The early fall of 1963 was the first time that I was attending a public school where at least 50 percent of the students in the class didn't also not attend classes in school on the Jewish New Year two-day religious High Holidays of Rosh Hoshanah and the one-day Yom Kippur Day of Atonement for people of Jewish religious background; if any of those three days fell on a weekday school day.
Prior to moving to Indianapolis in late 1962, over 90 percent of all my classmates in elementary school and junior high school were students of assimilated and non-Orthodox Jewish religious background; and during the one term I attended Bayside High School in the fall of 1962, over 50 percent of my high school classmates were also of assimilated, non-Orthodox Jewish religious background.
But in Indianapolis , at Broad Ripple High in the fall of 1963, nearly all the students in that school attended classes on the Jewish High Holy Days and Yom Kippur, if they occured on a school day; because I think less than 20 of the 1,600 students in the then-over 99 percent white high school seemed to be of Jewish religious background. Yet aside from my vague recollection that the usual classwork was going on inside a public school I attended, while I was at home or in a synogogue observing Rosh Hoshanah or Yom Kippur in some way, I don't recall much about how I observed the High Holy Days and Yom Kippur in Indianapolis in the fall of 1963.
What I do recall is that, unlike in Queens, my father had to drive himself and me in a car to the Beth-El Zedek synagogue, rather than being able to walk to the local conservative Jewish congregation's synagogue; like we had both been able to do previously when were living in Beech Hills in Queens. And also, the Beth-El Zedek synagogue seemed fancier-looking and more modern than the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue I had been bar-mitzvahed from in Queens. But I now have no memory of who the rabbi there was in 1963 or what he said in his sermons, in part, because neither my father not I ever went to that syagogue again after the fall 1963 High Holy Days, during the time we lived in Indianapolis.
My only other vague memory related to the fall of 1963 Jewish High Holy Days in Naptown was that when, for some reason, the few students of Jewish religious background (who needed to fill out some kind of form to be excused from attending classes on one of the religious holidays) were gathered together in one of the school offices, I first noticed that one of the woman students there, who would have been considered among the most attractive woman students by most of the Broad Ripple male students, was also of Jewish religious background. But I can't recall ever bumping into her afterwards, during the rest of my junior year at Broad Ripple, probably because she wasn't in any of my classes that year.
