By Phil Jacobs

Rabbi Gustav (Gus) Buchdahl was my bar mitzvah rabbi. It was 1966. My bar mitzvah was scheduled for Oct. 8 (24 Tishrei 5727). Bereshit was my Torah portion. “In the beginning …”

We didn’t know during the winter of 1966 as I started preparing for the bar mitzvah that the Orioles would be World Series bound and my bar mitzvah day would fall on the third game of the Orioles 4-0 sweep of the Dodgers.

Rabbi Buchdahl was the first rabbi that I ever studied with, and, for that matter, the first spiritual leader to become part of my then 12-year-old Jewish boy world. I’m not counting the mohel who I met really early in life, because after he left me in tears and tried to calm me with some wine, I didn’t have much to say to him.

Attending Temple Emanuel was something new for my family. My parents were Jewish humanists. With me and my older sister in tow they’d explore Baltimore’s Ethical Cultural Society. My sister’s first wedding was held there at the Gwynn Oak Avenue location. They even spent a small time at the downtown Unitarian Church.

My Cub Scout troop held its meetings at a Methodist Church just blocks away from Liberty Jewish Center on Liberty Heights.

My friends from my Cub Scout Park, my Howard Park Elementary School classmates and even my Howard Park Little League Baseball team (the Giants) was in what we’d call today a “not-so-Jewish” neighborhood, with All Saints Catholic School just around the corner. My babysitter, Angela, was one of eight siblings living in a three-bedroom row house just like ours. Her dad was a bus driver.

I learned a lot about Angela’s family, especially from her younger sister Patricia, a girl my age of 9, who thanked my mom for a plate of Oreos and cold milk to give us a break in our playtime. Patricia and I had turned an empty washing machine into a fort. I was unprepared for what came next, but Patricia, with the sweetest smile on her face, thanked my mother for the milk and Oreos and passed along that her mother didn’t think we were such bad people “even though you killed Jesus our savior.”

I suspect it was a phone conversation between my mother and Patricia’s mother that ended our empty washing machine box playtime. Angela, the babysitter, wasn’t coming over again either.

Morton, my dad, a furniture salesman, and Bernice, my mother, a secretary for the state of Maryland, announced to my sister Enid and me that we would soon be leaving 3913 Gwynn Oak Avenue and we’d be buying a house at 3914 Brookhill Road in what my dad said, “to be part of our people.”

My sister, a Forest Park graduate, explained it to me. “To be near other Jews,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

Enid just said I’d feel more at home.

There were never Shabbat candles kindled in our house on Gwynn Oak. My dad worked on Saturdays. I watched college football on Saturdays, and my mother did her shopping on Saturdays.

There were no Passover Seders, no invitations to Shabbat meals, no invitations to neighbors’ simchas, except for an occasional confirmation, baptism or Christmas meal at a local church from our old neighborhood.

Shortly after we moved and I learned that we’d be off from school for the Jewish High Holidays, I didn’t know what that meant. My parents were still going to head to work. The evening before, our street became crowded with neighbors’ family members coming over for a Rosh Hashanah meal or in a few days to break the Yom Kippur fast.

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I was usually one of a handful of Jewish kids in the entire school. Most of the Black kids stayed home as well. It was Rosh Hashanah after all.

When I hit the spinning, out-of-control age of 12, I received my first-ever bar mitzvah invitation. It was in this delicate blue paper with a self RSVP letter inside. This would be the first of many, so many in fact that I was sometimes making weekly trips to Hecht Co. at the Plaza to purchase the required $5 gift certificate.

At the bar mitzvah, we’d eat pigs in blankets, meatballs stuffed with mushrooms and whatever ended up on the kids’ tables. A huge victory went to the kid who could talk his parents into procuring a whiskey sour.

Forget fountain pens and trees in Israel. It seemed like all of my b’nai mitzvah friends were now walking around with gold, shiny initial rings and silver ID bracelets with big links for the boys, and delicate links for the girls.

Of all the reasons to want a bar mitzah, for me it had nothing to do with carrying on tradition, it was all about the bling. So, while I was taking bar mitzvah lessons, I was cutting out magazine pictures of gold rings and Speidel ID bracelets.

Enter the family bar mitzvah picture: Rabbi Gus Buchdahl. After a closed-door meeting with my parents (I still don’t know what happened there), I ended up in Temple Emanuel’s 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday school. Next was Hebrew school twice a week. Finally, Rabbi Buchdahl sat me down and we talked bar mitzvah. He looked up my Torah portion which was Bereshit “In the beginning …”

This went on through the spring of 1966. Sunday school, Hebrew school, Rabbi Buchdahl. Weeks before my first summer at Habonim Moshava overnight camp in Annapolis, Rabbi Buchdahl recorded my Torah portion and Haftorah on a portable reel-to-reel tape machine. I’d practice my bar mitzvah lessons in between color war, softball, basketball and swimming.

A couple of days before the bar mitzvah, I asked my dad to help me with my speech. We didn’t have ChatGPT then, instead I had DadGPT. He helped me rewrite the speech so well, while keeping it sounding like it was coming from my voice.

Saturday, Oct. 8, was a sunny, cool day in Baltimore. I had my Torah portion and Haftorah nailed but I was so nervous, and that’s what worried me the most.

When we arrived at Temple Emanuel, back when it was at the end of Milford Mill Road, Rabbi Buchdahl took me into his office, seeing that I was actually trembling, and started talking World Series with me. He knew both the Orioles and Dodgers’ lineups, and he told me over and over again that I wasn’t the first nervous bar mitzvah boy and wouldn’t be the last. He even made me laugh out loud when he said to remember that since it was a World Series day, think of Bereshit in terms of “In the big inning …”

When it came time to deliver my speech, there was a line about me “moving through the door of childhood to manhood in the eyes of the Jewish people.” Rabbi Buchdahl looked me in the eyes, knowing how gawky and young I was even for 13, that I could name every baseball player on every team but still had difficulty with my Hebrew letters. His words, which I remember some 60 years later as he smiled at me and my dad, “Philip, perhaps you should keep the door between childhood and manhood ajar.”

I’ve never forgotten those words. Rabbi Buchdahl gave them to me as a gift, a thoughtful instruction for my life. It wasn’t a $5 Hecht Co. gift certificate (quickly spent) and it wasn’t a fountain pen (don’t know what happened to it), but it was those words, “keep the door between childhood and manhood ajar.”

He then gave me the Reform Movement’s Holy Scriptures with my name engraved on the cover. I still have and cherish it.

Weeks later, at a Temple Emanuel Oneg Shabbat, I listened to Rabbi Buchdahl’s sermon, and as a bar mitzvah boy, I approached him later and questioned him on the purpose of his words.

This was the moment I learned the expression “Don’t be holier than the priest.” That came from my father.

As years passed by and I really did become a man, I’d run into Rabbi Buchdahl at various community events. We’d always embrace and talk to one another for a few minutes.

One day, I received a hand-written note from the rabbi. Without getting into too much, the rabbi, who knew that both of my parents had long passed away, wrote to tell me how sorry he was that more wasn’t done to keep my parents as shul members. I don’t know any of the specifics, but I know my parents and Rabbi Buchdahl saw things in different ways. Rabbi Buchdahl’s letter was so important to me and so heartfelt.

I so admire a person who humbly reaches out and wants you to know of his regrets, his feelings.

While I was sitting at Levinson’s for Rabbi Buchdahl’s funeral, I couldn’t help but think that once again Baltimore’s Jewish community was losing another spiritual giant.

I know we sometimes play this game where we ask “who would be your Mount Rushmore of sports stars, actors, educators, soldiers and so forth. So, I don’t have a limit on my rabbinic Mount Rushmore faces. Even before his death, Gus Buchdahl was on my personal Rushmore, along with greats like Rabbis Mark Loeb, Seymour Essrog, Joel Zaiman, Shlomo Porter, Chaim Landau, Moshe Hauer, Itchie Lowenbraun and Herman Neuberger.

Gus Buchdahl’s passing closes the door on much of my Jewish upbringing here in Baltimore. Yet because of his work, the future is very promising.

Remember, if he was still with us, Rabbi Buchdahl would give me a look and say, keep the door ajar.

I will.

In memory of Rabbi Gustav Buchdahl.

Phil Jacobs is the former editor of Baltimore Jewish Times and Washington Jewish Week. He writes from Baltimore.