{"id":78,"date":"2010-03-01T13:37:34","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T17:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/?page_id=78"},"modified":"2010-03-03T10:58:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:58:12","slug":"burt-and-phyllis-shiro","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/kennebec\/religious-education\/burt-and-phyllis-shiro\/","title":{"rendered":"Burt and Phyllis Shiro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Burt Shiro was born in 1923 and grew up in Waterville, Maine. He took Hebrew lessons with Abraham Hains four times a week to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah. He married Phyllis and they raised their children in Waterville and sent them to Sunday school and Hebrew school there.\u00a0 Burt and Phyllis were interviewed by Hasan Bhatti and by Sam Levine.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIn preparing for his bar mitzvah, Burt went to Hebrew school four times a week. He hated it because he didn\u2019t learn anything useful, and thought the rabbi who taught him one-on-one, Abraham Hains, was a drag to be with when he could be outside playing with his friends. He had a bar mitzvah when he was 13, only doing two and a half pages of prayers cumulative.\u201d (Hasan Bhatti)<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Burt Shiro: Well, I had a Bar Mitzvah.\u00a0 I could usually daven<\/em> pretty well.\u00a0 But, you couldn\u2019t get any education for what Israel is\u2026<\/p>\n

Phyllis Shiro: Well, you didn\u2019t have a Sunday school.\u00a0 You only went to Hebrew school.<\/p>\n

BS: See, the rabbi, he came from Canada.\u00a0 He was a rabbi, and he had great voice.\u00a0 But, when you go to\u2026<\/p>\n

PS: Cheder<\/em>.<\/p>\n

BS: \u2026cheder<\/em>, you have to go to his house, and you would have probably five or six boys there, and each got to learn how to read.\u00a0 But, we didn\u2019t know anything about what we read, because\u2026<\/p>\n

PS: Right.\u00a0 You just were learning Hebrew.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t know what it was.<\/p>\n

BS: We\u2019d know how to read it.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

PS: But our children all went to Sunday school and Hebrew school.<\/p>\n

Sam Levine: So would you say your Jewish identity is pretty strong even though your parents weren\u2019t very religious?<\/p>\n

BS: Well, the parents were.<\/p>\n

PS: In their own way, they really were.\u00a0 They may not have attended the services often, but I would say particularly your father.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

PS: Oh, this is important.\u00a0 We had no Sunday school when I came here.\u00a0 They just had the little synagogue that you saw.\u00a0 And, I thought, we\u2019ve got to have a Sunday school here.\u00a0 So, like he said, they learned Hebrew but they didn\u2019t know any of the stories, or they didn\u2019t know any of the history or anything.\u00a0 So, I contacted\u2026 I didn\u2019t even know where to begin, so I called a rabbi in New York and he sent me some information and books and stuff and that\u2019s how we started.\u00a0 But, we had no place to go, so we were on the second floor of the YMCA, with our little Sunday school.\u00a0 And some of the other young women at the time helped out teaching.<\/p>\n

SL: Was that when you had your own children?<\/p>\n

PS: Yeah. No, I was pregnant at the time, come to think of it, because I remember climbing the second floor. So that was in the 50s.<\/p>\n

SL: Is that a big reason why you wanted to get that started?<\/p>\n

PS: Well, partly, but I just thought it was terrible not to have a Sunday school, because I had gone to a Sunday school and Hebrew school in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Burt Shiro was born in 1923 and grew up in Waterville, Maine. He took Hebrew lessons with Abraham Hains four times a week to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah. He married Phyllis and they raised their children in Waterville and sent them to Sunday school and Hebrew school there.\u00a0 Burt and Phyllis were interviewed by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"parent":67,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78\/revisions\/137"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}