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How one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations added 900 new members in 8 months
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
TORONTO (JTA) — At a time of declining synagogue affiliation rates and following a pandemic slump, one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations gained 900 new members in just eight months.
Launched in July 2022, an initiative called the Generations Membership Program attracted young families to Beth Tzedec Congregation here by removing membership dues for anyone under the age of 40.
The success of the no-dues model surprised leaders of the synagogue, whose next challenge is to strengthen the connections between the new members and the congregation.
“We were all surprised by how much uptake there was,” said Yacov Fruchter, the synagogue’s director of Community Building and Spiritual Engagement, Yacov Fruchter.
With over 4,000 members, Beth Tzedec is one of the largest Conservative congregations in North America. However, over the past decade, Beth Tzedec has suffered from a decline that has affected the Conservative movement, once North American Judaism’s largest denomination. In 1971, 832 congregations identified with the movement, a number which dropped to 562 by 2020. The number of Conservative Jews also dropped from 1.6 million at its peak to a half million by 2020, according to data from the 2020 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews.
The decline of the Conservative movement left Beth Tzedec struggling to attract new members while old families fell out of touch with the congregation. “Ten years ago, our membership was at 2,400 households, but I think that number was inflated,” said Rabbi Steven Wernick, its senior rabbi. “Into the pandemic, we saw membership drop to 1,700-1,800 paying units,” or families. That’s a decline of approximately 25% over the 2010s.
As director of education, Daniel Silverman oversees Beth Tzedec’s congregational school as well as bar/bat mitzvah educational programs. Silverman said that it was difficult to attract and maintain younger congregants due to shifting cultural perspectives and financial stresses that have worsened over recent years.
“It was hard to help people understand that synagogue was worth their time when we put up a relatively high [financial] barrier,” said Silverman. “People of this generation are not going to be inclined to join and pay money to join a synagogue in the way that their parents and grandparents were.”
Beth Tzedec’s membership dues are adjusted for each family unit depending on how much the family can pay. That doesn’t mean that membership is cheap, however. For the highest-earning members of the congregation, dues can be up to $6,000 annually per family.
Ariel Weinberg, 17, belongs to Beth Tzedec and participated in Silverman’s bat mitzvah educational program. When she becomes an adult, she said she would be happy to pay a portion of her salary for synagogue membership but wants her experience to be more than simply attending for the High Holidays.
“That’s a lot of money to put forth every month when I only use it twice per year,” Weinberg said.
Voluntary dues programs like Beth Tzedec’s have been growing in recent years. Synagogues adopting the model cite research showing that potential members see belonging to a synagogue as less of an obligation and instead want to be shown what a synagogue has to offer, as Rabbis Kerry Olitzky and Avi Olitzky argued in their 2015 book on membership models.
Wernick said that the way younger generations view synagogue membership is fundamentally different from previous generations.
“The traditional synagogue membership model was pay first and engage later. So what we decided to do was, engage first, and then we’ll talk about money later,” Wernick said.
Boosting membership on paper is one thing; creating active, engaged members who show up for worship and take part in programming is another. To demonstrate Beth Tzedec’s commitment to engaging the new cohort, the shul recently hired an engagement specialist and the board is also in the process of hiring a new cantor or rabbi. Leadership has also committed to meeting one-on-one for a “coffee date” with each new member of the congregation to strengthen new connections.
“The goal is to make a place as large as Beth Tzedec feel small and personal,” said Silverman.
Leadership’s attempts to better connect with congregants have already resonated well with new members. After Rebbecca Starkman and her family joined Beth Tzedec in September 2022, her husband met with Wernick as part of the “coffee date” initiative.
“He really, really enjoyed it,” said Starkman. “It also made him feel connected, connected and comfortable.”
When Wernick became Beth Tzedec’s chief rabbi in 2019, he set out to address Beth Tzedec’s membership woes. As the former CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the congregational arm of Conservative Judaism, he used his expertise to devise a plan that would reverse the previous trend in Beth Tzedec’s affiliation.
“What I attempted to do at USCJ was to help synagogues reinvent themselves for the 21st century,” Wernick said.
Part of that idea, said Beth Tzedec’s president, Patti Rotman, meant rethinking the congregation’s membership model. “It couldn’t just be transactional. It had to be transformational,” Rotman said.
Prior to the implementation of the Generations program, Beth Tzedec had attempted strategies to improve engagement. Previously, membership for families under the age of 25 was set at only $50 per year. The congregation was able to support this program as membership dues only accounted for 30% of operating income, the rest coming from other sources.
According to Wernick, as of 2022, only 5% of Beth Tzedec’s operating income came from families under 40. As such, the switch to no-fee membership for the under-40 cohort did not cause a significant financial impact.
“So you already had a circumstance where those over 40 were already paying for those under 40,” Wernick said.
In the months prior to the implementation of the Generations Membership Program, Beth Tzedec undertook a significant amount of research into synagogue engagement in Toronto. Based on the 2018 Environics Survey of Jews in Canada, they learned that 70% of Jewish Canadians belonged to a congregation, more than double the percentage in the U.S.
“If there’s 200,000 Jews in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], then 30% are not affiliated,” said Wernick, “and then if you break it down by how many people are in their 20s and 30s, we’re talking about 16,000 Jews.” Out of the 16,000, Wernick estimates that approximately 30% grew up as part of the Conservative movement, while 30% grew up unaffiliated.
Geographic research told Wernick that prior to July 2022, there were around 500 households in the vicinity of Beth Tzedec in need of a shul.
Rabbi Steven Wernick, senior rabbi of Beth Tzedec in Toronto, previously served as CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. (Courtesy of USCJ)
Beth Tzedec was able to focus its social media campaigns on neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of young and unaffiliated Jews in the vicinity.
“We targeted the unaffiliated, we targeted the previously affiliated to Beth Tzedec, but who had dropped off for more than three years, and we targeted based on geography,” as well as the study by Environics and information from UJA-Federation of Greater Toronto.
Even with the sophisticated marketing campaign, Wernick said that the synagogue expected it would only gain around 20-50 new households per year.
“Just because you give it away for free doesn’t mean that people are going to come,” said Wernick.
By the end of the first day of advertising, 50 new families had signed up.
“We are well over 420 new households,” Wernick said. Seventy-five percent of the uptake are brand-new members while the remainder are former Beth Tzedec members who had fallen out of the fold for more than three years.
The 420 household figure represents mainly families, as well as couples and individuals. Beth Tzedec President, Patti Rotman, estimates that approximately 900 new individual members became part of the synagogue in the eight months since the program was inaugurated.
When it comes to reinvigorating community life, gaining new members is not the only task at hand.
The membership drive “is only mile one of a marathon,” said Silverman.
“The most difficult part is, how do you then keep people connected?” said Fruchter. “You have to have the capacity to develop the relationships that you are starting.”
As self-identified Modern Orthodox Jews, Rebecca Starkman and her family attend synagogue regularly. Because her primary congregation only meets every other week, Starkman had been attending Beth Tzedec for years prior to joining under the Generations program.
“I had been attending loosely since since 2015,” said Starkman. “We had always been members at this other congregation but had not joined Beth Tzedec until this past September.”
Starkman said that it was the financial barrier that had been preventing her and her family from officially joining Beth Tzedec.
“We didn’t feel like we had enough finances to pay membership at two organizations,” said Starkman. “The program definitely gave us the motivation to make the leap to being part of the shul.”
Starkman said that she knows of other families who were also in her situation, attending Beth Tzedec services without becoming official members due to the financial barrier.
“There are three other families who did the same thing we did,” said Starkman. However, one family was over 40 and still could not join the congregation under the program. Nonetheless, for families who are lucky enough to be covered, Starkman said that the program is definitely a motivating factor to join Beth Tzedec.
Weinberg said that the Generations program will also improve diversity within the congregation.
“Our mandate really is to build a stronger Jewish future with youth and young professional engagement as our priority. And to go with that,” said Rotman, “we are also at the forefront of equity and inclusion.”
According to Rotman, Beth Tzedec maintains a vigorous diversity and inclusion committee dedicated to ensuring that the synagogue is an inclusive environment for everyone.
Given the local renaissance that Beth Tzedec has undergone, Rotman stresses the importance of bringing down barriers as the best way for synagogues to engage the current generation of Jews.
“Our goal is to inspire and enable Jews to live meaningful Jewish lives and the best way [to do so] for the under-40 cohort is to remove the barrier to membership,” Rotman said.
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Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months
(JTA) — Iran fired multiple barrages of missiles toward northern Israel on Sunday night local time, in the first direct fire from Iran on Israel since early April.
No one was immediately reported injured in the barrages, according to Israeli media, and the Israeli military said it shot down all the missiles aimed at the country on Sunday night.
The attack came hours after a stabbing attack by an Israeli Arab on Jews in central Israel killed one person and left several others injured.
The Iran salvo added to the turmoil for Israelis living in the north, who have been under constant fire from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and upsetting an uneasy quiet in the rest of the country. Schools across Israel will be closed on Monday.
Iranian officials said the barrage was a response to Israel’s strike earlier Sunday on a Hezbollah installation in the suburbs of Beirut, which the Israeli army said targeted a command center used to direct attacks on its troops.
Hezbollah last week rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that would have halted Israeli strikes in Beirut, saying that it could not abide by terms that would have required it to exit southern Lebanon.
During a five-week war that Israel and the United States initiated against Iran on Feb. 28, at least two dozen Israelis were killed when Iran fired hundreds of missiles at the country in near-daily barrages. Active hostilities involving Israel ended when U.S. President Donald Trump initiated a ceasefire on April 8. He and Iran have not yet agreed to terms that would permanently end the war.
Trump said he was “not happy about” Israel’s strike in Beirut and signaled that he did not see Iranian barrage as an impediment to a future deal.
“It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” he told Fox News. “We’re very close. I would say an agreement would be signed on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. And now this takes place.”
Addressing Iran directly, Trump said, “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond publicly to the Iranian attack on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support
Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner on Tuesday to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this year. But a series of recent domestic violence allegations and controversies surrounding Platner could become a major political problem for the party in its effort to regain control of the Senate.
The controversy extends beyond questions about electability. Jewish Democratic organizations have withheld support from Platner over his past Nazi-linked tattoo, criticism of Israel and rhetoric that some Jewish leaders view as troubling, even as top national Democrats rally behind his candidacy.
The primary was effectively decided weeks ago when former Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after lagging in polls and struggling to raise money. Mills never formally withdrew from the ballot, leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will use Tuesday’s primary as a protest vote against Platner
The dilemma facing Democrats is unusually stark.
Maine, considered a purple state, is widely viewed as one of the party’s clearest opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. Collins, 73, is running for a sixth term, though critics argue her image as a political moderate has diminished in recent years. In her last reelection campaign in 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger 51-42. Sara Gideon, who is married to a Jewish lawyer, ran a competitive race and drew support from Maine’s estimated 15,000 Jewish voters and outside Jewish Democratic groups.
The 41-year-old Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine, appeared to be the kind of insurgent candidate Democrats dream about. He led Mills by a significant margin and consistently ran ahead of Collins in public polling.
But the past two weeks have left Democrats struggling with his candidacy.
Reports about explicit messages sent to women while married and allegations from former partners describing threatening and troubling behavior, along with scrutiny of past online posts, put the Platner campaign on defense.
For Jewish voters, Platner’s rise and the party’s embrace of him were already hard to swallow. Platner faced backlash last year after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it up. In past posts on Reddit, Platner defended a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
A New York Times story last week cited an ex-girlfriend who said Platner knew for years that the tattoo on his chest was associated with Nazi imagery, an allegation he has forcefully denied.
Also troubling to Jewish Democrats, Platner has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and suggested the U.S. should cut off all aid to Israel. Last week, Platner accused Collins of taking money from AIPAC and being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an April interview that her group was not prepared to back Platner. JDCA had endorsed Mills in the primary before she suspended her campaign. On Sunday, Soifer said the group continues to stand by its endorsement of Mills, signaling that voters who remain uneasy about Platner still have the option of casting a vote for the former governor, whose name remains on the ballot.
“If he were running in Jersey, he’d either be thrown off the ballot or buried under the Meadowlands,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey, said on Friday.
Top Democratic strategists told Politico that Platner could face pressure to drop out of the race if Mills receives a significant amount of votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., has so far continued to show support for Platner. After meeting with Platner last week in Washington, D.C., Schumer told reporters that defeating Collins remains a top priority for Democrats seeking to reclaim power in the Senate.
The likely result is a question Democrats increasingly cannot avoid: If Platner wins Tuesday as expected, how much longer can national Democrats continue treating him as their standard-bearer and excuse conduct they would condemn in a Republican candidate? Jewish Democratic organizations, having already distanced themselves from Platner, will also have to decide how to respond if he becomes the party’s nominee, as other nominees are also coming under scrutiny for past remarks and associations with antisemitic influencers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an interview Sunday on Fox News, was asked whether he’s concerned that his party “has an antisemitism problem,” citing Platner’s rhetoric and that of other Democratic candidates.
Platner is “going to have to speak for himself, and that’s what any candidate, particularly in a high-profile race, is going to be called upon to do,” Jeffries said. He added that the effort to crush antisemitism is an “American issue” and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “It can’t be a red or blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
The post Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support appeared first on The Forward.
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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