Chicago Rabbi

Young Louis Leopold Mann despised all rabbis, thought there was not a real, red-blooded man among them. Then one day he read in the Talmud, "If there be a need for a man, be thou that man," decided he would enter the rabbinate. He left Louisville, went to Johns Hopkins (where an English professor wrote on one of his themes: "Please describe something. You always preach."), then to Cincinnati's University and Hebrew Union College, then to Yale for a doctorate in psychology.

Last Sunday, Rabbi Mann, 53 and an outstanding Jewish American, marked his 20th anniversary at Chicago's Sinai Congregation. Said he: "If I had nine lives I should be a pastor nine times."

Nine Lives in One. Rabbi Mann could hardly do more with nine lives than he has with one. He has been active in the Big Brother and Big Sister movements ("There are no delinquent children, only delinquent parents"). He pioneered with Margaret Sanger in the American Birth Control League long before such participation was respectable. He is a director of the National Crime Prevention Institute. Ex-President Hoover appointed him a member of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. Secretary Harold Ickes put him on the Housing Commission. He is a regional arbitrator on the National War Labor Board.

Every Sunday Rabbi Mann packs the temple (the first reform congregation organized in the U.S.). Sinai has had Sunday services for 69 years (orthodox synagogues hold services on Saturday -- the Jewish Sabbath). He lets men and women sit together, does not require them to sit facing east. He baits them in his sermons, to make them think. "My job," he says, "isn't just to use a vocabulary. I have to get a thrust in now & then. Religion can't be taught. It has to be caught. And it must be caught from someone who is on fire."

Rabbi Mann has found the psychology he learned at Yale more valuable than his theology. In his study, filled with 700 books (there are 1,000 more in the adjoining bathroom), he sees an average of eight parishioners a day who come with problems. He keeps a fresh handkerchief in his desk drawer for those who cry. If he cannot straighten out a case, he recommends a psychiatrist.

Abraham's Grandpa. Rabbi Mann's synagogue has two other means of getting across his message: the Forum and the Sunday school. Sinai's Sunday school (TIME, Mar. 11, 1935) emphasizes the latest educational theories, retains a psychiatrist to look after the 600 boys & girls. Says Mann: "It is not too important to know who Abraham's grandpa was if children can learn to live normal, happy, useful lives."

Sinai Temple's Forum (an "ungraded university") began 29 years ago when the synagogue's community director, young Samuel Disraeli Schwartz, intruded on a basketball game in the gymnasium to ask if anyone wanted to hear a lecture. Forty-two people did. Now lectures are held each Monday during the fall and winter with audiences from 1,800 to 3,500. Cost: 15 programs for $5. Audiences are about half Jewish, half Gentile. Slight, greying Director Schwartz still runs the Forum, has made it pay its way for the past 20 years. This year's program includes: Louis Fischer, Archibald MacLeish. Last week Walter Duranty spoke; the week before, Will Durant. Asked one of Sinai's members: "When do we have Jimmy Durante?"

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