This baby boomer remembers all too well the days before the Supreme Court banned organized prayer in public schools. These were "the good old days," the days when everyone knew we were a Christian nation, the days before those activist judges threw God out of our public schools, the days before President Obama launched his campaign of bigotry against the Christian religion. Join me as I share my memories of my childhood so long ago, and describe what it was like for a Jewish child to attend a public school in which virturally every child was Jewish, but with a school board that insisted that Christianity was the official religion of the Baltimore City Public School system.
From kindergarden through 3rd grade I attended an Orthodox, all boys Jewish day school. My mom was a single mom, a rarity in the 1950's, and some nice benefactor paid for my private education. But for some reason the free tuition came to an end in 1958, and my mom discovered that her fellow Army nurse who had served with her in World War II in the jungles of New Guinea, had given up nursing and had become a public school teacher in our neighborhood's elementary school - she would be my fourth grade teacher.
So, at the age of 8, I started the fourth grade at Edgecomb Circle Elementary School, School No. 62. We lived in a working class almost entirely Jewish neighborhood - this was a few years before massive white flight. Today, the school sits in a blighted high crime neighborhood, with many boarded up homes and with the police competing with armed drug gangs for control. But it was a very different neighborhood back then.
Almost every child in the school was Jewish. Thanks to the post-war baby boom, each class had over 50 kids, but somehow a single teacher was able to control us and teach us. In my 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes, there were only two children who were not Jewish - both orphans from an orphanage in the neighborhood - one of them was the only black child in the entire school.
Each morning began with opening exercises. The teacher would pick one of us to stand in front and lead the class in the Pledge of Allegience to the Flag. Then the teacher would hand the child the Bible - each teacher in the Baltimore City Public Schools was provided a Bible, King James version, Old and New Testaments, which sat on the teacher's desk. The student leading morning exercises would turn to the Psalms, pick one of the 150 Psalms, and read it out loud to the class. Psalm 100 was the most popular, it is the shortest psalm, but psalms 1, 23 and 150 were also frequently read. If the child wanted to annoy the teacher, he or she would start reading Psalm 119, by far the longest. It would probably have taken the child 30 or 40 minutes to read it, but when the teacher realized what was happening she would stop the child and tell the boy or girl to move on.
Morning exercises ended with the Lord's Prayer. I had no idea of what this prayer was or where it came from - I certainly had not learned it at Talmudical Academy in the first to third grades. About 20 of us boys in our class attended Hebrew school, located in a house a block from Edgecomb Circle Elementary School. We went after school, two evenings a week plus Sunday morning. One day, when I was in the fifth grade, the rabbi asked us about morning exercises, and when we told him how we recited the Lord's Prayer, he told us this was a Christian prayer and we should refuse to recite it. So, next morning, we boys all refused to recite the Lord's Prayer. Our teacher, Mrs. Friedlander, became very angry and told us we would all be punished by being kept after school until we ended our strike. That afternoon, after school had let out for everyone else, she handed each of us a red pen and told us to write, 500 times, in neat and legible handwriting, "I will participate in morning exercises." For me and some of the others, she didn't like the deterioration of my handwriting so she made us write the sentence 50 more times. That was the end of our protest. We didn't tell the rabbi.
In the fourth grade, I learned that we would all be participating in the school Christmas play. Jewish children from the sixth grade would be playing Mary, Joseph, and the Three Wise Men, Roman soliders, and King Herod. The rest of us would sing Christmas carols to entertain our Jewish parents when they came for the play. The only secular song I remember is "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Otherwise, for a half hour to an hour each day, five days a week, we sang "Silent Night," "Joy to the World," "Come all Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Faith of Our Fathers," and probably other carols as well. The third grade teacher, possibly the only non-Jewish teacher in the school, was in charge of the play and the chorus. Tragically, she was killed in a car crash a few days before the play; I recall that she was quite young. They cancelled the play. In the fourth and fifth grades, there was no Christmas play, but we still had to sing Christmas carols for a half hour or hour each day, 5 days a week, from December 1st until Christmas break.
Needless to say, there were no Hanukkah songs. There was no mention of Hanukkah whatsoever. There was no menorah next to the Christmas tree that was placed in the front lobby. It was like Hanukkah didn't exist, in a school where virtually every child and teacher was Jewish.
I confess that I didn't really understand what these carols meant, I didn't understand what Christmas was all about, other than department store sales and Santa Claus. Funny, they never bothered to teach us that Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus. One day, in the sixth grade, I raised my hand in the middle of the enforced "choir practice" and asked about a line in one of the carols, "To the Great One in Three." What does it mean? The teacher, Mrs. Ginsberg, tried to explain the Christian belief in the Trinity. I wasn't sure I understood it, but I knew this was something my mother had NOT raised me to believe. But then I remembered being punished for not reciting the Lord's Prayer. So, until winter break, when we came to those words, I moved my lips, but did not utter sound, and I hoped, and yes prayed, that Mrs. Ginsberg wouldn't catch me and punish me again.
I "graduated" from the sixth grade and from Edgecomb Circle Elementary in 1961. That fall, I started junior high school, a new school. The first morning of home room our teacher introduced herself and announced that because of some court decision, opening exercises would now consist only of the Pledge of Allegience and there would be no more prayers. And I was very happy.