Meet Moocho Salomon
Moocho Salomon, president of BHC from 1994 to 2001, played a pivotal role in modernizing our building’s structure as well as the structure of the worship within it.
Born Marjorie Scott, Moocho’s Chinese basketweaving teacher was unable to pronounce her name, and it came out sounding something like Matchy. Her two older brothers teased her, first calling her Matchy, which gradually morphed into Moocho. The nickname stuck.
Moocho grew up in Buffalo, NY. She came to New Hampshire in 1976 when she transferred to Franconia College. She was an art major, and had a career as a weaver, selling her creations in a gallery in Boston.
While at Franconia College, she met her future husband, Dan Salomon. Both wanted to stay in the area, so Dan opened a small music teaching studio in Littleton. They have nurtured their business ever since. In 1982, they bought their current building; completed in 1833, it’s the oldest wooden structure on Main St. Early on, they sold electronics, like TVs and stereos, as a way to augment the business.
But when Walmart came to town in 1997, they knew they couldn’t compete. They took the leap, giving up the electronics and the almost 25 employees they’d hired. They continued to sell guitars as they always had, but emphasized high-end, handcrafted instruments, catering to guitar lovers hunting for a future heirloom. The store has prospered, becoming a premier place for people on the East Coast to shop. “A fabulous website, northernlightsmusic.com, has helped,” Moocho acknowledged. Both of the couple’s sons, Asher and Benjamin, have returned from living in California to work in the business.
Moocho converted to Judaism for two reasons. The first was relationship-oriented: She planned to marry Dan and wanted to be accepted into his family. Dan’s family had been refugees from Germany in 1938. His father, who’d been persecuted before he fled, considered it imperative to continue Jewish traditions. The second, more profound reason was spiritual: The things she’d heard in church as a child just weren’t meaningful to her. “The more I read about Judaism, the more it made sense to me. When I discovered Judaism, I discovered I was Jewish.”
Moocho had an Orthodox conversion. “There were three Chassidim standing outside the door of the mikvah, listening for the splash of my body.” Mort Fisch, who was then president of BHC, became a justice of the peace in order to marry Dan and Moocho. The service he arranged was also Orthodox. Although the setting outside the shul was lovely, everything said was in Hebrew. Moocho couldn’t understand a word of it.
The couple settled into and still live in the cottage Dan’s parents purchased for their summer vacations. Besides their two boys, they have a daughter, Eva, who lives in Falmouth, ME. When the children were young, Moocho looked for opportunities to connect with other Jewish families in the area. She found many young parents were similarly eager to give their kids a sense of Jewishness. She started a Havurah. “We’d gather all these ‘Hidden Yidden’ together and go to each other’s homes to do activities. There was little religious ritual other than maybe a blessing over the challah we’d just made. It grew to a crowd of about a dozen children.” Leslie Dreier volunteered to teach the children Hebrew at this time, a task he continued when the group became active in a re-imagined BHC that was shortly to evolve.
For in the meantime, attendance at BHC religious services had dwindled, and consisted mostly of elderly people without much vision for the future. They continued a Modern Orthodox service, which felt uninviting and out of date for many parents in the Havurah. Then, in 1994, Mort Fisch, who’d been BHC’s president for 18 years, died unexpectedly. Mort and his wife Adele had been mainstays of the congregation, not just overseeing services and kiddushs, but opening their home for social events and Jewish holidays. Moocho was stunned when one day not long after Mort died, Adele Fisch came to visit. She handed Moocho the checkbook for the congregation. Adele told her the future of the congregation lay in a new generation, essentially anointing Moocho as the next leader of BHC. However startled she was by this endorsement, Moocho rose to the challenge.
The young families wanted a more egalitarian attitude towards women, and an updated service. They wanted modern prayer books with transliterations, winter services, a Sunday school for their children. They also recognized there were enormous physical problems with the building. The roof leaked, the basement flooded, the items in the cupboards froze in the winter. The vaulted ceiling was not adequately buttressed and was in danger of collapsing inward. All this would have to be tackled to make BHC safe and ready for these newly enthusiastic and hopeful congregants.
Although Moocho was officially voted by the BHC Board as president (the first female to hold the position), there were challenging Board meetings and difficult conversations. Some members were reluctant to change the nature of religious services. For good reason, the Board worried about the expense of fixing up the facility. But she persevered, and with time they acquiesced to changes that were necessary to maintain the congregation. The rabbi’s house had a garage with a little apartment above it. The young group winterized this, so that services could be held during the winter in the garage area, while upstairs a visiting rabbi had a place to stay. While this renovation was ongoing, they met each month in a nearby church. Later, when they tackled the main building, the rabbi’s house and garage were sold to pay for those major repairs.
Gradually, the shul was winterized, the stained glass repaired, the basement cleared and cleaned, the restrooms made ADA compliant, the roof replaced, and the trusses added to stabilize the roof. Part of the funding for all this came from a grant from the Trust Family Foundation. Moocho credits all the young families who bolstered her and each other during this period. Particularly, “the women really pulled their weight. I had a lot of support. I was on the phone every day with Beth Harwood. Eli Gordon was instrumental in helping me get the grant. It was truly collaborative.”
One by one, their children had their bar or bat mitzvahs. Combining her art with her interest in Jewish education, Moocho taught the children weaving. In affection for Leslie and appreciation for his teaching, the class wove him a tallit and wove the prayer shawls for their own big day. Under Moocho’s leadership, BHC at last had a sound home and a revitalized congregation.
Today, Moocho celebrates Shabbat at home each week with her husband, her sons and their children, and occasionally her daughter’s family from Maine as well. It is a joyful time for her. She can rest knowing that she helped usher in a new era in the long history of BHC.