Synagogues' Identity Crisis
The Multitasking Shul (06/23/2005)
In a movement both new and old, synagogues are expanding their boundaries and transforming their missions. Welcome to the outward-looking temple of tomorrow.

By Steve Lipman - Staff Writer
New York Jewish Week

"In the weeks between now and November, the vestibule of a Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side turns into a produce market on Wednesday evenings. Members of Congregation Ansche Chesed and members of the general community, canvas tote bags in hand, sort through piles of lettuce and eggplants and spinach and other seasonal fruits and vegetables stacked on tables.

On a Sunday morning this month, the Garden Room of a Reform temple in Westchester becomes a blood collection center. Lying on a half-dozen beds set up like an assembly line, the men and women of the Larchmont Temple fill out donation forms, have their blood pressure tested and give blood in the temple’s semiannual drive.

Sometime this month, in the basement or attic of a home in Elizabeth, N.J. — the home of someone who belongs to an Orthodox congregation — a member of the Jewish community will pick out a skirt, shirt or something else to wear. The hosts and guests are participants in the Clothing Exchange, a program established more than a dozen years ago by the Jewish Educational Network to offer needed articles at no cost.

At other congregations in the New York metropolitan area, at various times of the year, you can take driving lessons or CPR lessons, engage the services of a social worker, get employment counseling or find information about apartment sales and rentals.

When Jews go to their synagogues these days, it’s often for something other than praying or learning, the traditional mainstays of Jewish houses of worship in the United States.

Reacting to changing demographics and needs of members or prospective members, a growing number of congregations are offering an innovative variety of programs, widening their mission, often reaching out to the community at large and hopefully attracting new members.

Some of these new activities — most of them volunteer-driven — are tied to the STAR or Synagogue 2000 national initiatives. Others have their roots in their own membership.

And they span denominational labels.

“It’s definitely a trend, not just within one denomination,” said Rabbi Michael Paley, scholar-in-residence at UJA-Federation and the philanthropy’s former director of synagogue and community affairs. “It brings people into the synagogue. It’s much more inclusive.”

“It’s a trend also backwards,” he said, restoring the synagogue’s multitasking function that was common a century ago across the Atlantic. “Synagogues in Jewish history used to do this. The idea of a synagogue as a place [exclusively] for education and prayer was an American church idea.”

In the Old Country, Rabbi Paley said, “The synagogue was the public building of the community.” There you could get food, or help with a shidduch, or other assistance that transcended a narrow “religious” definition — “all the services you used to need.”

“Here we’re bringing back that idea, which has caught on in the last decade,” Rabbi Paley said.

Some Jews simply feel comfortable in a Jewish setting, even doing things that are tenuously Jewish. Others rarely enter a synagogue, and these programs are a draw.

“People want to do it in a Jewish venue,” Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Ansche Chesed said of the “Tuv Haaretz” (the good of the land) food co-op program, part of the nationwide, community-supported agricultural movement held by the congregation for the first time last year. But his words also apply to the swath of new programming offered by other synagogues.

Ansche Chesed, in an arrangement with Eve Kaplan, an organic farmer in Aquebogue, N.Y., sells her produce to co-op members, who pay an advance fee.

“The shul doesn’t make any money off it,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said. “It’s something we believe in.”

The rabbi said that hopefully, people come to think of Ansche Chesed as a place that shares its progressive ideals about such things as the protection of the environment.

“If people find Jewish meaning in the protection of the environment,” if they find “something spiritually rich” in the synagogue, “they may come to daven or for learning,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said.

“For better or for worse, American Jews of my age, 38, have for the most part not grown up davening. Only a certain number of people will be attracted to synagogue for three hours of davening on a Saturday morning,” he said.

Ansche Chesed also sponsors blood drives and offers CPR lessons.

Trying to ride the synagogue transformation wave, the Orthodox Union, the umbrella group representing centrist Orthodoxy, just announced a first-time program to give five grants of up to $20,000 each for synagogues to come up new ideas and programming in areas ranging from communal outreach to youth programs to multimedia technologies. In a statement announcing the new initiative, Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, the OU’s executive vice president, said: “The OU now has the opportunity to say [to shuls], ‘Think out of the box. Dream your dreams. Create.’”

Glenn Easton, president of the North American Association of Synagogue Executives and executive director of a congregation in Washington, D.C., sees synagogues changing not what they offer but how they package it.

Activities like social action have “been a large part [of] the Reform movement, and probably [of] a majority of Conservative synagogues” for a long time, he said. “I think they may be focusing more on things other than synagogue services and religious school.

“They may be marketing it better,” Easton said. “Maybe they’re promoting it better.”

It’s all aimed “to make the synagogue more relevant,” he said. It’s aimed at people who have “dropped out” of synagogues — especially after their children finish bar/bat mitzvah studies — or are considering dropping out.

Is it working?

“I think the jury’s out,” Easton said, saying he’s noticed no huge increase in affiliation rates.

For Scott Riemer, an active member of the Larchmont Temple and a leader of the brotherhood’s twice-a-year blood drives, the activity is “part of our tikkun olam, helping the community.”

The drives are held in cooperation with the Sound Shore Hospital in New Rochelle.

“We’re the biggest drive of the year of that hospital,” Easton said. “This is part of our duties as Jews to give back to the community.”

Mostly temple members take part, he said, adding that it’s “a way to keep the members involved with the temple.”

The Clothing Exchange of Elizabeth’s Jewish Education Center — a network of a school system, kollel and several synagogues set up by the late Rabbi Pinchas Teitz — is part of an extensive chesed network that includes employment assistance and a free loan fund of baby equipment.

“A synagogue is more than prayer,” said Steve Karp, JEC executive director.

Members of the Elizabeth Jewish community clean their gently used clothing and bring it to one of three homes — there are separate centers for boys’, girls’ and maternity clothing. The items are placed in boxes or hung on racks. People who need something call for an appointment. Dozens use the service, Karp said.

“Helping each other,” he said, “is putting the words ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ into action.”
Temple Beth Torah of Melville, L.I., has expanded this concept into a neighboring community.

For 20 years the congregation helped the Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch sponsor a day camp for minority children.

“We call it ‘the Wyandanch Camp,’ ” said Marc Weiss, the temple’s executive vice president. “We’re an extremely affluent community that happens to be next door to an extremely impoverished community.”

Some 50 members of Beth Torah volunteer their time each summer. Some work the entire summer, and some show up just one day.

“This is clearly a way of giving back because we’re all created in God’s image,” Weiss said.

Rabbi Paley said these programs are a sign that synagogues are responding to needs around them, that they are revitalizing themselves.

“You want to open as many doors to the gateway of the synagogue as you can, so lots of people can come in,” he said.

Synagogues are “always competing with secular attractions for [the interest of] American Jews,” said Jeffrey Gurock, professor of American Jewish history at Yeshiva University. “People prefer to go to the theater or go to sporting events rather than go to services.

“What a synagogue has to do is adapt some of these activities, bring them into synagogue life … make the synagogue a 24/7 location for Jewish life,” he said. “The potential congregant has embraced American life — you have to embrace the American way of life.”

“That,” he said, “hasn’t changed at all.”

Gurock said the current outreach efforts by synagogues follow in the footsteps of the “synagogue-center” movement, usually associated with the late Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, which brought athletic and social activities to U.S. synagogues in the 1920s. Congregations built gyms and libraries, held dances and film showings.

That movement, Gurock said, actually began in Reform circles near the turn of the 19th century, then spread across the country to all denominations.

“It was very successful,” he said. “The idea was that who comes to play will stay to pray.”

It’s a uniquely American phenomenon, Gurock said, noting that “I don’t know of a synagogue-center movement elsewhere.”

More people came to shul. But, he said, “When these activities were developed, some rabbis felt that these events caused congregants to lose focus on the ultimate goals of the synagogue, which were religious ones.”

The “synagogue-center” movement changed both synagogues and Jewish community centers, whose athletic and social emphasis sometimes competed with synagogue activities, David Kaufman wrote in “Shul with a Pool: The ‘Synagogue-Center’ in American Jewish History” (Brandeis University Press, 1999).

“The synagogue was ‘socialized,’ now including a school, library, assembly hall, kitchen and other institutional trappings as a matter of course,” he wrote. “Whatever its congregational name, the American synagogue of today customarily perceives itself as a ‘Jewish center.’ ”

As for the book’s title: “Many people have assumed that ‘shul with a pool’ is my invention — it is not,” Kaufman wrote. “The irreverent phrase was coined during the 1920s to refer to a new phenomenon in the American Jewish community, a combination synagogue [shul in Yiddish] and Jewish community center [whose swimming pool was often its chief attraction].”

What will the next trend be?

Gurock, a historian, offers no guesses.

“It is methodological error to be predictive as a historian,” he said.

“The only thing that is certain [is] that the issue of how to get the unaffiliated and disaffected involved in synagogue life is not going away.”
- posted by Izak @ 10:59 PM