From 1976 | Barefoot in Shul

This is Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s first column for Moment, published in the September 1976 issue. She continues to write regularly for Moment (a collection of her columns is here) and will be honored with the Mitchel & Gloria Levitas Literary Journalism Award at Moment’s 50th Anniversary Gala on November 16, 2025.

Twice a year—on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur I enter a metaphorical telephone booth, shed my secular identity of writer, editor and feminist activist, and emerge a chazan, complete with white robes and beatific smile. 

As annual cantor of the erstwhile Jewish congregation of Saltaire, Fire Island, I have stumbled upon some inescapable insights—about myself, our “flock” of largely lapsed Hebrews and the state of Jewish consciousness among the landed (or sanded) bourgeoisie. 

Fire Island, a 32-mile long barrier beach less than two hours from Times Square, attracts sun-loving city folk of various social persuasions: swinging singles, gays, groupers and nuclear family types. During the summer, these self-selecting populations leave their cars on the mainland, board ferry boats and migrate across the Great South Bay to whichever Fire Island community best serves their lifestyles. 

Our little village of Saltaire is a family enclave; salty American Gothic, not Brighton Beach. You can get bagels and Nova at the village store, but pickled herring requires a special order. Up to fifteen years ago, there would have been few requests for either delicacy. For decades the town was tacitly restricted and the two or three token Jewish families kept a low profile. Then, in the early ’Sixties, a seemingly unspoken change of policy opened the Saltaire harbor to a steady influx of Jewish renters and homeowners, and today the estimate of Jewish households ranges from 15 to 25 percent. But who’s counting? 

Religion is not an issue in Saltaire. Residents are more overtly concerned with erosion of the beaches, repair of the wooden boardwalks, and supervision of the children’s day camp. Today, we’re a restricted community in only two areas: we exclude groupers in favor of decorous families and we restrict vehicles in favor of wagons and bicycles. On those issues Saltairians of all faiths are nearly unanimous. 

Yet for all its secular character, one fact about this integrated 300-family village would not evade a serious observer of American spiritual life. Rising out of the beach grass and sand dunes are two enormous churches, St. Andrews By The Sea (Episcopal) and Our Lady Star of the Sea (Roman Catholic). From ocean to bay, from one end of the horizon to the other, there isn’t a shul in sight. 

From the time our family arrived in the summer of ’68, there were always jokes about starting a temple building fund. What would the town elders say if we erected one of those fundraising thermometers outside the Village Hall? How about putting a pushke (collection box) in the store? Our humor rested not only on the town’s history but on our realistic assessment of ourselves. Which of us, after all, felt like a displaced person because no synagogue was near? Who lays t’fillin or even attends regular Sabbath services back in the city? 

We were young professionals, lawyers, stockbrokers, writers, business people—assimilated second-generation American Jews whose ethnic identity was neither denied nor affirmed. We were just Jews. If we belonged to Hadassah, if we planned bar or bat mitzvahs for our children, that was part of our “other” life. 

After Labor Day, summer renters moved their broods back to the mainland and homeowners continued coming out to the Island only on weekends. When the High Holy Days arrived, some people affiliated with temples near their year-round homes, and others (many others it turns out) ignored the holidays altogether. 

As I see it, we were a microcosm of American Jewry—raised traditionally and now alienated from rituals that seemed to have lost their emotional relevance. Uninterested or even negative about organized religion, but vaguely disturbed that our children lacked an ethnic anchor for their futures. Concerned for Soviet Jewry, supporters of Israel, contributors to Jewish causes, we were responsible people who were busy with our everyday lives and comfortably remote from our spiritual selves. 

But Adele Seltzer and Peggy Shuman, two women in the community, had found a way to keep the faith while remaining on the Island. For a few years they had been hiking two miles down the beach to the neighboring village of Seaview where another woman held impromptu Rosh Hashanah services on her sundeck. They called it “Great Neck By The Sea.” But in 1969, instead of schlepping along the beach, the Shumans and the Seltzers decided to borrow 10 prayer books from the Seaview group and perform their own service. The Seltzers’ house was informally consecrated as a sanctuary and Hal Seltzer walked up and down the town’s boardwalks inviting every Saltairian whom he knew (or suspected) to be Jewish. 

“Thirty-two people ended up squeezed around the 10 prayer books,” Hal remembers. “A minyan, plus 22 children. We didn’t know what we were doing. Earl Shuman, a lyricist, was the rabbi though he couldn’t read Hebrew. His brother Alden, a composer, was in charge of the record player. He put on a few minutes of Richard Tucker’s service and then we recited English from the prayer books and made up a few things of our own. For the first time in years I wasn’t embarrassed about my lack of religious training. I felt at home in Judaism.” 

In a way different from Hal, I too had been struggling with my place in Judaism. During my childhood there were no contradictions. I was raised in a kosher home and was educated by a decade of Hebrew school and Talmudic discussions at the dinner table. Every Friday night and Saturday morning and on holidays, my parents and I went to temple where I daydreamed, thumbed through the Chumash looking for the sexy parts, and flirted with boys of bar mitzvah age. Whether subliminal or conscious, all that davening managed to etch the liturgical melodies into my brain. And I grew to love them. For my bat mitzvah Haftorah I read Deborah’s “Song of Victory” from the Prophets. I remember feeling very lucky that I was growing up to be a Jewish woman. 

Everything changed when my mother died. I was 15. There seemed no sense in serving a God that could allow such a thing to happen. Moreover, my Kaddish didn’t count because I wasn’t a son. 

During the next 15 years there was college, work, marriage, three children and feminism. The feminism added a new rationale for my estrangement from Judaism. Despite Deborah’s “Song of Victory,” I saw scant evidence that Jewish women were valued for more than domestic and child-rearing roles. I refused to remain in the kitchen. 

But I’ve discovered that I cannot entirely exempt myself from this system of beliefs and observances that once mattered so deeply. My intellect rejected everything, but my spirit was addicted to a semi-annual fix of Jewish ritual, and I was willing to let my children get hooked too. But only on Passover, Chanukah, and the High Holy Days. 

Which brings me to 1970 in Saltaire. 

That year I anticipated spending the Holidays at a synagogue in Manhattan where one can buy a seat if not a sense of belonging. But sometime during the summer I learned about plans to augment the tiny ad hoc congregation that had been formed at the Seltzers’ house the previous year. Would we and other Jewish families be interested in participating? Sure we were interested. Indian Summer is the best time of year on the Island. 

The Seltzers again offered their home for the services but this time the guiding genius of the project was Larry Weber, a New York stockbroker who was best-known on Saltaire as a gung-ho volunteer fireman. Somehow Larry made a list of all the Jewish homeowners (renters would be gone by October) and tried to contact each personally. To reach Jews and gentile friends alike, he put signs on the store bulletin board and on the lifeguards’ shack at the ocean beach. People were intrigued and enthusiastic. Some volunteered to bring wine and honeycake for the Kiddush. Judy Weber and Adele Seltzer rehearsed a group of children in a selection of Israeli songs. Other people contributed money toward expenses. 

And we started to have expenses. Larry went to Bloch Publishers in Manhattan to buy a shofar and 25 prayer books. 

“I decided to try out the shofar since I’ d never blown one before and I thought I’d need the salesman’s help,” Larry recalls. “I made a perfect t’keeah on my first attempt, probably because I used to play the flute. But the salesman was astonished. He told me some rabbis can’t blow as well after a lifetime of trying.” 

To avoid charging Larry sales tax, the salesman said he needed the name of our congregation. Larry thought quickly and answered, “B’na i Saltaire.” 

During the planning stages it became clear that among B’nai Saltaire (the Sons of Saltaire), there were no male Jews who could read Hebrew and sing the traditional holiday chants. And so, with the liturgical melodies flooding my memory, I came out of the closet and reclaimed my Jewish past. I accepted the mantle of cantor. 

Fearing spiritual overdose, Larry and I mapped out a service for Rosh Hashanah that would last only an hour and a half. We marked selections to be sung in Hebrew and passages to be recited in English by individual members of the congregation. The wicker couches and chairs were lined up in the Seltzers’ living room and two tables were stacked together and covered with a cloth to serve as an altar. This time nearly 80 people shared our 25 prayer books. Larry’s shofar blasts were triumphant, our communal readings were expressive and our children’s singing was sweet. I was overwhelmed by the just-right feeling of beginning a fresh new year among friends in a fresh, hopeful place. From the crowd around the kiddush table came a chorus of demands: “What time are Yom Kippur services next week!?” 

Late afternoon, October 10, 1970. On the spacious pine-surrounded deck of the Webers’ house we “did” Yizkor and N’ilah (the concluding service of Yom Kippur). Judy Weber reminds me of the magnificently timed sunset that accompanied the end of those prayers under the sky. Just as I finished chanting the seven-times repeated Adonai Hu Haelohim (The Lord, He is God), the sun slipped behind the trees. “It was mystical,” Judy says. “The sun seemed to be setting on the old year just for us.” 

News of our successful services spread and magnified through winter retelling. By the following summer it was well known that the Jews had outgrown their houses and sundecks. A senior pillar of the Episcopal community offered us the use of the Church for our 1971 services. We accepted, but secretly we feared humiliation. The church could seat about 250; what if there were rows of empty pews? 

But there was no stopping the rise of this particular lost tribe of Jews. With our own group growing and inviting their house guests, and with Jews trudging to us from nearby Island communities, we have more than filled the church every year since 1971. St. Andrews By The Sea has been newly dubbed St. Andrews By The Shore, which has a better ethnic ring, and each year before the High Holy Days the announcement case in front of the church spells out “Happy New Year“ and lists the schedule of services. Uninformed passersby perform a double-take trying to jibe the sign with the cross on the bell tower. As Jewish congregants enter the church for services they hear a hidden tape recording of Jan Pierce singing holiday chants to set the mood. Inside, the sanctuary is “converted” to Judaism. We remove signs of Christian worship—a banner, brass cross—and replace them with our own symbols, a silver kiddush cup, our shofar on a stand, and a stained glass Magen David made by a local artist. 

In appreciation for this sturdy home, the Jewish community gave the church a pair of candlesticks on which we engraved a quotation from Isaiah: “Thy House Shall Be A House For All People.” But perhaps the real message had been exchanged without words: the days when Jews were unwelcome in Saltaire are part of a dim and forgotten past. 

For the past five years the Jewish community has been a highly visible constituency during the holiday period and our services have become a village “event” for all. The Saltaire market occasionally donates sacramental wine, various neighbors contribute floral arrangements from their gardens, and we all turn in yarmulkes we’ve collected from the Jewish functions we attend throughout the year. B’nai Saltaire’s eclectic yarmulke collection includes the blue velvet cap from the “Bar Mitzvah of Bernard Schwartz,” the white satin number embroidered “The Cohen-Finklestein Wedding,” and a choice of black acetate styles stamped with the dates of assorted testimonial dinners. 

In 1975 we prepared our own prayer “booklet,” and thank God we had a printer in our midst. Norman Shaifer, a Jew who happens to be the publisher of Catholic periodicals and encyclopedias, contributed 300 prayer booklets complete with spiral binding and a cover picture by Chaim Gross—a bright watercolor drawing of the blowing of the ram’s horn. 

For each holiday service we attract a colorful pilgrimage of bikers, walkers and parents pulling small children in red wagons. I think I relish most the touching tableau of men in suits and women in long skirts and suntanned children in starched dress-up clothes walking down the church aisles, barefoot. 

Ask any Saltaire Jew and you’ll hear another favorite High Holiday anecdote. 

Remember when the fire alarm sounded just as we were set to begin Kol Nidre. Our fireman-rabbi trembled with indecision, finally resolving his conflict of interests by dashing off to fight the fire while the Jan Peerce recording was replayed for the waiting congregation. 

Then there was the immense communally cooked dinner preceding one Rosh Hashanah service when the smells of stuffed cabbage and kasha filled the breezes and families came with wagonsful of Jewish dishes never before exhibited publicly in Saltaire. 

Remember the year Shalom Secunda died and his son Sheldon sang to the congregation a selection of Secunda’s classic Jewish songs, bringing a lump to every throat. 

Who can forget the time when George Maluso, the town’s Italian gourmet cook, baked a huge Challah for our kiddush. After the blessing one unidentified man brandished the bread knife and said it looked as if we needed about 100 pieces. While George winced and the rest of us gaped in amazement, the man proceeded to hack the loaf with the speed and grace of a samurai swordsman. “I used to be a caterer,” he said proudly. 

Last year a motel in the next community ran an ad in The New York Times (alongside big notices for the Concord and Grossingers) luring guests with the headline, “Join Us For The Holidays. RELIGIOUS SERVICES NEARBY.”“ That’s when we knew we were a bona fide Jewish institution with solid roots in Fire Island’s shifting sands. In fact, we’re now wondering if we’ll need the Catholic church this year for our overflow service. 

But these anecdotes of our success would be meaningless if our services were meaningless—if we simply provided a way for Jews to avoid guilt by “making an appearance.” 

As reluctant Jew turned eager cantor, I know what Saltaire services fulfill for me and my family. But I’ve heard the president of a multi-million dollar corporation say that he had never been moved by a Jewish service before ours, and I’ve heard a 10-year-old boy tell his parents that because of our service he’d decided to become a bar mitzvah after all. I’ve seen a staid and formal lawyer wipe away tears and admit his repressed childhood Orthodoxy, and I’ve heard another lawyer proclaim that this was his first turn to Judaism since his bar mitzvah forty-five years before. I’ve heard a woman resolve to resume her Hebrew studies, and I’ve listened to a reclusive couple who believed that they had been “passing“ as gentiles, announce “Now that you know we’re Jewish please include us in all your services.“ 

Christians have experienced Jewish tradition and ritual for the first time at our services, and Jewish-Christian intermarriages have expressed gratitude for services that satisfy one member of the couple without alienating the other. 

It isn’t hard to respond to B’nai Saltaire. We don’t ask much. It’s “come as you are” and “donate if you feel like it.” We play music and ride bikes on the Yom Tov and we skip great portions of the service so the kids can get back to the beach and the grown-ups to the tennis courts. But we seem to be reaching people in ways that no other kind of Judaism has. And our volunteer speakers deliver dynamic sermons. One year, a sermon about the presence of God in the unspoiled natural beauty of our Island; the next year a message about the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the relentless predictability of anti-Semitism. Last Rosh Hashanah, Hal Seltzer returned to the pulpit that he and his wife founded and Hal gave a sermon that epitomized the joys of do-it-yourself Holidays. He comforted our little band of born-again religionists by gently reassuring us about being “twice a year Jews:” 

“No need to apologize…I prefer to look at the bright side of things. I think it’s great that we show up at all!

“I think it’s great that you do come here for Rosh Hashanah—meet in a Church, not a Synagogue, pray with an extracted combination of Hebrew and English prayers which might cause an Orthodox Jew to walk out in either anger or laughter. 

“I think it’s great that you bring the children. Because what you’re showing is you’re a Jew…and on this holy day, if on no other day, you want to show up in shul, pray to God as Jews have prayed for over 4,000 years, and restore yourself and your faith.”

Amen. And Happy New Year to all you mainland Jews who still wear shoes in shul.