Exactly 30 years ago today, Rabbi Michael Williams was conducting Friday night services in his beautiful synagogue in Paris. He was leading hundreds of worshippers crowded into Union Libérale Israélite de France on the eve of Simchai Torah.
The shul serves the rich elite of the Parisian Jewish community. Its entrance is inconspicuous from the stores and residences lining both sides of the narrow rue Copernic, one of many small streets in an ancient tony section of Paris between the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. But inside two sets of doors, polished wooden pews upholstered with red velvet seats surround a simple but imposing bimah. But the most magnificent part of the sanctuary is overhead, where the ceiling is dominated by a giant Star of David made of brilliant blue and white stained glass. Somehow, the ceiling is illuminated from above. You could easily believe that the light comes from heaven.
Rabbi Williams says his head was bowed in prayer when he first noticed something different was happening that evening. “I remember thinking: ‘Well, that’s strange. It’s raining in the synagogue.’ ”
The “rain” was shards of glass. Part of the glass ceiling -- already replaced after it was destroyed by the occupying Nazis 40 years before -- was being torn apart again. And once again, the motivation was hate.
A powerful bomb strapped to the side of a motor scooter had gone off. But the thick doors of the synagogue had kept out the noise of the explosion – until those doors were blown open.
The rabbi remembers: “At the beginning we thought we’d carry on the service. You know how one has this kind of heroic pseudo-reaction. The hazzan [a lay person who leads the congregation in prayer] was an ex-Auschwitz man, and I’m a pretty combative Englishman, so we thought, ‘fuck that, we’re going to carry on.’ ” he said.
“But about two minutes later we saw the flames and we saw people injured, so we left the synagogue.” There, through the dust and smoke, they saw broken shop windows, twisted overturned cars, bloodied survivors and four bodies – three non-Jewish Frenchmen and a visiting Israeli woman walking to the grocery with her grandchild.
Already arriving at the scene were Parisian emergency squads and, of course, the press. As ambulance sirens screamed, reporters surrounded the rabbi. Most of them wanted an answer to the one stupid question newspeople always seem to ask in almost any situation: “How do you feel?” The following day the New York Times reported on its front page that the rabbi paused for a moment and, before turning to walk inside and continue his service, left a simple message to the world: “We are not afraid.”
Now, jump ahead exactly 19 years and two days. Rabbi Williams stood on the same bimah, under the repaired stained glass ceiling and married Marc to Marcia before God and whoever He invited. Three witnesses joined us in the otherwise empty synagogue.
The rabbi performed a beautiful 45-minute service. A tallis held aloft by the witnesses served as our chuppah. I placed the wedding ring on the middle finger of Marcia’s right hand and she walked around me seven times. The rabbi sang a beautiful Hebrew love song, delivered a heart-felt sermon about marriage and gave us the traditional blessings.
It was all very traditional because the rabbi played by the book. Jewish tradition mandates that a rabbi cannot marry a couple he has never met. So we visited him in his office early in the afternoon, walked to a small café on Avenue Victor Hugo, had a few glasses of Champagne and returned to him a few hours later. We returned to the same café after the ceremony. It was wonderful.
It was not until we left the shul for the last time that I noticed the bronze plaque of remembrance honoring those killed and injured in the 1980 blast – and the scars in the wall that have been left unrepaired.
But it almost didn’t happen. It seemed like almost everyone and everything had tried to stop the ceremony.
Our first wedding took place December 15, 1996. I was Managing Editor of the New York Post at the time. The ceremony was simple and hastily arranged. Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams was my best man and about 40 guests, mostly business associates and close family, watched as New York State Chief Justice Judith Kaye recited the vows in the backroom of Le Perigord Restaurant on East 51st Street in Manhattan. The restaurant’s owner, Georges, had opened his usually sedate restaurant on that Sunday morning just for us. The Champagne was good and there was plenty of it and the same for the food. Cindy’s husband, the late comedian Joey Adams, told a joke. (I will repeat the joke when requested, which happens very, very rarely.)
The next day, still aglow with wedded bliss fueled by true love, we left for a honeymoon in Paris. It was as close to perfect as a honeymoon could be.
But I always thought my wife wanted to be married by a rabbi. Frankly, I think I wanted it more than she did. Nevertheless, when I suggested to Marcia that it might be “fun” to get married by a rabbi in Paris, she immediately thought it was a good idea.
So I decided to let her have it.
What I could not have known at the time was the heartaches and nightmares such a mission of love would set off. Getting a French rabbi to seal the deal turned out to be one of the most fascinating, educational, frustrating and time-consuming experiences of my life. It took more than four months of planning, testimony, negotiations and compromises to get it done. And even so, on the morning of the planned ceremony, it came within an hour of being called off completely amid an atmosphere of old-testament laws and Talmudic pronouncements.
It started easily enough. Since we were already booked to spend a week at the end of September touring the French Champagne region floating down the Marne River on a barge, we already knew the dates we would be in Paris. My first move was to call the only person I knew who might be able to advise me how to set up a Jewish wedding in France.
The man was Uri Dan. Based in Tel Aviv, Uri was The Post’s Mideast correspondent and had become one of our closest friends. [Unfortunately, Uri died in December 2006. My tribute to him can be found in the December 2006 post earlier in this blog.]
I was accustomed to Uri surprising me by his wide-flung resources, but even so, the voice on the line from half around the globe floored me. “Ah Marc, my friend, this is wonderful news! Don’t worry about a thing. I will take care of everything. I will be back in touch shortly.” Then he hung up.
A few days later he called to say “everything is being taken care of” but that was followed by another call the following week describing a “slight problem.” It seems the French rabbis in charge could not understand why two American Jews would fly all the way to France to be married in a synagogue. They suspected some sort of scam and needed proof that we were Jewish.
Marcia already had all the necessary documents. But my Jewish life was much more informal. And the rabbi who presided over my bar mitzvah was long dead. I had to collect notarized letters attesting to my Jewishness from as many upstanding New York rabbis as possible. It took weeks. Some quizzed me on Jewish history and rituals. I anticipated some of these tests and studied – but there were some pop quizes. They were tougher.
But I managed to pass them and proved to their satisfaction that my intentions were pure. There was a debate whether a Jew’s tribe was inherited from his mother or father [the correct answer is the father]. Finally, after a few months, everything seemed to be in order. But it was a false finish.
Uri called a few weeks before we were to leave. He explained that the Jewish community in France was controlled by ultra-orthodox elderly rabbis from north Africa who were very paranoid – although it’s not hard to figure out why, considering what they had seen during their lives. The latest problem was solved by my visit to the New York Beth Din. I admit the Beth Din is an institution that I had never heard of. But there I was taking the subway to Beth Din headquarters in Chelsea where I was stunned by the huge bureaucracy behind the doors. I was shuttled among various offices, questioned by numerous authorities and finally, after two days, handed a very official-looking piece of paper certifying my Jewishness. The parchment was laminated, had several embossed stamps and, on top, a color photograph of me. The picture had some more stamps on the corners to make sure it could not be replaced with someone else.
The certificate, along with a stack of other necessary papers, were over-nighted to Uri who profusely apologized and assured me we were now cleared for marriage.
So we flew to Paris. We had a day before the barge tour left, so we checked into our favorite hotel on the left bank, where we would leave most of our luggage until we returned from the tour. Early the next morning, the phone rang. It was Uri. After everything we had gone through, the chief rabbi of Paris refused to allow the ceremony. “The reason is not clear,” he said. “But don’t worry, my friend, I will figure something out by the time of your return to Paris.”
As usual, Uri was true to his word. The first morning we were back on the left bank, Uri called with instructions. We were to meet the rabbi at 2 PM in his office in the Synagogue on Copernic Street. As if he was apologizing, Uri explained that he was forced to bypass the roadblock set up by the orthodox rabbis by moving the ceremony to a “liberal” synagogue, explaining that in France, liberal congregations fall between American orthodox and conservative. In short, the service was in Hebrew but men sat with women. We could not have been happier.
When we met the rabbi for the first time, he was seated under a picture of him with Queen Elizabeth. He explained that as the former liaison between the British royalty and the Jewish community, he was known as the “Queen’s Rabbi.” We talked for awhile about the big issue for the conservative Jewish Community raging at the time in back home – how to stop intermarriage with non-Jews. He turned serious and had extremely emotional thoughts on the subject. “I’m against any program to stop intermarriage,” he said. “How can you possibly stop two people in love from getting married.”
He’s the guy to do the job, I thought. And he was.
That’s the story. If you’re wondering if the terrorist was ever brought to justice, a suspect, an Arab associate professor, was arrested in Canada in 2008 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police acting on a warrant issued by French authorities. Rabbi Williams said at the time that the arrest “was better late than never” but it came as something of a surprise to him because French police never entered his shul until after the suspect was arrested 28 years later. The French police said the evidence came from German intelligence sources.
As of October 2010, the suspect is still in Canada, fighting extradition.
Rabbi Williams has recalled two things about the aftermath of the attack on his shul. He remembers the French Foreign Minister telling the world the bomber’s actual victims were mostly innocent Frenchmen -- carefully separating them from the French Jews praying inside.
And he also remembers a visit to the hospital to visit some of those wounded by the blast. He said a group of French doctors and medics surrounded him, insisting that French Jews should build their synagogues on the outskirts of town instead of in the more crowded inner city where innocent people might be involved.
Ah, the French.
