Torah Portion:	Re’eh
Synagogue:	Gerrer Shtiebel (ultra-orthodox)
Walking time from home:	Around 15 minutes
Reason for going:	Something different
Kiddush:	N/a

This week was another special one for me and this blog. There is a shule I’ve been meaning to go to for a long time but other priorities always got in the way, and it also always felt a little intimidating. Finally – with just a few weeks left till the end of this shule adventure and blog – I made it to the Gerrer Shtiebel, a shule that is close to home but equally in another world.

The Gerrer (or Gur) Hasidic dynasty emanates from 19^th century Poland and before the Holocaust, was the largest and most influential of all the Hasidic groups. Today they are the biggest Hasidic cohort in Israel, with smaller communities around the world. Because of their size, the community maintains its own shules and practices and therefore even in Melbourne they aren’t directly part of Addas. The Melbourne Gerrer Shtiebel was founded in the 1980s, with the current house purchased in the 90s. The block, on a suburban street in East St Kilda is split in two, with a family in the back unit and the shule in a converted unit at the front.

Part of my reticence in going was that I didn’t know what time they started on a Shabbat morning. They have absolutely no social media or internet presence, proudly so according one, and when I decided that this was the week to go there, I had to go through third party, almost covert means just to find the starting time. But once I arrived, it wasn’t nearly as intimidating or as foreboding as I had expected. They start at 8:30am and my friend and I arrived a few minutes early. Whilst some of the men already there were wearing their large fur hats – which always appear a little odd – a few of them came over and showed us around. I even recognised one or two people.

The shule is essentially one large room. At the entrance there is a hallway, a bathroom and a small kitchen, but the rest of the space is the sanctuary, with a smaller room behind the main one with one way glass for women. I didn’t see any women the whole time I was there, but then again, if they were in the room I wouldn’t have seen them anyway. The main room holds probably close to 80 people when seated, but on this day, being a normal Shabbat with no festivities, there were a little over 20. There is a sign in the hallway that says that the congregation needs to be silent during praying and Torah reading times, and in this shule they take that extremely seriously, almost to a militant level. Even when I asked someone where we were up to, they hissed at me and showed me that I should be quiet. But I did notice that many of the regulars have developed quite advanced miming skills, since they still ask questions of their fellow congregants, but without words or sounds.

The real distinction of this shule, as opposed to almost any other that I have ever been to, is that they have a break in the middle of the service. The Gerrer way is to focus on yeshiva-style learning as well as praying, so they stop just before Torah reading for an entire hour. Immediately the room filled with noise and the regulars told us we can learn, chat, have a coffee or even go for a walk. I noticed some took the latter option and didn’t return, but once the service resumed, a few new people also walked in. My friend and I had a coffee, chatted and observed some of the learning and chatting going on in the room. Then exactly an hour after the end of part one, one of the senior people banged the table just once, silence again descended on the room and the service resumed exactly where it had ended, with the Torah reading and the Musaf prayers. This is a no frills shule, so there were no communal prayers, no sermon and almost never a kiddush. The regulars like it that way and they like to be done before 11:30am, with enough time to go home, have a rest and then lunch. I went to another kiddush, but it was nice to finally be at this shule and to see their practices.