Miriam Epstein

Weil: Mimi, would you please tell me your full name, place of birth, and date.
EPSTEIN: Miriam Epstein. The rest of my name is Miriam Esther Monicar Epstein. My place of birth is New York City, and my date of birth is October 4th, 1942.

Weil: Can you describe your household when you were growing up?
EPSTEIN: Yes. I had two sisters. We were all born within four years of each other. My parents were older parents. My mother started having babies at 41 and had the three of us within four years, by the time she was forty-five. We lived in a nice house in a suburban neighborhood in the Philadelphia area.

Weil: You said you were born in New York. So when did you move to Philadelphia?
EPSTEIN: When I was two. We lived in a pleasant-enough neighborhood. It was primarily a Catholic neighborhood where we lived, and so my neighborhood friends were Catholic. When I wanted to play with them on Good Friday, I found out that they don’t play on Good Friday. We didn’t encounter overt antisemitism in the neighborhood at all. You didn’t ask me about that, but that was something that might have come into somebody’s mind from the conversation. I’m the middle child. My older sister was 18 months older than I am, and she was my idol. I always wanted to be where she was and do what she did. Our younger sister, Myra, who was 20-something months younger than I am, was mostly an annoyance to both of us. As it turns out, she diagnosed herself when she was in her 40s with Attention Deficit Disorder, which she then got treated for, and she became less annoying after that.

Weil: Tell me something about your parents.
EPSTEIN: My mother was born in 1899 in New York to immigrant parents who — I guess my grandmother was a stay-at-home mom, and my grandfather was a tailor. They lived on the Lower East Side of New York, and if you go visit the Tenement Museum in New York, you’ll probably see the building they lived in, if it’s still standing. I don’t know. My father was born in Vilna in 1904 or ’05, somewhere in there. We’re really not sure exactly when he was born, but he was brought to the United States as an infant with his parents. They moved to Baltimore. My parents found each other at a summer camp for adults in the Catskills. They courted for a number of years and then finally got married when my mother was 33. That was 1933. So they waited a while to have a family.

Weil: Where did your mother’s parents come from?
EPSTEIN: I don’t know where my mother’s father came from, but my mother’s mother came from a place where she said, “Part of the time it was Poland, and part of the time it was Russia.” My mother thought of herself as a Galitzianer [Jew from Galicia, an area that included parts of Ukraine and Poland], and she would say about my father, “But he’s a Litvak” [Jew from Lithuania]. His whole family came from Vilna, which was a major center for learning at that time. But his father was a baker; he wasn’t a scholar.

Weil: And where is Vilna located?
EPSTEIN: In Lithuania. That’s why he’s a Litvak. That’s what that means.

Weil: All right. So tell me, when you were young, what kind of religious affiliation did your family have?
EPSTEIN: That was interesting. My mother grew up without any kind of particular connection to a synagogue or anything. I think her parents were probably — well, whatever they were, they weren’t actively Jewish. Her mother kept a kosher kitchen and they followed Jewish practice, but they didn’t go to religious services or anything as far as I know. My father grew up in an Orthodox environment in Baltimore, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. When he became an adult, he moved to New York. When he married my mother, I don’t think they were really involved with a synagogue or anything. But when we became old enough to go to religious school, they decided to join a Reform synagogue because they didn’t want the kids going to a place where they would come home and tell the parents how to run the household. They thought the Reform movement was a better choice because of that, so my sisters and I went to religious school in a Reform synagogue in Philadelphia. I went to religious school all the way from kindergarten through — really, I continued taking classes all the way through high school.

Weil: Do you remember the name of the synagogue?
EPSTEIN: Beth David.

Weil: Beth David?
EPSTEIN: Yes.

Weil: And that’s in Philadelphia?
EPSTEIN: It was then, but now it’s in the suburbs. When I went to it, it was in Philadelphia, but they bought a piece of land out on the main line — it’s a more affluent kind of area — and built a building out there. I’ve never been in the new building. It’s not new anymore; it’s probably been there 45 years, but . . .

Weil: And Jewish holidays were celebrated at home?
EPSTEIN: Yes, they were celebrated at home. We always had a seder. We had Hanukkah. We never had — if we tried to open a conversation about having anything about Christmas in our house, it was completely squelched. On Yom Kippur afternoon, I remember that I was allowed to read a book, but I was not allowed to do anything else. And after the seder, you didn’t get to eat anything. The rule about the afikomen was the last thing you eat. It was the last thing we ate.

Weil: Did you have a bat mitzvah?
EPSTEIN: No.

Weil: Was that just not done in that congregation?
EPSTEIN: It was done, but it wasn’t done very much. The boys had bar mitzvahs. Mostly the girls did not have bat mitzvahs. My older sister didn’t have one. My younger sister did, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever.

Weil: Did they have confirmation at that synagogue, and were you confirmed?
EPSTEIN: Yes and yes. I think all three of us were in a confirmation class. We all had confirmations.

Weil: Did you ever go to a Jewish camp?
EPSTEIN: Not as a camper. No, not as a child. I didn’t go to Jewish camp.

Weil: You say that like maybe you did later in life.
EPSTEIN: I went as a counselor.

Weil: Oh, you did.
EPSTEIN: I was at two different Jewish camps when I was a college student. My summer job was to be a counselor at a Jewish camp. Twice. But I never went as a camper.

Weil: You were in public school?
EPSTEIN: Yes.

Weil: Tell me about your school education.
EPSTEIN: I went to Cynwyd [spells out] Elementary School. I’m spelling it because the area where I grew up was originally settled by Welsh people, and this is the way they spelled it, in Wales. So I went to Cynwyd Elementary School. My two sisters and I and maybe two or three other people were all the Jews in the whole school, so we never had a record for perfect attendance because they didn’t close the school on our holidays. All three of us had non-Jewish friends because those were the people who were around us. We had some Jewish friends through our synagogue. As time went by, more Jewish people moved into the area, and so we connected with some of them. Of course, when we got to high school or junior high, there was BBG [B’nai B’rith Girls]. I don’t know when BBG started, but I was a member of that.

Weil: Were your parents involved with Jewish organizations?
EPSTEIN: Both parents were active at the synagogue. I think my father was probably president of the men’s club. My mother was — usually she took a role as a secretary, not as a president of anything. But she was in the sisterhood, and she did volunteer work at the synagogue, and my father did volunteer work at the synagogue. I think my father was in B’nai B’rith. My mother, when she was older and after we were out of the house, she joined an organization called ORT [Organization for Rehabilitation through Training], and she was very active in that. I don’t remember what other organizations she was involved in.

Weil: Tell me where you went to college.
EPSTEIN: Before we stop this, there’s one more organization which is not technically a Jewish organization, but there was a country club that was started, a golf club — out in an area called Radnor, Pennsylvania, which was probably a half an hour’s drive from our house — by Jewish people who couldn’t get into the other golf clubs. My father was an avid golfer, and so he joined the country club for the family. Prior to that, he used to play golf at public golf courses, but then he joined this exclusively Jewish golf club. We saw a lot of Jews there. We had Jewish friends. It was a sort of Jewish community for us, although it had no real Jewish content. It was just — here we are surrounded by Jews who aren’t welcomed at the Philadelphia Country Club and the Marion Country Club, and so on. We were members there — for my years, it was junior high and most of high school. For some reason, we weren’t members there anymore after that. I don’t know why that ended.

Weil: Should we go on to college?
EPSTEIN: Yes. So I went to Penn State. At college I majored in English and had a minor in education; my goal was to become an English teacher, which I did. At college I joined a Jewish sorority, and I was active at Hillel. By the end of my sophomore year, I started folk dancing. That was new for me at that point. I always loved to dance, but folk dancing was new for me when I was 19. I was totally passionate about it. It was extremely important to me, and so I was dancing four times a week for a couple of hours each time. We’re talking serious passion here. I was in a performing Israeli dance group that was connected with the Hillel. We used to rehearse there, and then we would go perform at various venues, but mostly we rehearsed. We didn’t perform all that much that I remember, but it was wonderful. If you were there to dance but you came for brunch, the dance group would be in the kitchen slicing the tomatoes and seeing how many slices you could get out of one tomato so that we could serve this brunch as economically as possible [laughs]. I went to services at the Hillel. That was the only place there was at Penn State at that time to go for anything Jewish.

Weil: Where is Penn State located?
EPSTEIN: It’s equally inaccessible to all parts of the state. It’s right in the middle. If you go from Erie to Philadelphia, make a line, and then you go wherever the other two corners are and make an “X,” Penn State is smack dab right in the middle where the “X” meets. It was a five-hour drive to my home from Penn State, and so you didn’t go home on weekends; you went home on vacations. We went home for Thanksgiving, we went home for winter break, and so on. You did your own laundry.

Weil: Did you meet Bob in college or after?
EPSTEIN: Yes, I met Bob as a freshman in college. I was a freshman. He was a junior. We met at a fraternity house. He was in the fraternity. He says he met me before I met him because I really don’t remember meeting at his fraternity the first time when he says he met me. In the car, going home on Thanksgiving weekend, people would buy rides from people who had cars. The man who was driving the car was the person I was on a date with when I supposedly met Bob. Both of us got a ride with this same guy going home, and we spent the entire ride talking to each other as if there weren’t three other people in the car. That’s how we started.

Weil: So when did you get married?
EPSTEIN: We got married after I finished college in 1965. Bob and I went together when I was a freshman. We broke up at the beginning of my sophomore year. He finished college a half a year after that. He joined the Navy, saw the world, literally, and when he came back, I was finished with college. We got back together, and in a couple of months we were married — bang! Just like that.

Weil: Where did you go after college? Where did you live?
EPSTEIN: I lived in my parents’ home.

Weil: And then you got married?
EPSTEIN: And then I got married and lived in — oh, I see what you’re saying. When I got married, Bob was stationed in Camden, New Jersey, and that’s how we were able to get back together, because he was back in the area. So we got married and lived in a place called Belmar, New Jersey, which is in the greater-Camden metropolitan area. We lived there until Bob started medical school, until he finished his Navy tour.

Weil: And then where did you go?
EPSTEIN: We stayed in Philadelphia because he went to Penn.

Weil: I see. So you were in Philadelphia for all of his training?
EPSTEIN: Yes, seven years.

Weil: And you had children during that time?
EPSTEIN: Mark was born while Bob was still in the Navy, so when Bob started medical school, we had a 15-month-old child.

Weil: After that, when he finished his residency, where did you go?
EPSTEIN: Portland.

Weil: You came directly to Portland? What brought you here?
EPSTEIN: We looked at the map. We said, “We don’t have to live in Philadelphia.” Both of our sets of parents were there, but we did not like the Philadelphia area. We did not like the climate. With a medical degree at that time, you could pretty much go wherever you wanted to go. So Bob and I looked at the map. One of his cousins had already opened up the idea to us that we didn’t have to live in Philadelphia for our whole lives. Bob had been in the South; he knew he didn’t want to live in the South. He had been in the South when he was in the Navy. We didn’t like the East Coast climate in general. Bob felt, after having finished five years in the Navy, that he really needed an ocean nearby. Then we looked at the West Coast because it had a really nice ocean. We thought about, “Where should we live?” Long story short, we picked Portland.

Weil: Did you have any religious affiliation before you came to Portland, after you got married?
EPSTEIN: When we got married, we got married at Beth David. They gave us a one-year membership after we got married in the synagogue, and we went only for High Holidays. During those years, we did family religious stuff but no synagogue religious stuff at all. That was nine years. Bob just didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and I guess I didn’t care that much at that point. But when we got to Portland, Mark was eight, and I said to Bob, “We need to do something.” And he said, “You do it. Whatever you do, I’ll go along with it.” He’d had a very unpleasant experience as a child growing up in his synagogue with his rabbi and everything, and so he said, “You do it. You pick.” I found that if we enrolled Mark at Neveh Shalom’s religious school, we didn’t have to join; we could just send him to the religious school. So that year we did, but at the end of that year, they changed the rules. Then we would have had to join, and so I said to Bob, “What should we do?” He said, “I don’t care. You pick.” I said, “I grew up in a Reform synagogue, and that’s what is comfortable to me, so we’ll join Beth Israel.” And we did.

Weil: What year did you move to Portland?
EPSTEIN: ’74.

Weil: So you went to Beth Israel in ’75?
EPSTEIN: Yes. It was probably the fall of ’75 when we went to Beth Israel.

Weil: Somewhere in here, Neal was born.
EPSTEIN: Neal was born in January of 1976.

Weil: So you sent Mark to religious school at Beth Israel. Did you partake of other things at the synagogue?
EPSTEIN: Yes. We went to High Holiday services. We didn’t go to Shabbat services at all. I tried to find my way in there, and finally, with the religious school, they finally said, “Okay. We’ll let you teach some dancing.” They gave me a nice room. Various teachers would bring their classes to me, and I would teach them some dancing, which went very nicely for a while. I was bringing Mark and teaching. Then one Saturday, there was one week when I came to teach and they gave me a classroom, but it was full of desks.

Weil: It was full of what?
EPSTEIN: Desks. Places where you sit with a thing in front of you and you write. And so I had to move all this furniture in order to teach. I began to feel like I wasn’t being appreciated. There wasn’t good thought going into that assignment of that particular room. This was kind of a pattern after a while, and so I thought, “Hmmm. Maybe this isn’t the right place for us.” And Bob hated the services that we did go to. He really hated them. Then we began to hear news that there was this new congregation starting.

There was one other part of the story with Beth Israel. Mark, of course, had to have a bar mitzvah; he was coming up on his 13th birthday. So we made arrangements for him to have a bar mitzvah at Beth Israel in the main sanctuary, which was really the only place you could do it then except that little teeny chapel that they had in the school building. So Mark was preparing for bar mitzvah. We had a tutor for him. Rabbi Kleinman was tutoring Mark for his bar mitzvah. He really learned well, so then we had a visit with Rabbi Rose so he could hear Mark. It was the end of the afternoon and we come into Rabbi Rose’s study, and Mark is ready to chant, and Rabbi Rose is opening his mail. Then, when Mark got done — it was really perfect what he did. It was perfect; he couldn’t have done it any better. And Rabbi Rose said, “Hmm. It’s coming along.” I was livid, really! I went home and said to Bob, “I’ve heard about this new congregation. I think we should just leave Beth Israel, go join Havurah, and be the first bar mitzvah at Havurah.” Bob said that it was a little bit rash to do that [laughs], so we didn’t do it. But I was already moving in the direction of leaving Beth Israel before Mark’s bar mitzvah, which was in the spring of 1979.

Weil: So soon after that you made the move to Havurah.
EPSTEIN: We made the move to Havurah on the day of the Selichot service, in the evening. It was also the day of the very first religious school at Havurah. I had heard about it. We were friends with the Brems, and they had told me there was this religious school that was starting, and the concept, Saturday afternoon from 3:00-5:00 PM and ending with Havdalah, that whole thing. And the parents involved with the school. I had, at that point, a 13-year-old and a three-year-old, so I didn’t have anybody to send to this religious school, but I was an educator and I was very excited about the concept. So I went to see what it was like.

It was Shabbat afternoon, but I wrote a check anyway [laughs]. It was in the days when I didn’t even think about a thing like that. And I joined for our family without even talking to Bob about it because all along he had been saying, “You do it.” That evening was the first Selichot service, in Joanie Rosenbaum’s basement. I told Bob I wanted to go to this and he said, “You know, I really don’t like cocktail parties.” He didn’t want to go. He thought it was going to be people standing around having drinks and talking to each other. I said, “No, I think this is going to be a little different.” So we went. Alan Berg was the rabbi at Havurah, of course, and it was the night he brought Aryah [Hirshfeld] for the first time. Do you remember this? You must remember this evening. It was a mind-blowing experience.

Weil: Yes.
EPSTEIN: Aryeh brought us this music that we had never heard before and told us that you don’t have to worry about the words, just get the melody. Just hum along and it’ll come. It filled the room with this incredible music, and Bob was blown away. It became very clear that this was the right place for us, but we were still members of Beth Israel. That year we came to Havurah for part of High Holidays, and we went to Beth Israel for part of High Holidays.

Weil: So that was in 1979?
EPSTEIN: ’79, yes. After we saw them side-by-side, there was no question, but Bob said, “Let’s just keep our membership there. Let’s not burn any bridges.” Mark had connections; he had met people in religious school. So we kept our membership. But it was totally a waste; we never went back there. It was totally not right for us.

Weil: So once you joined Havurah, it seems to me, that you very quickly became involved with activities there.
EPSTEIN: Yes.

Weil: So what kinds of things were you doing?
EPSTEIN: The first thing that we did was we heard that anybody could attend a Steering Committee meeting there. So Bob and I thought, “Well, we’ll just go see what the Steering Committee is doing.” We did, and it was very exciting to be right there in the middle of it. Pretty soon thereafter, Bob became the president. He was maybe the third president. I did my presidency much later, but — anyway, what did we get involved in right away? I’m sure I was teaching in the religious school before very long.

Actually, this envelope here — I wrote some things. Let me see if I can find that. There’s a piece here — I have to backtrack a little bit to tell you what this is about. I was trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. This is after we joined Havurah. I didn’t have a profession or a career at that point. I was a stay-at-home mom, and I was a very enthusiastic volunteer. I went to a person at PCC [Portland Community College] who was in the counseling department, who was helping figure out what I was should be when I grow up, and part of that was to write down what you’ve been successful at.

So this is a list of 15 successes that I had, and some of them have to do with Havurah. I found one that had to do with teaching religious school: “One of the teaching techniques that I have used very effectively in my religious school classroom is that of leading a discussion in which students are encouraged to answer each other rather than directing all their participation towards me. I have found that, on occasion, the students have become deeply involved in discussions, listening well to each other and rarely becoming fidgety. For a group of sixth- and seventh-graders, I think this was special, particularly since the class is two hours long.” So that was one of the things that happened as part of teaching at Havurah.

Weil: Do you remember what size class that was?
EPSTEIN: Not very big, maybe five kids, something like that. It wasn’t very big.

Weil: Where were they meeting at the time?
EPSTEIN: At West Hills Unitarian Fellowship. And there are one or two others here that touch on Havurah. One of the things that I did — if you remember, Alan Berg was with us for basically one year, and then he went back to Beth Israel, so we had a year with no rabbi. I organized three retreats during that year. One of them was at Arrah Wanna. We went to this camp that was used for outdoor school, basically, with our families over Christmas, so that we could have something Jewish to do over Christmas. I organized that one, and there were two other retreats. One of them was when we brought Larry Kushner from Boston. The Friday night was at the Jewish Community Center, where we had a huge dinner and it was a potluck and he was there and did services with us. The Saturday was an all-day thing out at the Jenkins Estate. He led us through a wonderful day. I’m sure you were there.

Weil: Do you want to briefly describe who Larry Kushner is/was to this congregation?
EPSTEIN: I don’t know if I can answer that as well as somebody else can. My understanding is that Larry Kushner has a philosophy that you can make Judaism happen in your life. You don’t need someone to do it for you. He was really teaching us firsthand how to do that at this retreat. I do remember that he tried to teach us a new melody for Mi Chamocha. We already had Aryeh’s melody and we basically said, “We don’t want another melody. We have this one, and we really like it very much” [laughs]. He was ready to bring us all different kinds of ideas that opened up possibilities for do-it-yourself Judaism, which is what our group was really open to at that point. The Jewish Catalogue was floating around, and everybody was looking at that, and I think that he was — I don’t know if he helped to write the Jewish Catalogue, but he certainly was one of the influences in writing the Jewish Catalogue. So we brought him to enrich our Jewish experience during this year when we didn’t have a rabbi.

Weil: When were you president?
EPSTEIN: I think it was 1989, maybe ten years after we joined. Somebody, maybe Rich Stein, had been president. He came to me asked me if I would consider being president. I said, “I’ve never been president of anything in my life.” He said, “Maybe it’s time.” And I said, “Maybe I’ll think about it. I don’t know.” I guess it was during High Holidays, although I don’t know why this timing would have been correct. I remember thinking about the story of Jonah being on a boat bound for Tarshish instead of going to Nineveh, and I thought, “Maybe I’m trying to duck out of something that I really ought to be doing.” And that’s when I decided to do it. It really was a kind of an “ah ha” moment, in the middle of listening to Jonah, that I decided I would accept that nomination for president.

Weil: Tell me some things that happened during your presidency.
EPSTEIN: Yes. Roy [Furman] was pretty new with us at that point. I’m trying to remember how that worked. I think he was already the rabbi when I came into the presidency. We got an office that year. We’d never had an office before. It was in the downstairs area of a medical office building where they had a room or two down there. I think it was two rooms. There was a room for the rabbi, and we hired a part-time secretary. It was very surprising to do that. And I remember the stresses of being president. The most stressful thing about being president was getting an article into the Hakol [the newsletter] every month because it was supposed to be from the president. The way they are doing it now, it’s somebody on the Steering Committee, so they spread it out and they can have I-don’t-know-how-many different people write them, but in those years it was the president writes every time. That was very challenging. And then, any time anything came up, I had to deal with it. Everything. It was a pretty challenging job to be the president at that time.

Weil: Do you remember any particular issues that came up during that time?
EPSTEIN: No, I honestly don’t remember any particular issues. If I do, I’ll write to you. I just remember that it was a very life-consuming job.

Weil: So here we are 30 years later. What kinds of changes do you see in the congregation today from when you joined?
EPSTEIN: The obvious one, that it’s a lot larger. When we joined, I would say there were maybe 60 households, and now there are probably 360 households. One of the things that was very exciting when we joined was to go to a congregational meeting where everybody turned up. And it was really dynamic. That’s another thing that blew Bob away too, was this roomful of really interesting, knowledgeable people who had a lot to say. It was worth listening to. That was another reason why he was really glad we joined and why he became really involved. And of course, I felt that way about it too. In recent years, you go to a congregational meeting and the people who are nominated for the Steering Committee are there, and maybe a few other people who always turn up for everything, and maybe one or two new people, but it’s nowhere near 360 households being represented. So that’s a huge change in terms of the percent of the congregation that’s deeply involved in what’s going on.

Obviously, back then we didn’t have a building, and it was really taboo to try to bring up the topic of a building, although I was pretty interested in having one myself. While I was president, after I was president, I really thought that it would be very helpful for us to have a building. The attitude back then was that if we had a building, it would take our energy away from what we really want to be doing, which is spiritual stuff and educational stuff. But if you get critical mass, then you can do all of it, and that’s what happened. And that was an evolution, really. I was on the committee that developed the recommendation.

I was on the long-range planning committee back when we were trying to figure out how to invent ourselves when it became clear that we couldn’t stay at the Jewish Community Center anymore. It was a really wonderful group of people on that committee, one of whom was Noam Stampfer. He was actually the chair of the committee. Beth Kaye was on that committee, and Layton Borkan, and Steve Goldberg, and Lou Jaffee. It was a pretty wonderful committee. We developed a set of recommendations which included having our own building. Then it was a matter of figuring out what that would that be like. So I was involved with that, and I was also the chair of the committee that raised the first million dollars to have our building. That was a pretty wonderful group of people too, which included Alvin Rackner, and Herman Asarnow, and I think Dick Mastabrook. It was all men and me [laughs].

So what else has changed? So many things have changed. One of the things that made a very big change, after Joey came, was that the flavor of our religious services changed very dramatically. We hired a Conservative rabbi who made Conservative services for us. I was really put off by that. One time I thought, “I’ll go to Shabbat morning services early” — at the time when Joey was doing the Shabbat morning services. I went and I thought, “Oh, my God. I can’t do this” because I didn’t know any Hebrew. I knew some of what it sounded like, but I couldn’t read it. It became quite clear that anybody who was going to get anything out of those services, even to follow in the siddur, you had to be able to follow Hebrew. And I wasn’t there. But there were people who were, who really wanted to do that, and it sustained itself with enough of those people. It wouldn’t have worked when we were only 60 households. But get 150, 200, then you’ve got enough of those people who actually know some Hebrew that it can carry that Conservative style of service.

Weil: But how do you feel about the services now? Do you still feel put off by them?
EPSTEIN: I’ve gone through an evolution myself where I decided that I really wanted to be part of what goes on at Havurah, and so I chose to do some learning. I can’t speak Hebrew. I know a lot of Hebrew words that are in the siddur, and I did do an adult bat mitzvah with a group of other people a number of years ago and learned enough Hebrew to chant out of the Torah, although I have not made a practice of doing it since then. I can follow a Jewish service pretty much anywhere I go now, which was not true back when I joined Havurah.

Weil: Who taught that class?
EPSTEIN: Deborah Eisenback-Budner. She’s a wonderful teacher; she’s really gifted.

Weil: So sometime in here, I think we skipped over it, Neal was bar mitzvahed.
EPSTEIN: Neal had a bar mitzvah, yes, in January of 1989. I don’t know if I was president when Neal was having his bar mitzvah. Maybe I became president after that, I’m not sure. But he was born in ’76, and ’89 is when he would have had his bar mitzvah. Noam Stampfer was his teacher for his bar mitzvah. It was at the Jewish Community Center, in the big main room, and we had a wonderful turnout for that. He learned the entire Torah portion. I don’t know if he chanted the Haftorah as well, but he definitely chanted all seven aliyot of his Torah portion, and he learned appropriate for his enthusiasm. He had a tremendous enthusiasm for it. Neal was really passionate about being a Jew from age three or so, when we joined Havurah. I really think that Havurah was extremely influential for Neal.

Weil: Now he’s married and has children of his own. Is he involved Jewishly?
EPSTEIN: Deeply, yes. Neal is at Shabbat services every week.

Weil: And this is where?
EPSTEIN: In Virginia. They’re members of a Conservative synagogue. Their daughter goes to the preschool at the synagogue. They are shomer Shabbat, deeply. Neal has looked for a Jewish connection everywhere he’s gone. When he went to Swarthmore. Then when he was in Chicago for a while. He was in Boston for a little while. He was in Kansas. Everywhere he’s gone, he’s found Jewish community, he’s found ways to make Jewish music and make a Jewish life. And of course, in Osnabruck, Germany, where he lived for three years. That’s where they really got — of course, and then he married Elizabeth, who was not Jewish when he married her, although they did have a Jewish ceremony. Then Elizabeth decided to convert to Judaism and embraced Judaism with the kind of passion that Neal had for it when he was three [laughs]. She’s very bright and very dedicated to having a Jewish life. It’s very rich for them.

Weil: Has the same been true for Mark?
EPSTEIN: No.

Weil: No religion?
EPSTEIN: Mark is now very involved with religion because he’s with Sharon. Sharon wants to be connected, and they’ve joined Neveh Shalom. Her daughter is in the Neveh Shalom religious school and is preparing for bat mitzvah at the age of 10. They’ve got her on that track. And little Max goes to the Gan, which is a Chabad school, at the age of three, and he’s going there daily. So it’s happening in Mark’s family too. But when Mark was by himself, he came to seders. I don’t know what he did about High Holidays, if anything, when he was by himself. He married a woman who was not Jewish who wanted to have nothing to do with anybody’s religion, and he was with her for 11years. He got divorced from her, and then he was with somebody else. She was Jewish by birth, but she wasn’t Jewish by education, so anything they were going to do had to come from him, and it wasn’t coming from him. But then Sharon came along, and the whole thing changed.

Weil: Do you have other involvement in the Jewish community outside of Havurah?
EPSTEIN: Yes, I do. Years ago, Priscilla Kostiner invited me to be on the women’s board of the Federation. I was on that for a number of years, and I participated in their retreats and other things. I also went, with Bob, on a Melton Israel Seminar, when he finished his Melton class. And when we came back, I said it was really silly for me not to take this Melton course, so I did. I signed up for the Melton course, and we took that. I was in the second year of taking the Melton course, and the director came to me, and she said, “We need you on the Melton board. We need you now. We need you to be the president of the board, now.” So I did that, and I became the president of the Melton board. I did that for maybe four years, and I brought several Havurah people onto the Melton Board, by the way. I actually was the Interim Director at a point when the Director who had brought me in left and we hadn’t hired the new person yet. There were a couple of months there where somebody had to step in, and I basically had a full-time job running Melton. Luckily, I had retired by that time, so I was able to do a full-time job. It wasn’t a paid full-time job [laughs], but it took all my time. So I did that.

The very earliest part of my time in Oregon — you were asking me about Jewish community — all the way back in 1975, I discovered that there was a performing Israeli dance group at the Jewish Community Center. One of the people in that group came to me and said, “We need a director. Would you be willing to do this?” And I did that for five years, from ’75 to ’80. There was nothing religious about it, but it was Jewish culturally, and it was exclusively Israeli dance that we were doing. I know I’ve done other things, but I’m drawing a blank right now.

Weil: You didn’t talk about your profession now.
EPSTEIN: My profession now?

Weil: No, the profession that you had.
EPSTEIN: After college, I was a high school English teacher for a number of years in Philadelphia, and when we moved to Oregon, I did not take a job. Then I got certified to teach elementary school and taught elementary school for one year, at Woodlawn, NE Lombard, burned out in three weeks but finished the year. Then I went looking for another career and became a financial advisor, which I did for 21 years. That was really my profession. I did that. I advertised in the Jewish Review every month for probably 19 of those 21 years, so I got to be a familiar face because I had my picture in there. I got to be a familiar face in the Jewish community, and people would say, “Don’t you do real estate?” I would say, “No, actually I don’t, but I do this other thing.” That was very fulfilling work. I loved that work and did it until I was 65, and then I decided I could retire and so I would. It worked out.

Weil: Did you have any interests outside of the Jewish community, in the greater Portland community?
EPSTEIN: One of the things that I continue to be very involved with is international folk dance. As I said, when I was in college I started with Israeli dance, but I also did international dance, and that is actually more interesting to me now than Israeli dance because what’s happened in Israeli dance is that it has evolved. My interest in what it’s evolved to is very low. I like the old Israeli dances, not the new ones, and I try to keep them going wherever I’m dancing.

But the international dance that I connected with in 1974 when I first came to Portland — I connected with a group at Reed College. I danced there, and then Bob started dancing there. We danced there for a number of years. Then there was another group called the Portland Internationals which we were involved with for a number of years. I wasn’t in leadership until Ralph Pratt retired. Ralph Pratt was a man who led the Reed group for 13 years. Then he got sick and couldn’t do it anymore, and 14 of us stepped into his shoes. I was one of the 14. Bob was one of the 14. We took over and started running that group. I have continued to go there, and I’ve been influential in having that group continue.

And also we’ve put on dance festivals where we bring in teachers who know how to do a particular Polish dance, or they know how to do Macedonian, or Hungarian, or whatever. We bring a teacher for the weekend and have a Friday-night session and maybe a Saturday-morning session and a Saturday-evening party, and just all these events for a weekend. We’ve done that several times, and I’ve been part of the group that has put that on also. That’s connected with the Reed group that we are still connected with. Unfortunately, Bob can’t dance anymore, and a lot of the joy of going is dancing with him. But I still get a lot of pleasure out of dancing, and I go without him. So that’s been very important to me.

I’ve done volunteer work in the schools where my kids have been. When Mark was in elementary school, I was going in on a pretty regular basis and putting on sensitivity training kinds of things with the children in his class and other classes. I did that for a couple of years at Raleigh Hills Elementary School. It feels like a lot of my energy, though, has gone into the Jewish community.

Weil: I have one last question. In what direction would you like to see the synagogue go?
EPSTEIN: That’s a hard one. I would like to see a younger, more enthusiastic rabbi than what we have right now. I shouldn’t say more enthusiastic; I don’t know how you can be more enthusiastic than Joey. But younger. Somebody who connects well with all aspects of the community. I don’t know how we’ll ever replace Deborah, but I think that Deborah Eisenbach-Budner has done the most wonderful work with the religious school and with the young people, and I just hope that we can keep going when she’s — she picked up the ball and carried it so beautifully. We already had this concept, and nobody has thrown out the baby with the bath water here. We started with a concept, which was to have the religious school on Saturday afternoon, have it end with Havdalah, and have the community grow around the religious school. I think that is so absolutely central to what Havurah is all about, having the parents deeply involved in the religious school, and I only hope that that would continue. I don’t think that anything needs to change about that.

With regard to our space, I think we have serious space issues, and with the number of households we have now, there are times when we’re totally bursting at the seams. When I think about, for instance, when I had my bat mitzvah, which was two and a half or three years ago now, and we had 12 people in our class, there was basically standing room only for that service. The new class has 20 people in it. I just don’t know how that’s going to work. I don’t think the fire marshal will approve of who turns out [laughs]. I don’t know how you deal with that. Our building, because there’s an intimacy of having a building that size, it’s very sweet, but at the same time, if you’re going to have 360 households and growing, that needs to be addressed. I think it’s going to take some creative minds to come up with ways of addressing that.

Some synagogues have been successful in making little communities of this and that. We tried an Empty Nesters group. At one time I was connected with that. As long as the people were there to make it go, it went, and when people who were leading didn’t want to lead anymore, nobody picked up the ball and so it fizzled. I think that maybe some professional leadership to keep that kind of thing going would help. You have the Empty Nesters group, you have the people with the Tot Shabbat who are going to be the religious school parents and children, and then you have Singles, and you have all these different contingents. And then you have the people who are so deeply into Tikkun Olam and that whole group. The congregation is diverse, and I would like to see it keep that diversity.

It was very exciting to me to see people who have been members of the congregation for decades suddenly stepping up to be part of the Steering Committee this time. Nancy Spiegel, I was thrilled to see she was going to be part of it. And Andy Gordon? We just haven’t seen them very much. We’ve seen Nancy coming to things, but never in a leadership role. I think it’s great that people come back in when they are ready to, and the door is always open for people. I’m hoping that will always be the case, that people feel that when they’re ready to volunteer there’s something substantial for them to do. But I think the space issue is a big issue, and I don’t know how we need to resolve it. I would have liked to see us buy the whole block at some point, but it’s not going to happen now.

Weil: Is there anything else that you would like to cover that I haven’t covered?
EPSTEIN: I’m thinking about mentoring. I think that the concept of having co-presidents is a mentoring thing that has worked really, really well. I was very disappointed to see that there’s nobody in the position of vice president on our new slate of officers. So what that means is that there is an opportunity to be mentored that is not going to happen. I’m very concerned that whole thing can fall apart unless something’s done about it. One of the things I learned that — remember I told you I did three retreats in one year, and I pretty much did them by myself? I realized after I did that, that that’s not the way to do it. It’s wrong. I was totally wrong to do that. I was very pleased with what turned out, but it should’ve been a team effort. What I’ve been seeing from the Steering Committee looks like team effort up until now, but if nobody’s going to step into that vice-presidential slot, you’ve got a wonderful structure that’s at risk, and I’m concerned about that. It’s because of the mentoring. I don’t know what else to say.

Weil: Thank you very much. I appreciate having this time to talk to you.
EPSTEIN: You’re welcome.