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Partly Cloudy Helping unite two synagogues
Outgoing Wantagh rabbi eschews labels
Howard Nacht decided he wanted to become a rabbi during his pre-teen years, growing up in the traditional Orthodox synagogue his grandfather attended.
Nacht described the synagogue’s ceiling as sky-blue, with cloud designs. “As a kid, I could sit there and close my eyes and listen to the cantor or the all-male choir, or just look up and stare at the ceiling,” he recalled. “It was like I was already in heaven. And I think that’s where my first love of being on the pulpit came from.”
Nacht, 77, began student teaching in 1997, and became a rabbi in May 2001. He has been associated in various ways with the reformed congregation in Wantagh, Temple B’nai Torah, for the past 10 years. He joined the synagogue in 2008, and volunteered occasionally as cantor before becoming the community’s rabbi. He has enjoyed his time there, he said, but is nevertheless looking forward to his retirement.
Nacht initially retired in 2008, immediately before joining B’nai Torah. He was asked to fill in as rabbi for three months in March 2016, when Rabbi Marci Bellows went on maternity leave. But three months turned into almost three years, when Bellows decided not to return, and the congregation needed Nacht as B’nai Torah began merger talks with East Meadow’s Temple Emanu-El. After the merger was complete, Nacht finally retired for a second time on Dec. 17.
For his role in shepherding the union of two major congregations, the Herald names Howard Nacht as our 2018 Person of the Year..
“I love what I do,” he said. “But I’m not a person who doesn’t know when it’s time to step back . . . I want to spend more time with my family and [do] the things we want to do.”
Nacht is currently a part of the Wantagh Clergy Council, which held a vigil after the shooting in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 and a joint interfaith service at B’nai Torah after the October shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation. He also conducted a menorah lighting for the Wantagh Chamber of Commerce a few weeks ago. He is currently looking for other ways to continue serving the community, though not on a full-time basis.
Nacht keeps up his cantor skills by singing at the wedding and funeral services he conducts.
Jersey boy
Nacht grew up in an observant Jewish home in Newark, N.J., in a family that spoke Yiddish. “It wasn’t as some people say — ‘Oh, they spoke Yiddish so the kids wouldn’t understand,’” he said. “My grandfather wanted us to understand.”
He grew up with one metaphorical foot in the synagogue and the other in the conservative Hebrew school he attended. By the time he was a teenager, he was helping to lead Saturday morning services at school. He couldn’t decide which side of the pulpit he wanted to be on, “which is why I wound up doing both,” he said.
Though he wanted to be a rabbi, Nacht knew he was not yet prepared for it after college. So he attended law school, and became a land-use attorney before working for a number of businesses as well.
Eventually, he wanted to return to school to pursue his original dream. He spoke with his wife, Patti, about it. “I’m blessed,” he said, “because she said, ‘Let’s make it happen.’”
Nacht began his religious career as a cantor, after attending the Academy for Jewish Religion, now located in Yorktown Height. Rabbis and cantors were trained “pretty much in parallel,” he said, aside from a concentration in either music or Jewish law. He learned both from Orthodox, Reformed, Conservative and Reconstructionist teachers over the course of more than eight years. “For me, that was a great place to be, because it didn’t button-hole me as Reformed or Conservative,” he said.
He has served a total of four congregations, both Conservative and Reform. Nacht said he learned at AJR that the denominational titles “are not as important as some people think. For me, those denominational differences separate us rather then bring us together ...
I’m just a rabbi.”
He and Patti have been married for 42 years, and have lived in Merrick for 39 years. Patti is retired from a career as a speech and language pathologist in the Hicksville School District. They have a daughter who lives in Richmond, Ky., where she is a senior veterinary technician at a small-animal practice.
Visiting Germany
One of the high points of Nacht’s tenure at B’nai Torah came four and a half years ago, when he was one of the escorts on a trip to Germany with six of the congregation’s younger members.
He explained that the synagogue’s school, the Susanna E. Heiman Religious School, is named for the religious leader Susanna Heiman. Heiman’s husband came from the Bavarian town of Oberdorf. The Heiman family traces its roots in that German town to the 17th century, and always had cordial relations with their Christian neighbors. During the Nazi Kristallnacht persecution, in November 1938, the family’s Christian neighbors ran into the burning Oberdorf synagogue to rescue a Torah scroll that the Heiman family had donated.
The Heimans eventually immigrated to the U.S., bringing the scroll with them. After the outbreak of World War II, Susanna’s husband joined the U.S. Army and took the scroll with him, first to Ft. Dix, N.J., where he did his basic training, and then to Europe. Long after the war, in 1985, he bought it back to Oberdorf.
The Torah was preserved in the Oberdorf synagogue, which is now a memorial to the town’s former Jewish community. Nacht conducted a service there during the B’nai Torah group’s visit, when he read from the Heimans’ Torah. It was the first service conducted in the building in 75 years. “If you can hear it in my voice,” he said, “it’s still a very moving experience whenever I tell about it.”
The hardest part about being a rabbi, he said, is conducting a funeral service for a friend. “When I know the person, it’s more difficult,” he said. “And when I know and like them and call them a friend, then it’s emotional.”
The best thing about being a rabbi, Nacht said, is connecting with people on every level, whether in joy or sorrow.
In his free time, Nacht likes to play golf and to be outdoors. He used to lift weights as well, he said. He is looking forward to traveling with his wife, and is halfway through writing an epistolary book, crafted in the form of letters.
