MAKING THE ISRAEL EXPERIENCE EFFECTIVE

If I recall my first teaching experience, it is only to suggest that perhaps, in many congregations, the situation has not materially improved. It was the season of 1923–1924. I was a freshman student at Columbia College, and I was invited to assist the backward students at Temple Anshe Chesed (in Harlem, New York) in their reading of Hebrew, and to serve as substitute for any teachers who might be absent on any particular day. I had as much right to serve as anything at all in any classroom as I had to perform surgery in a hospital. But to Cantor Marcel Katz z”I who doubled as principal of the school (Dr. Jacob Kohn was the Rabbi) no further credentials were necessary besides my willingness to do my best — which was not, clearly, very good.