the land-use laws he championed. McCall died months later.

The Story of O

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:40:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Oregon Historical Society, image #bb010251

Built in 1892, the old Oregonian building at SW Sixth and Alder was demolished in 1950.

Let us count the signs pointing to the Oregonian’s demise as a daily printed newspaper—and weigh them against its history of survival.

The paper’s circulation on weekdays, which has been shrinking for years, dropped another 6 percent in 2012, to 228,599. The newsroom has seen prize-winning reporters flee to PR, government jobs, and even a longtime nemesis, Willamette Week. Famed political cartoonist Jack Ohman recently jumped ship for the Sacramento Bee, of all places. Last year, the Oregonian’s parent company announced that several of its papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer and New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, would print just three times a week.

Oregonian publisher N. Christian Anderson III has denied an imminent similar move. But many believe it’s just a matter of time. “It has become seemingly impossible to make money creating daily compendiums and throwing it on people’s doorsteps,” wrote David Carr of the New York Times last year.

But whatever changes come, obituaries would be premature. Portland’s paper has had its back against the wall before. Somehow, it always found an escape route.

The Oregonian launched in 1850 as a newspaper catering to the Whig Party, a GOP precursor. By 1860, the paper had become known for brass-knuckled pro-Republican commentary, part of a ferocious brand of partisan journalism known nationally as “the Oregon Style.” In 1880, the O opined of the Democratic Party: “[T]hey have fabricated more and more audacious fictions ... calculated to disgust and alienate even intelligent democrats, and to reduce the party to the sodden and stupid elements.”

The strategy worked, at first. By 1892, the O’s owner, Henry Pittock, had erected one of the city’s first skyscrapers at SW Sixth Avenue and Alder Street. Yet by the Great Depression, circulation of the “Old Lady of Alder Street” had plummeted. In 1934, the board hired a Great War vet named Guy T. Viskniskki to turn things around.

“The Oregonian finds itself on evil days,” Viskniskki wrote. “It must quit being a Model T newspaper in a V-8 age.” Viskniskki made headlines bigger, added pictures, dialed down the rhetoric, and packed in more local news. Some dismissed his approach as “sensationalist” and “yellow,” but the shake-up was a success. By 1939, the Oregonian’s circulation had reached a then-record 120,000.

After World War II, the paper became the state’s dominant printer of mainstream news and views, but it did change course several times. In the mid-1970s, it tacked to capture an increasingly suburban, nonwhite, nonmale readership. “A newspaper is a living thing,” observed O editor J. Richard Nokes. “It must be relevant to all age groups and segments of the population....” Solutions included a handyman column and an entertainment section edited by a New Yorker. (“Anybody from New York has to be an entertainment expert,” declared Nokes.)

But what now, when the predawn thwack of a folded broadsheet hitting the stoop every single morning has become a throwback with dubious business prospects? (“Some days of the week are just more profitable than others,” says Rick Edmonds of the journalism think tank Poynter Institute.) Across the publishing landscape, the general-interest approach is dying, but niches are on fire.

Here’s an idea: perhaps the O could consult the spicier parts of its own archives.

In July 1901, for example, the paper blasted socialists. “It is fortunate for the country that the revolutionists and desperadoes who attack social order and the law ... have become mighty unpopular.... [I]n their harangues they draw a smaller audience.” A local socialist showed up at the offices in a rage. Though managing editor Edgar Piper was able to talk this particular reader down, the episode convinced him to install an emergency buzzer at his desk that could summon the whole newsroom to his aid. A few days before, Piper had punched a visitor who was wielding a chair. Love the politics or abhor them, that was passion.

“Public taste ... waits for no one, and is relentless and cruel to the laggard.”

—Oregonian Editor Guy Viskniskki, 1934

Last year, Anderson hired editorial page editor Erik Lukens of the Bend Bulletin, whose previous work included a call for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—published on Earth Day. Leftie blogs cried havoc, but any rightward drift is subtle so far. Maybe too subtle. The paper declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time since 1964, and reported the election with a grudging headline: “Obama Keeps Job.” (Is passive-aggressiveness the new “Oregon Style”?) Lukens’s editorial page has made odd contrarian jabs—advocating reviving smoking in bars, for instance—but few waves.

Maybe the O should just go for it. A gadfly libertarian voice could be a combustible element in one of America’s liberal bastions. If the paper can once again rouse strong feelings, perhaps it will survive the 21st century just as it mutated through the 19th and 20th. It has less and less to lose.

Slide Show: A Short History of The Oregonian

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:37:00 -0800

We take a tour through the 163-year-old newspaper's tumultuous past

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The Story of O
Can the Oregonian survive? We look to the newspaper's past for clues.