Oral Histories

Yutan Getzler

Interviewer: This interview for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society is being recorded on September 17th, 2025, as part of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society Oral History Project. The interview is being recorded via telephone. My name is Yvonne Bury and I am interviewing Yutan Getzler and we will begin, so why don’t you give me your full name?

Getzler: Yutan David Yishai Laemmle Getzler.

Interviewer: Okay. Do we need to spell any of those?

Getzler: Yeshai, I mean it’s transliterated Y-e-s-h-i, and Laemmle is my mother’s maiden name L-a-e-m-m-l-e, German.

Interviewer: Do you have a Jewish name?

Getzler: I’ve always gone by Yutan which is a name my dad made up, but I can’t be, you know, when I lived in Israel when I was younger, I spelled it yud vav tav nun that’s the name that I’ve used.

Interviewer: How far back can you trace your family?

Getzler: Well, so on my father’s mother’s side, they claim descent from the Baal Shem Tov and there’s, actually, in my step-mother’s house, in Moshav Aminadav inside Jerusalem, there’s a, there’s this famous print that you see sometimes in Hasidic families, of the tree, like the familial tree of the Baal Shem Tov, and there’s a place where they’ve written in our family, our father’s mother’s family, so his, his mother came from a rabbinic dynasty in Galizia. On my father’s father’s side, I don’t know how far back. I don’t know super far back. Mon my mother’s father’s side, I mean, the Laemmles were in Germany, and we can go back to the late 1700’s, I think, and I don’t know much on her mother’s mother’s side, but they were in Hungary.

Interviewer: They were from where?

Getzler: Hungary.

Interviewer: Oh, Hungary. Okay.

Getzler: I mean, you know, Austro-Hungarian Empire and all that.

Interviewer: Yeah, and all of those countries switched property a bit over time, too. I know that. When did your families come to the United States?

Getzler: So, my mother was born in Los Angeles. My father was born in Mandate Palestine. His parents had both moved there in the thirties and were part of Hashomer Hatzair, and then they moved to Los Angeles in, I think, the early forties. He was born in ’38. I think they moved in the early forties. There was a sister who died of polio and that was very, very hard on my grandmother and they decided to leave, you know, kind-of that, that challenging time and that place, so, they came in the forties. My mother’s father emigrated to the United States from Germany in the early to mid-thirties. Certainly, he was very aware of the rising tide of authoritarianism and left, in part, for that and he and my grandmother went back to Germany post kristallnacht and got his parents out. I mean, he had to work to get a visa advance and all that stuff, and my mother’s mother was born in Chicago, but her parents were both born outside the United States, so they…

Interviewer: Do you know where?

Getzler: Hungary, I think they were both Hungarian. One of them might have been born in Paris. When I filled out that thing and I put in what I knew but they probably came to the States in the…well, she was born in 1916, so her parents probably came to the States in the 1890’s or 19-aughts.

Interviewer: Okay. That’s pretty early.

Getzler: Yeah. Yeah.

Interviewer Burry: And all the names of your grandparents in the earlier generations that you know of are on the form that you filled out?

Getzler: Yeah.

Interviewer: Did your parents tell you how they met?

Getzler: Now, that’s a good question. I don’t know exactly how they met but they were both, they both were living in L A. You know, I used to tell my parents, I used to call my parents hippies. They said they were too old to be hippies. They were beatniks so, they were kind-of like involved in the counterculture in Los Angeles, in, you know, the late ‘50s early ‘60s and they had met. They definitely, they had met in Los Angeles. My mother, I guess my father was already done with film school. He did film school at USC and then my mother did art school and teaching at UCLA and she decided she was going to take off to Big Sur, which was like a thing that people were doing at that time, going up the coast and kind-of living off the land a little bit

very rustically, and she told my dad that’s where she was going to be and he went up there to find her and that’s where my sisters were born. They were both born in Big Sur. They were homebirths. I was born in Colorado. I was also a homebirth.

Interviewer: How did your parents earn a living?

Getzler: Ah, so, in, when they were in Big Sur, my dad and a friend of his, Don Avery, grew cannabis so, they were pretty early on with that. This is maybe part of why I called them hippies, but, you know, the beatniks also were involved in cannabis. You know, they lived pretty modestly, ha, I will say. When we, they received some support from my mother’s parents who did relatively, they sold life insurance.

Interviewer: And where were they at that point, your grandparents?

Getzler: In Los Angeles.

Interviewer: Oh, everybody’s in L A.

Getzler: Yeah. They met in Chicago. My mother’s parents met in Chicago and then after they got married, moved to Los Angeles and stayed there, both of them until they died. My grandmother lived to a hundred and six.

Interviewer: Wow.

Getzler: My grandfather lived into his eighties, mid-eighties. Yeah.

Interviewer: But, your two sisters were born in California.

Getzler: In Big Sur.

Interviewer: In Big Sur and you were born in Colorado and where did you all grow up?

Getzler: You know, in, in, I mean, they, for the five years before I came along, or, you know, four years or so before I came along, were in California. Then we were, they initially moved to the Front Range in Colorado. Then we moved to the Western Slope. That’s where I was born and where mostly I grew up. I was born in ’75. My…

Interviewer: Like Grand Junction? Where were you born. Grand Junction or somewhere around there?

Getzler: Well, Delta County, which is one county south of Junction County. I was born in Redlands Mesa. I mean we had like forty acres. It was the smallest, you know, or one of the smallest farms on the Mesa, so very, very, I think it was an hour south of Grand Junction. We’d go to Grand Junction for the High Holidays. Maybe there was a minyan in Delta County? I don’t know, like we knew two or three other Jewish families but, you know, to me, Judaism was very home-based, you know. We lit candles on Erev Shabbat. I’d be sent outside to look for stars for when we’d make Havdalah and ‘cause it’s Colorado and the skies are clear almost always you can almost always find three stars Saturday night and, you know, my sisters had their bat mitzvahs at the house and we, I don’t know how we got a Torah, but, you know, family came in for that. We, my father always felt very deeply connected to Israel, I think. You know, his parents were Halutzim and you know, he also was involved in Hashomer Hatzair and so then, in like, 1980, we lived there for about six months and then in eighty, it was like ’83 ’84, we lived there for a year and my parents split up at that time and my father stayed in Israel and we came back to the States. We were in Colorado for another couple of years. Then we were in Boston for two years and at this point my sisters were starting to be out of the picture but my mom got a master’s degree because like, the farm, the kind of subsistence farming was not a thing you could do with one adult, so we moved to Boston and she got a master’s degree in Expressive Therapies. Then in, for high school I was in Sacramento. She was back closer to her parents, and she was, at that point, working in a clinical setting as an art therapist. That’s, that’s growing up, I guess. That’s the eighteen for me.

Interviewer: And then you went on to college?

Getzler: Went to college, I took a year between high school and college at my sister’s recommendation. I worked. I, like, lived at home and worked, and then I did some travel internationally. I went to Beloit College, which is in southern Wisconsin, a small liberal arts college. I took the year between, again between college and grad school and I entered a PhD program at Cornell which I finished in 2004. I met my wife in about 2000, I think. We got married in 2005. I moved here in 2004. She finished her PhD in 2003. I was in Atlanta for two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer and then in 2005 after I’d been here for, she moved here.

Interviewer: So, you came here. Did you come here for your PhD?

Getzler: I came here for the job at Kenyon. I was, my wife and I met during our PhD’s in Ithaca at Cornell.

Interviewer: Oh, I see. Okay and tell me your wife’s name, please.

Getzler: Elizabeth Conrey. C-o-n-r-e-y.

Interviewer: Okay, so I know how you met. You want to talk a little bit about where you got married or how you got married, the type of wedding day you had?

Getzler: Oh, sure. We, so, my wife was not raised Jewish. She was raised Catholic. She had long since ceased to be actively engaged there. We had, so, we got married in White Plains, Pennsylvania, because it was relatively near Ithaca and it was relatively near her family. She’s from the Baltimore area and it was a, like, you know, we had, kind of, it was kind of a weird place, but it was, they had a bunch of different rooms and there was a pond and we were there. We had like, the place rented out for the weekend, and a bunch of families stayed on site and uh, what was the wedding like?

Interviewer: Was it a Jewish wedding?

Getzler: It was a Jewish wedding. So, we, there’s a friend of ours who we met when, I mean, it depends on how you, how you slice it, right? So, there’s a good close family friend, Sheila Peltz Weinberg, we met when I was living in Israel. She’s a rabbi. She’s in the Reconstructionist siddur. She’s been involved and she had done a lot of active teaching. She’s kind of at that point when she was no longer a traditional rabbi. Both of her kids are rabbis, have been congregational, have been not been also. Her younger child, Ezra Weinberg, he and I were very close friends in Israel and that got me involved in Habonim Dror which I attended for many years, which my kids go to. It’s a, you know, there are sleepaway camps that are affiliated with the Kibbutz Movement.

Interviewer: In Israel.

Getzler: Uh-huh. Yeah, so, Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror share a building in New York and the reason they haven’t merged is Hashomer Hatzair is too adamantly secular and socialist as a movement, and Habonim Dror is seen as too religious which is hilarious because, boy, is it not religious.

Interviewer: Ha. Okay.

Getzler: But, you know, it’s like that thing of where there, there is an engagement with Judaism as a religion whereas Hashomer Hatzair is very adamantly about peoplehood and not about religion, or at least, thought, so, anyway, the wedding. Sheila married us. We were the only inter-marriage she ever did. It was conducted to anyone’s eye like a Jewish wedding. The ketuba did not say “according to the laws of Moses and the People of Israel,” but we have a ketuba that is written in English. It’s written in Hebrew. It’s witnessed by witnesses. We, you know, exchanged bands. We had a chuppah. We broke a glass, etcetera, right. I mean, it was, for all intents and purposes a Jewish wedding. Our intention from very early on was to keep a Jewish home and raise, if we had children, to raise them Jewish. I did not demand my wife convert because that felt fucking awful to me as a thing to say to her from me and like, I couldn’t imagine making that demand of someone who I loved and she has never formally converted but she, you know, can say the prayers on Friday night. She can say the prayers for Havdalah. She makes a quite incredible challah. She’s like very committed to us having a Jewish home and considers herself Jewish chazak.

Interviewer: Where did you first live when you were married?

Getzler: We, the entire time we’ve been married we lived at the house we currently live in which is where our children were born also. They are also born in Columbus.

Interviewer: In Columbus.

Getzler: Yup. Yup.

Interviewer: And you have how many children?

Getzler: Two children, Aravah– A-r-a-v-a-h, who is eighteen, and Pnina P-n-i-n-a-h, who is fifteen. Aravah means willow, which we know is from Sukkot, and Pninah means pearl.

Interviewer: What else do I need to ask you? Are your children still living with you?

Getzler: My older child has, is not living with us at the moment, graduated high school last year and are taking, as I did, a gap year and will be attending Oberlin in the Fall of 2026, and my younger child, Pninah, is, yes in high school living with us.

Interviewer: In Columbus.

Getzler: Yep.

Interviewer: Do you remember anything special about your children, each of them as they were growing up, just a memory or two that are kind of sweet?

Getzler: Oh, boy. Well, so, for Aravah, like, they, the kids were both born at home, so Aravah is the older child so, Aravah was there, and is about two and a half older, years older than Pninah. Aravah was there when Pninah was born and I was, Pninah was, the, Pninah, my wife was laboring kind of in a, like a kneeling position, you know, on hands and knees and I was, where Pninah was coming out, I was, I caught the, I caught her as she came out and Aravah was at Beth’s head and like, talking with her and being very sweet with her in that way and, anyway, I just think of that as being our, yes, that’s a memory of Aravah. For Pninah, I mean, you know, these are memories that include both of them, but, with Pninah, we, we live about four and a half blocks from the Clintonville Farmers Market and so, like our kids have been raised at the Market. When they’re home and when Market is happening, we go there. We do our shopping. We meet lots of people. There’s friends that we have who we’ve met there, like, very, like, deep life-long friends who we’ve met there, you know, people that the kids are friends with, so I just, I have, a lot of memories of, walking with them and Pninah would like, often when she was young, she would sing. She’d make up songs that she would then have us sing as we were going to the market and we’ve got some recordings of those, but just really, yeah, very, very nice times going from home to Market with the kids.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s wonderful. So, you are still working. You’re teaching chemistry at Kenyon.

Getzler: Yeah.

Interviewer: What about hobbies or other interests that you have?

Getzler: I really enjoy wilderness hiking, and I get out into the wilderness. I try to get out into like, you know, real high-altitude wilderness at least once a year and that’ll vary from, you know, a couple of days to sometimes a couple weeks, depending on what my schedule can sustain. I love cooking. I’m a pretty good cook. I like to make cocktails. I used to ride a motorcycle. I have intentions to do that again but I, there was a period of time where it became clear to me that I wasn’t riding enough to maintain the level of skill I needed to do it as safely as I wanted to. You know, I do like, little bits of sculpture and home repair. I really like kind of graphic design which I end up incorporating into my work a fair amount. I do, I like photography, so, I, yeah, I have, like a pretty nice digital camera and I will, I will make pictures of people, and people, I have photographed a few people’s weddings, not like professionally, but just ’cause they’re friends weddings and bar mitzvahs and these, those kinds of things for friends. Yeah keep myself out of trouble.

Interviewer: Sounds, sounds like you have lots of interests. I wanted to ask you a little bit about historical events that have had a major impact on your life and those would be things like 9/11 or October 7^th or other things and that includes you and your wife and your children, too, in terms of your Jewishness.

Getzler: Yeah. I remember when the first Lebanon war started because I had a, like a, we called him an uncle. He was a cousin. He was my grandmother’s nephew, so, my father’s mother’s sister’s son, and he was part of the, like, founding generation for Kibbutz Ein Hashofet which is up in the Galil and he was visiting us in Colorado when the war started and so I have a very, a very distinct memory there. Um, you know, I, historical events. You know, I think about the Fall of the Berlin Wall as being a pretty significant historical event and having been at that time, we were living in Boston at that time, and we’d been involved in, you know, there’s the Refusenik thing with Jews wanting to leave the Soviet Union and having like, a pen-pal there and so then with the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, you know, I guess I think about that as being this significant moment. You know, I think of, I mean, I have a fair amount of family in Israel so I was always aware of things that were happening there, like, when then, you know, the Ethiopians started to migrate, I’ve a, my cousin in Israel is married to an Ethiopian and has kids with an Ethiopian man so I’ve got Ethiopian whatever, relatives. You know, did 9/11 make me think, or the Gulf War, did the Gulf War make me think about my Judaism? The first one, the second one. The first one, they definitely made me think about the security of Israel. I don’t think it made me think about my Judaism particularly. 9/11 – I don’t know that that made me think any differently about my Judaism. It made me think a lot about it made me, I mean, I was always very involved in, like, interfaith work with Muslim communities and it made me want to commit more to that kind of work in graduate school because I knew that, I was, I remember very clearly I was in the lab and I saw the first report and everyone started gathering around computers and looking at video and stuff and reading stuff and I called my wife and we went to our kind-of favorite place in nature. We both packed our lunch that day and we both kind-of hung out together because my first thought was, the people who are in charge in this country right now are going to mess this up so badly and it’s going to be like generations, generations of trauma and devastation and we’re going to start treating Muslims really poorly, and also a bunch of people who don’t want the war are going to blame the Jews for it, and I just couldn’t stand gathering around a computer, and like, living the trauma of the attack in real time…

Interviewer: Yeah. Okay.

Getzler: …so,

Interviewer: Let’s… go ahead.

Getzler: …so, I guess, 9/11 made me think about my Judaism as a minoritized person in relation to like, how to not just kind-of curl up into that ball. Yeah.

Interviewer: And how about COVID and the isolation? How did that affect you? Did you still do things like shop or teach or go to services or performances?

Getzler: Yeah, so, I did most of the shopping for the house, like I actually before there were high- quality masks available, I had access to a lot of stuff that other people didn’t from being in a scientific setting you know, so I had a very high-quality ventilator, so I was shopping for the family and for my mom and for some other people very early on before there was any high-quality masks available, before there were vaccines. You know, we continued to make, I would say, I, you know, I am very comfortable with a home-based Judaism, and yes, there are all kinds of things that by halacha you can’t say without a minyan, but if we are to take the teaching to heart, that Shabbat is the most important holiday and nothing’s stopping us from doing that with one person even, right?

Interviewer: Yes.

Getzler: You can make Shabbat with one person.

Interviewer: Sure.

Getzler: So, so, I would say we were, you know, we were still very involved there. There were lots of things on zoom. Did we go to performances? No. We were, so my wife is a chronic disease epidemiologist. Up until April she had worked for the CDC since 2003, so we were alert to what was happening before most people were. We stocked up on food and toilet paper and sanitized like, a lot of stuff. We were about a week and a half to two weeks before most people in terms of all that kind of stuff. We were very cautious and didn’t go into crowded public settings for really a long time, but we had, like, you know, small groups of people who we, you know, whatever, we podded. I actually was scheduled, so the spring of 2020, I had a Fulbright that was going to take me to Israel and so, I had arranged my teaching schedule so I was teaching like the first, kind-of the first half of the semester and then I was going to be away the second half of the semester, so I taught maybe like a week, two weeks, maybe two weeks remotely and then I didn’t teach again until, like September or October, so I was basically home full time taking care of the kids and the family, like, they didn’t have, you know, day care or camps for the summer, so like, it was, I was doing activities with them. I was doing the shopping. My wife was, you know she does chronic disease epidemiology, but everyone at CDC was really working very hard at that point and so she was filling, she was basically backfilling for a lot of people, so I was, you know, I was kind-of running the household at that time. Um…

Interviewer: Okay, so, let’s shift a little bit.

Getzler: We would…

Interviewer: Oh, do you have more you, you want to say more about COVID?

Getzler: Oh, just, we’d take my mom for walks two to three times a week, so, and so the kids and I would go and walk with her. We had a dog at that time. We’d walk. She’d walk, you know, to get her outside and try to keep her healthy. We’d sing together so there’s this great song White Coral Bells that has a beautiful three-part harmony. You can do it as a three-part round and we would sing that walking through the neighborhood, together while walking the dog. It was not bad.

Interviewer: No, that sounds wonderful.

Getzler: That part was very good. Yeah. Okay. Moving on.

Interviewer: Moving on. So, a little bit about just some family stuff and then we’re going to move on to community and religious questions and get around to KSS (Kehillat Sukkat Shalom) here pretty soon, too.

Getzler: Okay.

Interviewer: Family vacations? Anything you want to say about the trips you’ve taken with the family?

Getzler: So, my wife’s mother was very worried when she got married that she would never see her daughter again for Christmas, so we have spent Christmas with my wife’s family. Very bizarre for me because I just was never involved in Christmas, weren’t a like, Hanuka-bush family or any of that and I never saw any reason to participate in that so, that was very bizarre for me. My children very clearly identify as Jewish, not confused at all about that. We then spent Thanksgiving with my family, mostly out in Los Angeles because a lot of my big extended family is out there, so, yeah, so we’d go out there almost every year for Thanksgiving. That was always really nice. We, you know, we, we’ve had a couple of trips to Israel as a family. We went once when my, when the kids were really young, and then we went back after my dad died. We went there for, I was like, in the air when he died. We went there and then were there for shiva, not really a vacation, but we, then in 2019, we were there for Pesach with family for a couple weeks, had a nice trip to Maine a couple of summers ago, really fantastic trip to Maine a couple of summers ago. I don’t know. We don’t, we don’t really do a lot of family, I mean, on the one hand, we travel a lot but, like, it’s almost always for stuff.

Interviewer: Yeah, family things.

Getzler: Like, we’ve kind-of, yeah, we’ve kind-of only done one vacation, just us as a family and that was that trip to Maine two summers ago.

Interviewer: Are there any deaths of loved ones that you want to talk about?

Getzler: Oh, my mother’s father died when I was a freshman in college. I remember the dean of students coming to get me. He was a very traditional German man and I like, I have this distinct memory of him and like, the year or two before he died. I have pierced ears and he said this thing of, “I’ve never liked those but on you it looks good.” It was a very sweet thing of him to say. My father’s father died when I was, when we were, I feel like we were living in Israel in the mid-eighties, and I have this memory. He’s buried in Petach Tikvah, which is where they lived and where my father’s sister is buried in this little grave that my grandfather made. I don’t really remember my father’s mother dying so much. I think she was this long goodbye that you have with Alzheimer’s, you know? so, her death was like anti-climactic or relief or whatever it is. I mean, my father’s death was eleven or twelve years ago. It happened, like just before spring break. We found out, actually. We didn’t know he was extremely ill. We didn’t know except for that there’s an old friend of his, a guy who he grew cannabis with he visited in Vermont where that guy runs a big nursery and Don called me to ask me if my dad was okay because when he visited he didn’t look well, so, that, that call came in like January and my dad died in March. We had less than two months between when we thought there might be an issue, so, I then called him and said, like, “Hey, what’s going on?” and he said, “Oh,” you know, blah blah “and there’s a maybe a shadow on my liver and I didn’t want to tell you all until I knew what it was.” I looked it up and there is one thing that ‘shadow on a liver’ means and it’s an hepato-cellular carcinoma and like the time to survival is really just the time of diagnosis. There is, there is zero six years survival on that, so, yeah, he, I had to very rapidly just be present because he was in complete denial that he was about to die and I didn’t do anything to try to convince him otherwise because it’s his life and what good does it actually do?

Interviewer: Well, yes.

Getzler: Just tried to like, be present with him when I, when he was on the phone and he and I, you know, he stayed in Israel when I was nine, so I didn’t, I saw him like, annually after that. I would say, as is not uncommon with fathers, we had a somewhat fraught relationship. I felt like he chose Israel over me because he chose Israel over me, like, explicitly and, but, you know, he very clearly loved all of us very much. We, they were, my parents were never physically violent with us. There was a lot of love. They didn’t get along, the two of them, but they both really clearly loved us. My father never really figured out how to hold a job, and he was always like the coolest dad. Everyone was like “your dad’s so cool” and I was like, “except for if he’s your dad” but like, he was great at hanging out, and in the year or so before he died he had found this thing where he was like, “So you just like go up and get up and go to work every day?” and I was, like, “Yeah,” I was talking to him about like, my week and he was like, “Yeah I never figured out how to do that,” like, and I had always thought that he was just too cool for school and I didn’t, he just was not, he just was bad at living in capitalism, right?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Getzler: It just was, which a lot of people are because it’s pretty inhumane, you know…

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah.

Getzler: …and so, anyway, you know, he and I had, had a lot of conflicts. When I first got my ear pierced, he like, had a, pitched a fit at me about it. I went to visit him in Israel and he pitched a fit at me about it. I mean, you know. Anyway, it seemed like the most minor thing, given all of the mistakes he made in his life and how well I was doing with everything, you know, but anyway. So, I mean, you know, that was, his death was definitely meaningful, and you know, I can’t say that I sat shiva or that I said kaddish every day. We sat shiva and that was meaningful, really, really, really meaningful. Sitting shiva for him was really meaningful, really profound to be with family and hear stories and be together in, like, joy and mourning.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Getzler: When I thought about him, you know, I observed the shloshim in some pretty significant ways and I thought about him every day for that year, for sure, and then, you know, less so afterwards, but him dying made me think really, just gave me so much respect for Jewish rituals around death and how kind they are to the mourner and how kind they are to the community, like, the shloshim is not about “you shouldn’t be at a public event because that’s inappropriate,” [sound cuts out briefly] more but to be out with people where you’re going to hear music, like, you’re just going to ruin it, you know, like there’s no way to go an hour without feeling like your heart is torn out, like, you just may not be so present. At least, that’s my interpretation.

Interviewer: So, in your time in Columbus, how did you get involved with Sukkat Shalom?

Getzler: Yeah, I’m going through a spot where there’s bad reception so if I drop out, let me, tell me to repeat. The first or second year that we were in Columbus, so we bought our house in 2005, in like September 2005, so, it would have been the summer of 2006, I think, is when this would have happened. We were at ComFest and there was, the JCC or whatever it was called at the time, had a booth at ComFest and there were some little flyers about, you know, with like, the different congregations and when I was living, in the first year I was living up in Gambier and I’d come down and I’d gone to both or maybe there were, maybe there were three Reform, or there were two Reform and a Conservative. I went to like, three different shuls. You know, my dad was very, like, he knew Zalman (Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) who founded Renewal back before Renewal was a thing, like, they would get high together in Western and even Front Range Boulder. You know, they like, were very involved in kind-of that branch of Judaism from very early on. We, my aunt was ordained Reconstructionist in part, because she really lived mostly Conservative but Conservative movement wasn’t ordaining women at the time so, we’ve been involved in Recon or Renewal for, for a long time as a family. I mean, also have gone to a lot of Conservative shuls, but, so, the fact that there was a congregation that was more exploratory was really attractive to me. I, yeah, that was very attractive to me, and I think also, you know, like I said, I grew up in a very home-based Judaism and so, it has, I have always felt most comfortable in smaller spaces, you know, like a chavurah within a larger congregation, right. or, but Sukkat Shalom has always just been of a size that feels very comfortable to me. I love it and also, like, the exploratory nature that feels very, very much in line with how I engage with my Judaism and God-wrestling.

Interviewer: Your, your name has appeared in documents for the Little Minyan from KSS in the early planning stages, and you were on the board in the beginning, right?

Getzler: Yeah, I did a bunch of different stuff at different times, yeah. I’ve, you know, I’ve when we were entirely lay-led, I guess we’re entirely lay-led again but I’m like, I led services a fair amount. I have been on the board in various capacities over the years. I’ve done some stuff with the Hebrew School, or, you know the children’s Teva Travelers. I, yeah, I mean, yeah, I definitely have been involved from a lot in the early stages and a little bit less so now. I expect I will be again a little bit more as, when the kids leave actually and I have a little bit more time, so, yeah.

Interviewer: Okay, and in the notes that I’ve got it says that you blow the shofar…

Getzler: Yeah.

Interviewer: …and that your mother, your mother joined the synagogue when she moved here…

Getzler: Yeah.

Interviewer: …and so there’s three generations of your family involved?

Getzler: Yeah. Yeah. I, I grew up playing the French horn…

Interviewer: Ah, okay.

Getzler: …and so I also, like from early on, I’ve played shofar. I’ve had a shofar that was my own probably since high school…

Interviewer: Wow. Okay.

Getzler: …maybe since before then. I have three now. I never play the one that most people would recognize, like, the short horn, the short ram’s horn. You can also make from an ibex and there’s another animal, I forget which one, that, the Yemenite ones, the big, long curly ones. That’s the one I like the most. It makes a, it has just a beautiful deep round tone, and um, I think, boy, I will try to say this without it sounding braggadocious because I’ve really, I’ve worked really hard in the last bunch of years to, really in the last ten to fifteen years to not make the shofar blowing about me but to make it, to try to do what I can to make it be for the people and for the moment and for people who want getting the spiritual need met, and, I can hold a note longer than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I have very good tone control, like, I’m a very, very good shofar blower.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s great. I’d love to, I’d love to hear you play.

Getzler: Well, yeah. I love to play it.

Interviewer: Tell me about your mom and her coming here and then your children growing up in the congregation.

Getzler: Yeah, so my mom was living on the Front Range of Colorado and, you know, I think once the kids were born, as you know, that is a strong draw for grandparents and that was combined with, uh, you know she was, uh, you know, aging. I mean, we’re all aging, but feeling her age more and also with, she lived a good bit out of town, She had, I don’t remember, eight or ten acres maybe, and the increased frequency and severity of fires was being really stressful for her so she moved here, yeah, actually, around the time my dad died and then people were like, “Oh, you moved here because your husband died.” She’s like, “Oh, no, we’ve been apart for thirty years,” or whatever, so she moved here. She lived about three tenths of a mile from us. She was very involved in the Renewal Movement in Boulder. Yeah, I mean I was like, blessed in the womb by Zalman. She, like, had all this stuff with him. Tirza Firestone, who’s a pretty well-known Renewal Rabbi who was the leader of the congregation she was in, so.

Interviewer: In Boulder.

Getzler: In Boulder, yeah, and, so I mean, I think, even if I hadn’t been part of Sukkat Shalom, she would have participated. I think, you know, she was used to what a congregation of that size can offer within. She, I would say, is much more observant than I am. I would say I have the same if not more Jewish knowledge, but she was always, I don’t know, she has, she spent more time in the congregation in Boulder. She became significantly more observant, so I think she has some frustrations about how, how infrequently we are able to provide services, so she’s gone, she has been involved in, she’s gone to other congregations since, but, yeah, having her a part of Sukkat Shalom has been really wonderful and I think really good for her also. People really value what she brings.

Interviewer: She’s still active in the congregation, too, now?

Getzler: Some, I mean she’s really slowed down a lot now that she’s in her eighties. She’s aging much more quickly than her sister or her mother did, but yes, she still comes to services and will participate.

Interviewer: So, I have a big question to ask now, and that is, what is your Jewish journey?

Getzler: What is my Jewish journey? I have always known I was Jewish. I have always, I don’t know that I’ve ever believed in God, but I believe very strongly in the power of ritual. I really love, I don’t think Judaism is the only or the best but it’s something that works for me. I, from very early on, felt like I needed to really understand what Judaism meant to me and what it was because I knew that I would encounter people who would demand that I tell them things about that and I wanted to be firm in my understanding. You know, my dad having grown up in Hashomer Hatsair, like, he always said he didn’t think God was really necessary to Judaism. It’s like a, a way of being in relation to the earth and each other. You know, our holidays are very much based around the seasons and the plants, and you know, the passage of time and marking the passage of time, and I, I love all of that. Yeah, I guess, that says it as well as I could do.

Interviewer: Okay. What notable occurrences have you experienced with or because of KSS?

Getzler: Yeah. you know, certainly the kids’ b’mitzvahs and those were big and facilitated at the Kehillat. You know, have in general, life cycle events, right, people having, when friends’ parents have passed, when members of the community have died and being able to, you know, support each other, feeling the love of the community around my father’s death and after my grandmother died. I mean, I guess I’ll say, like, in a lot of ways, the most notable events are, to me, are like, the quotidian, the every day, the like, just singing with people on Shabbat or at the chagim or you know, breaking fast together or, you know, unrolling or holding up the Torahs at Simchat Torah, whatever, like those, all of the small, every- having people over at a sukkah in our backyard, comparing latkes or hamantaschen.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Getzler: You know?

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah.

Getzler: That’s the stuff. That’s the business. That’s like, yeah.

Interviewer: So, being part of KSS, has it affected your Judaism or the way that you practice?

Getzler: How’s it affected my Judaism or the way that I practice? I think, if it were not here, I don’t know that I would make the drive to the other synagogues in town because I think, like I said, like, I don’t really connect to much of that setting, the big buildings and the big distance between the congregation and the rabbi, and I mean, I’ll say, actually, very honestly, like, very clearly, you know when we moved here, like, I mean, I told you my wife, right? – not raised Jewish, didn’t formally convert. I didn’t feel like it was respectful to her as a human to demand that she abide by someone else’s ideas about how she had to behave in order to be Jewish in my life and with our children, and none of the other congregations were going to welcome her or my children at that time. I think that’s changed now but when I arrived, it was very clear that that was going to be just some bullshit we were going to have to deal with, and I just had no desire for it, you know.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Getzler: My dad, when I started dating her, when I started dating her, my dad was of the, what I like to think of as the clipping generation, right? He’d like, clip things out of the newspaper and like, once every couple months, I’d get a big packet from Israel, right, with all these articles, and, I mean, there was a lot of wonderful stuff in there. There were recipes. There are some that we still use that are fantastic, and you know, there’d be interesting things that related to science ‘cause you know, I was into science, and, you know, after it was clear that things were serious with Beth, I started receiving a lot more articles about how intermarriage was destroying the Jewish people, right, some passive-aggressive bullshit and I dated this girl in college who was Jewish and was from a, like, incredibly wealthy family on the North Shore of Chicago, and like, they would only go to synagogue on the High Holidays, and it was all about just being really dressed up, and really, like everyone seeing what, like, the nice new whatever that you had, right, like everyone in the family got nose jobs. The dad wore a wig or a toupee, right. It was very fancy and it was, and it was, I mean, it was a kind of relation to Judaism that worked for them but was deeply alienating for me, and I know for my dad also, like not what he wanted and so, at some point I was like, would you rather that I marry her? You know, do you think that’s a better person for me to raise my children with, and if not, like, fucking accept it, you know?

Interviewer: Sure.

Getzler: Like, so, yeah, I guess, actually to be real blunt, like, early on, it was really clear that we as a family were not going to be welcomed, and didn’t matter like, my level of knowledge, didn’t matter that, how often we were lighting candles at home, didn’t matter the, what my children’s relation to their own identity was. None of that was going to matter. What was going to matter is whether some boxes had been checked in the way that people did and, even then, like, my experience has often been, that people who are, become members of the Jewish people by choice in many congregations, their identity is always questioned, as is the case for Jews of color often, and like, I’ve got enough shit to deal with, you know? Right?

Interviewer: Absolutely.

Getzler: Just no interest in that.

Interviewer: The reason we are doing these interviews is because Sukkat Shalom is coming up on a twenty year-watershed mark, right? And so, I guess, let me, let me kind of end with this question and that is, what do you see for the next twenty years of the congregation?

Getzler: Oo. I feel, I think, so, look. We are, we are, like, the Jewish community in Columbus. We are like, in some ways, like the Jewish people in the world, in that we have always been very small. We have always felt, like, on the edge of not even really being capable of sustaining ourselves and it’s also, like, always been, we have evolved to meet the needs of the people who need us, so I think that will continue to be the case. I don’t see us ever building a building. I don’t think we want that. I think, boy, oh my God are buildings expensive, and this lets us, you know, anyone can come for any, we don’t, we’ve never had tickets for the High Holidays. We’ve never, like, our dues are absurdly reasonable. I think we will continue to operate in that space. I think, like, in the first five years that it was around, I would encounter people who thought we were a, like, a Jews-for-Jesus congregation in Columbus. I don’t think that happens anymore, like, I think we’re well enough established within the Jewish Columbus in community, er, community in Columbus, that it’s not going to, we’re, like, we’re part, part of the scene. There still are places where we feel like we don’t get brought into the loop but that’s mostly fine, so what do I see? I see us continuing to be pretty small. I would be really surprised if we ever grew past, like a hundred and twenty families. That’s kind of the biggest I can see it being. Maybe some, like, really ambitious person is going to come along and figure out how to organize everything. Yeah, I think we’ll continue to operate in this space. I would be surprised if we left Clintonville. You know, we met in Upper Arlington for a while, but most of the, most of the congregation is in this neighborhood.

Interviewer: What do you value most about your time with KSS?

Getzler: I have a lot of love for the people. I have a lot of love for the people and I have a lot of love for the people that they are in the world. It’s a congregation that is, to my mind, mostly filled with people who are trying to live and act in a way that will, you know, bring a better world about in the world that we’re living in, we don’t have any, like, big machers. There’s, like, none of that. It’s just a lot of, like, it’s very Hamish and I, and I, I value, yeah, it’s the people in the end. It’s the people and how they are trying to live in a world that is not easy to live in and try not be in this world, yeah.

Interviewer: Do you have any comments to, anything come through your thought as we were talking that you didn’t get a chance to say? Now is a time where you could just kind of, you know, have the last comment or two you want to make and then we’ll be finished?

Getzler: No. Nope. You did very well. Nice work.

Interviewer: Oh. Well, thank you very much. Let’s give our concluding statement so I’ll say on behalf of the Columbus Historical Foundation and the Society, I want to thank you for contributing to the Oral History Project and this concludes our interview.

Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein