Do I Have to Wear the Beard?

ALBANY, NY — Rabbi Israel Rubin turned a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday into a Talmudic inquiry Thursday at the Maimonides Hebrew Day School of the Capital District in Albany.

“Would you rather have your face on a penny or a dollar?” Rubin asked the students. There was a low murmur that suggested the smart money was on the dollar.

“Ah, but there are more pennies than dollars, aren’t there?” he asked the youngsters.

Rubin launched into a discussion about the 16th president’s tenuous connections to Judaism (Lincoln’s podiatrist was a Jew) and an aside about the estimated 6,000 Jewish soldiers who served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

“And you might be amazed to know there were Jewish soldiers on the Confederate side, too,” Rubin said.

His monologue seemed part history lesson, part Borscht Belt shtick as he stood before a banner that read “Happy 200th Abe” in English and “Happy Birthday” in Hebrew.

Of course, it’s the year 5769 by the Jewish calendar, but that’s a technicality.

Lincoln is not only the nation’s most revered president, but his extraordinary life and times can become a vessel into which an endless stream of interpretations and assessments can be poured.

Young boys with yarmulkes and waist fringes known as tzitzis worn by observant Jews performing a short skit about how the Sabbath was observed by soldiers during the Civil War may have broken new ground in Lincoln studies.

“Do I have to wear the beard?” asked fifth-grader Eli Levin, making a face before accepting a black stovepipe hat.

After getting over a case of the giggles brought on by his friends in the audience, Eli read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The raw power of those few well-chosen words stilled even a fidgety pre-lunch crowd of kids.

The fake beard and full sideburns worn by Melech Backman, an eighth-grader, who portrayed Lincoln, didn’t look out of place among the full-bearded men at the school.

“Lincoln’s beard did look a bit like ours,” Rubin allowed.

The centerpiece of Thursday’s skit was a letter the students found in their research written by B. Behrend from Narrowsburg, Sullivan County, on Dec. 4, 1862. He wrote to Lincoln asking that his son, an observant Jew, be allowed to mark the Sabbath on Saturday in the same way that young Christian men in the Union Army kept Sunday as a holy day.

Behrend asked that his son “may enjoy the same privilege as those who observe the Sunday as a holy day, as well as for the heathen or the so called infidels, who do not want to celebrate either the Sunday or Saturday as a Sabbath, but choose perhaps some other day as a day of rest.”

Eight-grader Eiden Tal-Fournier read Behrend’s letter and Tzemach Simon, who’s in ninth grade, portrayed the son and wore a Union soldier’s cap.

There is no record of a reply from Lincoln.

Rubin got the idea for the Lincoln lesson after consulting one of his Talmuds, printed in 1862, and he wanted to put the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth into some historical context.

Rubin, raised in Montreal in the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, came to Albany in 1974 and helped start the school in 1980. It now has 80 students, preschool through high school. Their building was previously used for a Jewish temple and a First Assembly of God church.

An undercurrent of religious tolerance and humor ran through Thursday’s short program. The kid who stole the show was Eli Kochman, a fourth-grader who seems to be a walking encyclopedia of Civil War facts. He quietly corrected the rabbi on the location of Gettysburg.