On a snip and a prayer Rabbi Mike flew into Omaha from St. Louis to ritually circumcise Leo Wolfgang Novak, Gilda’s and my fourth grandchild. Leo joined sister Cecilia Jane as blessed children of Ellie and Donny.
Omaha has a vibrant Jewish community (there are synagogues for all three major denominations plus a Chabad House), but at 5,000 to 6,000 it is not able to sustain some of the requisites of traditional Jewish life. That includes having a resident mohel, a ritual circumciser whose function is to formally usher an eight-day-old male into the covenant God made with Abraham some 4,000 years ago.
Rabbi Mike Rovinsky flew in early Sunday afternoon a week ago for the ceremony attended in the Novak home by more than two dozen friends and relatives, many of whom had never witnessed a brit milah, the Hebrew name for the ritual snipping off of the foreskin of the penis. Done properly, professionally and expeditiously by a mohel the procedure takes about 20 seconds compared to the near half an hour it could take in a hospital by a doctor.
With more than 10,000 circumcisions to his credit since 1988, Rabbi Mike performed as advertised, explaining in detail with flashes of wit and humor the millennia-old procedure. Leo took it all like a man. I can vouch for that, as I had a close-up view as the sandek, the male who holds down the baby lying on a pillow on his lap.
Almost eight years ago I held Finley as he was circumcised. It is a remarkable, emotional experience perhaps matched only in its powerful significance to Jewish heritage by observing a grandchild’s bar/bat mitzvah or seeing an offspring under the chupah, a wedding canopy.
Leo Wolfgang received a name steeped in family lore. His paternal great-great-grandfather, Leo Novak, is enshrined in the West Point Hall of Fame as the winningest coach in the military academy’s history. Over a quarter of a century, from 1925-1949, Leo Novak compiled an overall record of 326-115-1. He earned more victories in men’s basketball and outdoor track and field than any other Army coach, including Bobby Knight.
Wolfgang is in memory of his maternal great-great uncle Willy Forseter, a Holocaust survivor from the family’s ancestral village of Ottynia in Galicia, then part of southeastern Poland, now part of western Ukraine. Willy was away from the village when the Nazis rounded up the Jewish residents, marched them to a nearby forest and shot them into a previously dug mass grave. For a couple of years he survived by hiding among Polish neighbors and in the forest. When Russia liberated the region he was drafted into its army and sent to Siberia for training. After the war he returned to Poland and was reconnected with my father who had arrived in New York in 1939. Willy first made his way to Cuba and then to New York. He lived with his wife Ethel and son Max in an apartment above the 2nd Avenue Deli in the East Village and operated Willy’s Dry Goods a block away on First Avenue.
Leo Wolfgang’s Hebrew name is Aryeh Ze’ev. Aryeh for lion. Ze’ev for wolf.
