Labor of Love Produces a Paean to God

Before the beginning of Rosh Hashana services tonight, some members of Congregation Shir Ha-Ma’alot will welcome the Jewish New Year at home by dipping apples in honey.

It is a simple but profound act, as Rabbi Bernard King explains it, an entreaty to God that the coming year be infused with sweetness.

Tonight’s High Holy Day services promise to be sweet for the 20 or so women of the Irvine congregation who have spent the last 18 months fitting tiny pieces of colored glass into a 25-square-foot frame. They have finished the second of seven stained-glass windows planned for the temple. It was installed Thursday.

“This new addition to our synagogue will be our taste of honey to begin this new year,” said King, founding rabbi of the 320-family congregation. The 28-year-old congregation moved to Irvine two years ago from a Newport Beach location shared with St. Mark Presbyterian Church.

The first window, on which the Shabbat candle-lighting prayer is encircled by the mythical sea creature known as Leviathan, was completed in April. It contains about 2,500 pieces of glass and took nine excruciating months for the novice stained-glass artists to finish. Scenes of Jerusalem on the window are framed by flowers, grapes and pomegranates.

There are about 1,500 pieces of glass in the second window, which is a rendering of the creation as seen from deep space.

“Each piece has to be meticulously cut, shaped, ground, wrapped in copper and then soldered,” said congregation member Lynda Nosanov, a 46-year-old Corona del Mar stained-glass designer who has volunteered her time and materials for the project. “An obsessive-compulsive person is perfect for this type of work.”

Nosanov estimates it will take another three years to complete the five remaining windows.

She has trained the volunteers, who come and go throughout the week, who give away spare hours in the second-floor temple workshop in return for a bit of immortality. The volunteers liken the experience to a kind of religious quilting bee.

“There is a great deal of similarity between quilting and stained glass,” said Lana Alber, a 23-year member of the Reform Jewish congregation who brought her recently finished baby quilt to the workshop to show off. “Each involves a whole that is cut into small pieces and then reassembled. They’re both a kind of spiritual endeavor.”

In the beginning, the volunteers carefully score and break each piece of glass, then painstakingly shape the pieces with hand tools. The edges are then smoothed with a diamond-bit grinder and fitted into a small section of the window. The fit is tested and the shape is adjusted to conform with the pattern on which the pieces are placed.

The pieces grow in size as they are edged with copper foil, and the entire window seems to become a living thing, expanding, almost pulsing as the women quietly work. Earlier this week, the multicolored glass was at last joined together by a seamless trail of solder.

Nosanov began the project with nearly two years of research, poring through reference materials on stained-glass windows used in churches, temples and religious gathering places throughout history. She was encouraged by Rabbi King to go beyond traditional designs.

“Usually, when windows are done for a church or synagogue, there’s a board, there’s a budget, the designs have to be approved, so it’s usually art by compromise,” Nosanov said. “It’s very, very rare that the artists are also part of the congregation.”

The volunteers, many who have some experience in the arts, were trained by Nosanov on small “apprentice windows” made of clear glass. It took them about 2,000 hours to complete the first window.

“I always wanted to be part of a quilting bee, to be a small part of something big, like singing in a choir,” said Irvine optometrist Jan Jackman before the window was completed. She filed the copper edge of a small piece of dusky-colored glass as she spoke. It was carefully fit among the jewel-colored pieces that form a view of the Mideast from above the Earth and its turquoise aura, aligned with the sun and moon in a lunar eclipse at the moment of creation.

“In a sense, this is an implementation of God’s act of creation,” Rabbi King said of the six-year project. “They are releasing the holy sparks in the various pieces of glass, which then form an interconnected whole. We believe there is a spark of divinity in everything and everyone, and that our work on this planet is to recognize that spark and put a broken universe back together.”

Although Nosanov has restored church windows in the past, she said this project has helped bring a new spiritual outlook to her work and to her personal life as well.

“My husband’s Jewish and I’ve been involved in the Jewish culture for 25 years, but I only recently converted,” she said. “I’m sure this project was part of the stimulus for that, and the people.”

* GOD AND PARTY: Fund-raiser on holiday offends O.C. Jewish Democrats. B1