Tales of the Village Rabbi A Manhattan Chronicle [Paperback]

A warm, witty memoir of Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s by a young rabbi who led a local synagogue in the midst of it all.

In the late fifties and sixties, Greenwich Village was the quirkiest, most charming, jazzy, eccentric, and urban of environments, the center of all that was both quaint and “cool”: brownstones and beatniks, coffeehouses and college students, folksingers and freethinkers, poets and “prophets.” Into this fascinating mix of cultural archetypes came a young rabbi, Harvey M. Tattelbaum, who became known as the Village Rabbi of the Village Temple. The spirit of Sholom Aleichem infuses hisTales of the Village Rabbi, a touching and laughoutloud-funny memoir of his tenure at a small synagogue in the heart of Greenwich Village. Though his years in this magical place were productive and soulfilling, rabbinical training had not exactly prepared him for the bikers, thieves, excons, eccentric old ladies, drug users, cleavagebaring brides, and other Village denizens he encountered while serving the congregants of his spirited little temple. Rabbi Tattelbaum shares his insider's tales—both downtown and uptown—of wayward weddings (and funerals), contentious Temple boards, irreverent interfaith shenanigans, heartaches, and triumphs. But theTalesalso reveal a deep personal struggle with some of the most profound philosophical problems of ancient and modern religion, and are filled with a warm, humane, and rational approach to spirituality and religious meaning.

Rabbi Harvey Tattelbaum was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated at Harvard University and the Hebrew College, which he attended simultaneously, and he graduated with honors from both in the same week of June 1955. He was awarded a traveling fellowship for a year’s study at the Hebrew University in Jersualem. Upon return to the United States, he enrolled in the Hebrew College UnionlÃ.