Yisroel Finman

[Aryae Coopersmith]

Recorded at Aryae's house, El Granada, California, July 5, 2004

Aryae – What was it like the very first time you came to the House?

Yisroel –I called up the House and said I need to come for Shabbos, that I was involved with Dovid Din, and they said, oh, welcome! Please come by! Come for Shabbos!

So I got to the House of Love and Prayer, and it was for sure after sunset. It was already dark. It was definitely as far as I understood, Shabbos is already beginning. I was having a lot of trepidations. Should I knock on the door? So I walk up to the House and knock on the door, very kind of embarrassed that I have my knap sack. And Louise Burke opens the door. And I say, “I’d like to come in for Shabbos.”

And she says, “Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome! We’re waiting so long for you.” So I come in. And the thing that blew me away, just totally, somewhere between 10 and 20 women are in the middle of candle lighting. They’re lighting candles on the window sills around the prayer room, doing it one at a time. Each woman is doing a deep meditation and lighting her candles, and her sisters are behind her, and they’re singing softly.

And I’m thinking, here it is, it’s already Shabbos, and they’re lighting candles? What’s going on here? And they go through the whole ritual. When it was all over, I asked somebody, “How come you’re lighting candles so late? Don’t you light candles before sunset?” That’s how my mother always lit candles.

They said, “Well, we started well before sunset.” (laughs) They kept right on going, you know? It took an hour and a half for the women to light the candles. Because each one had to do it individually, with the support of her sisters. But there was such a glow of light. It was so radiant, so deep. I said, shhhhh! There’s something here.

So I became a regular at the House of Love and Prayer. One day two young women, Barrie Dinnerstein and Joanie, two friends from Queens, young hippie girls with their backpacks, come in. And they knock on the door one Friday evening, around candle lighting time, and they said, they’re looking for a place for Shabbos. And I said, “Ah, we’re waiting so long for you! Come on in!” Bracha Din (Barrie’s name when she became Dovid Din’s wife) tells the story over and over and over again to this day.

Aryae – When did you move into the House?

Yisroel – April of 1970. I realized I needed a place to eat. I was keeping kosher (at college) as best I could on my meal tickets. But it got to the point where I was eating yoghurt and fruit, ‘cause I couldn’t eat out of the traif (non-kosher) cafeteria. At Pesach I realized I couldn’t be there at all. So I asked to come and stay for Pesach.

I moved into the basement dungeon. (laughs) The boiler room was the men’s dormitory. What a nightmare! It was a boiler room, for crying out loud. One big old boiler over there, and bunk beds made out of wood all over the place. If there wasn’t bunk bed space, you’re on the stone floor in a sleeping bag. That was the boys’ dorm. The girls’ dorm was in the attic. Koved (respect) to the women! (laughs)

Day in and day out, the House was very high. Shabbos, and week to week, it was an extremely special place. But when Shlomo came out, he just blew it out of the water. When Shlomo was there, I got a sense of what it must have been like with the Baal Shem Tov. Completely beyond time and space.

With Shlomo we would daven, and the davvennen would go on forever, and the meal would go on. Sometimes we wouldn’t be sitting down to eat until 11, 12 o’clock at night, ‘cause the davvennen went on that long. Just the singing and dancing was two hours. Then we’d bensh (say the blessing after the meal) at 3 or 4 in the morning.

(On Saturday) more often than not, we’d walk out to the Presidio. There was this big, old tree. Shlomo loved to sit by this tree and teach. We’d go sit out there and learn for two or three hours, and then come back and daven. So here it was in the summertime, we’d be getting up from the second meal (the noon meal) around 6 or 7 o’clock PM. We wouldn’t end Shabbos (which is supposed to end at sunset) until midnight.

The sense of time … the sense of Shabbos being an entity, instead of something that goes by the clock – it was amazing. Shlomo, the way that people were attracted to Shlomo – his magnetism… It’s hard to describe what Shlomo was doing, but it was absolutely incredible just watching him, be himself! Being in Shabbos, being there for people.

[Zahava (Brumberg) Krevsky]

Oh MY GD!!
Barri Dinnerstein and I, Joni Brumberg ...hitchhiked our way out to SF from NY in the summer of 1970. We were on the blue hippie bus from Brooklyn, and we were dropped off on Market St. in downtown SF in the middle of the afternoon. Standing there like the two lost souls that we were, this lovely readhead young woman
(who was carrying her "erotic"photos from a photoshot in a manila envelope) asked us if we had a place to say...we said we were going to head over to Golden Gate Park,. and she said "why don't you go to the House of Love and Prayer?...then Barri said "oh, that's Shlomo's place, and I said "what's a shlomo?
Well, the House won out... and as we arrive on the doorstep, this HUGE dude with a frizzy black ponytail answers the door and says "Come in, we've been waiting for you, you're just in time for dinner, come wash with us! (As I proceeded to look at my travel-weary dirty little hands)...and the rest,as they say is history.