In 1967, when we became a full-fledged Reform Jewish congregation, we began sharing the sanctuary with St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in SW DC. Their Rev. Al Shands and our new Rabbi, Bernard Mehlman, got along quite well, plus our two congregations were made up largely of neighbors. The Episcopalians were kind of delighted to have us.

Until then we had been moving about the SW area from church to church holding Friday night services. We had one Torah, a second-hand one that had been bought by Belle Moscou, the mother-in-law of Ted Schuchat. Ted was our first president and I believe Belle bought that Torah in his honor. The Torah used to be stored in people's houses and taken in an old portable china closet (stripped of its shelves) to wherever we were having services. That china closet was our first ark. I remember Shirley Kallek, our congregation' s first matriarch, opening up the enormous trunk of her 1956 Buick convertible and pointing to the china closet and the Torah inside and directing me and Sheldon Tromberg or Sid Booth to please take it out.

Rabbi Mehlman mentioned to Rev. Shands that, now that we were settled some place, it might be time for us to get a proper ark for our congregation. We would have to have at least one more Torah for, if nothing else, Simchat Torah, when we read from the end of one (Deuteronomy) to the beginning of the other (Genesis). Bernard said he thought we could design a portable one, so that it would not be in the way of St. A's Sunday services.

Bernard asked my wife, Lee Cron, to look into this, since she had had the idea of putting on Art Shows to raise money, knew some of the artists around town, and had a really good eye for art and design. At that time, I was Assistant Commissioner of the Food & Drug Administration, in charge of press, public relations, and publications. My Art Director was Sheldon Cohen, who also knew everybody in the DC art world. Sheldon used to farm work out to a hot new design studio in DC called Tasi, Gelberg, & Pasanelli. Over time, I got to know the key principal, Murray Gelberg, a nice Jewish boy and the son of the owner of Gelberg Signs, a Washington institution.

So naturally, with Lee's permission, I called Murray. We all met, and we asked Murray for his advice. Whom did he know who could help us with the design of an ark. Murray's eyes lit up and he said he would do it at no cost. Later in the week Murray, Lee, and I went to St. A's and looked at the bimah and tried to imagine what a portable, one-Torah ark might look like. Then we repaired to our nearby townhouse for lunch.

During that or subsequent conversations, Murray became fixed on the idea that the seminal moment related in the Torah was the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai, and began to sketch out an ark that would suggest that holy mountain. "Get it? At every service, you'll take the Torah out of Sinai again!" When Lee and I showed these sketches to the Rabbi, he was very interested, but wondered what would happen we got our second Torah and maybe even a third. Lee and I asked him if there were any other holy mountains, and he said, yes, there were really four: Mt. Sinai, Mt. Neboh, Mt. Zion, and Mt. Moriah, the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile we had copied out for Murray the Biblical instructions in Exodus 36-38 for the building of the original ark. Exodus provides a great deal of information about curtains, bronze fittings, decorative finials, priestly colors, and so on. We urged Murray not to go wild, because we were a young and broke congregation and couldn't afford anything too elaborate. So he focused on the original ark's basic material: acacia wood. It is native to Africa and plantation-grown in Asia. It is so dense and hard that it's sometimes called ironwood and lasts forever. Murray said we had to get enough money to at least buy the appropriate wood, whatever it costs. You can't build a real Aron Kodesh out of knotty pine. We agreed. Then we told him about the other three mountains, and he was ecstatic. Almost in a flash, he saw the ark he wanted to design.

Murray did several sketches of mountainous arrangements – four in a row, different clusters, etc. He thought that the four-mountain idea was perfect. Each mountain would hold its own Torah, plus you could easily dismantle the four arks after every service. Lee showed the sketches to Rabbi Bernard Mehlman and Rev. Al Shands. They loved the concept, but Al went even further. He said the presence of the four-mountain ark throughout his own Sunday morning services would be an inspiration for Episcopalians, also, and he insisted that we design our ark to be permanent, not portable!

The next problem to be solved was ... who would build it? Murray knew a young, reclusive, Italian-American sculptor named Don Turano, whose material of choice for his own work happened to be wood. Murray asked Don if he would execute the ark design. Although it was essentially a cabinetry job, the Temple Micah ark was still a commission paying real money and Don agreed to do it. (I don't recall Don's fee, but it was respectable.) The Board drew up the contract and Don went to work.

Don went to St. A's and measured the torahs, measured the space on the bimah, drew up a precise blueprint, and ordered the planks of finished acacia wood for our ark. One day, after the wood arrived, Lee, Murray, and I went to his studio to see how Don was coming along. He was in rented studio space behind a block of rundown stores on Connecticut Avenue, around the corner from Calvert Street. Don was not having an easy time. The wood was hard as steel, as advertised. He had had to buy extremely tough saw blades, chisels, and drill bits to get through the stuff. He wasn't completely sure he could do this job, but he promised to keep trying. He missed several deadlines, but the ark was finally finished and installed in time, I believe, for Rosh Hashanah of 1969. Almost immediately the four-mountain ark became the icon for this congregation, appearing in outline on our stationery, program sheets, greeting cards, and so on. When we built our new Temple on upper Wisconsin Avenue, we moved the ark intact. It was the only time it actually became portable. Despite that move, and despite the heat, humidity, and dry cold of the Washington, D.C., climate, our ark has not changed color or shape since it was built.

I should add that Lee, meanwhile, made several trips to New York, shopping for a Torah-cover fabric that would work with the color of acacia wood and the mountain shapes, plus somehow echo the instructions of the Torah. She came back from one trip with many yards of sturdy but gorgeous cloth designed by the great Jack Lenore Larsen. She had bought it directly from his studio on Park Avenue South. That material has been as strong as the wood of the ark itself; it still covers our Torahs to this day.

The final touch to the ark, the letters spelling Micah near the top of "Mt. Sinai," were added at the very end by Rabbi Mehlman. They are an acrostic, spelling not only Micah but also asking, in initial form, "Who is like Adonay? "

Where is everyone today? Well, the Red Line opened and the Calvert-Woodley station inflated the values of Don's studio neighborhood. He left and, the last I heard, was living still reclusively somewhere near Poolesville and still sculpting. Murray Gelberg left DC for New York City, where he became a partner with Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in the famous Push Pin design studio. His foray into cabinetry was not forgotten, however: among other accomplishments, Murray designed the innovative interior display spaces for the hardware chain, Brookstone. He is retired in Westchester County, but still consults; Murray's current client is one of the firms working on Ground Zero.

Lee Cron passed away in December 1998, but her touch and those of her family still enrich our worship experience.

When we moved into our new building, the architects and Temple members, Robert Weinstein and Judith Capen, asked me to figure out a way to put our Reform Jewish canon on the oak frieze that encircles the sanctuary. I did that with the help of Gelberg Signs, who began the task by installing our special alphabet – Micah Bold – in their computers. For nearly two weeks during our first summer here, workmen from Gelberg Signs placed the words from our sacred texts on the walls of our sanctuary, where they will be as permanent as the ark that Murray Gelberg designed for us.

[as told by Ted Cron]