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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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The post How one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations added 900 new members in 8 months appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I.
Denise Blumenfeld’s AI learning tool doesn’t have all the answers — or at least it’s not so eager to give them away. Instead, Blumenfeld, a second-year student at the Orthodox women’s seminary Yeshivat Maharat, has customized ChatGPT to answer her with questions with a question.
I watched recently as Blumenfeld fed a paragraph of Talmud into the module, aptly named Socrates Havruta (its surname is Hebrew for study partner). Its response tested her reading comprehension: Based on the first line of the text, what is the basic obligation around candlelighting? Blumenfeld typed in an answer, which Socrates affirmed before asking another.
She knew ChatGPT could simply summarize the text, but would that really help her learn it? On the other hand, responding to questions could help someone figure things out on their own. And to keep herself honest, she’d set a rule: “I always try to read the authentic source first,” she told me.
Blumenfeld is part of the first generation of rabbinical students who are training with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini at their disposal — and hoping to avoid those tools becoming a crutch. But the beit midrash, or study hall, is just one of many contact points they have with an invention that may be changing not only what it means to be a student or a rabbi, but also what it means to be Jewish.
To get a sense of how AI is helping shape the next generation of the rabbinate, I interviewed students from five U.S.-based rabbinical schools about how use and think about AI in relation to their work. Their attitudes ranged from guarded enthusiasm to flat rejection. But their comments — and the boundaries they had each set around their personal use — revealed the deep influence AI is already having on their professional and religious outlook.
This was true even for students who did not use generative AI at all. Adrian Marcos, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, listed moral reasons he avoided it, among them its exploitation of stolen data, its environmental impact, and the digital literacy crisis it was accelerating. Yet Marcos admitted that the burden of explanation fell on AI’s detractors, not its enthusiasts.
“A lot of people are very into AI, and as a rabbi, whether or not you end up in a pulpit, you have to converse with those people,” said Marcos, a second-year student at the Conservative seminary. “And as the technology evolves, the conversations around it are also going to evolve.”
Hacking the sermon
ChatGPT can seemingly draw on the entire digitized Jewish canon, translate it from Hebrew if necessary, and draft new content about it. For students pursuing the rabbinate because of their passion for seeking and sharing knowledge themselves, the question was whether a tool that lightened the load was really helping.
Aiden Englander, a fourth-year at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, engages ChatGPT for on-call intellectual companionship. Upon finding an interesting commentary on the week’s Torah portion, he’ll ask ChatGPT for secular variations on the idea. It might spit out Nietzsche, he said, or a recent news story.
Knowing ChatGPT can make such a connection unlocks a different level of rhetorical ambition — serving as a kind of academic force-multiplier — but it forecloses the possibility of, well, sorting out his concept without it. It also raises the question of what makes a sermon “better,” and whether literature you’ve only learned about via ChatGPT summary is any less suitable for a sermon than a volume you’re still working through on the page.
Englander’s calculus was straightforward. “When you’re able to quote a book that someone is familiar with, they’ll remember it more,” he said.
Though an avid user, he harbors doubts about AI’s reliability. “It will just completely make up a Gemara,” he said, and in his view its knowledge is especially shallow in matters of Jewish law. Yet what ChatGPT can do is what makes Englander, who is 24, most cautious. In a creative pinch, he’ll ask it to bullet-point some possible themes to explore from that week’s Torah portion to write a sermon about. But that’s a muscle he’s conscious about developing, so he tries to desist.
Yet a theological question about AI use persists underneath the utilitarian concerns. Is a ChatGPT-generated d’var torah a bad idea because it’s likely to spew cliches or degrade one’s writing ability — or because the very notion of a computer recommendation defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is to bring human experience to bear upon the Torah and vice versa? Major Jewish denominations have been as quiet on the religious questions around AI as rabbinical schools have been on the practical ones, leaving students to work out both problems on their own.
“An LLM doesn’t have autobiography — it’s not having a faith experience,” said Dani Pattiz, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College. “It can come up with these brilliant syntheses of other people’s ideas. But at the end of the day, it can’t genuinely glorify God, or speak to people’s souls in an authentic way.”
A changing pulpit
As they navigated their own use of AI, rabbinical students were pondering how it would reshape the lives of their future congregants, and in turn, their own work.
On a recent trip to Washington, Micah Glickman, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, visited a synagogue where a number of congregants had been laid off in DOGE’s federal job cuts. AI’s impact on employment, he realized, could be exponentially greater. If that were the case, it was not merely that more people would be facing financial and emotional vulnerability. It was also that a universal source of human fulfillment might have an expiration date.
“It seems like the promise of this technology is to basically do anything that a person can do, and do it better than that person can,” Glickman said in an interview. “And I wonder how that will affect a congregation of people who maybe derive a sense of meaning and purpose from their accomplishments in life.”
It would fall on rabbis and other faith leaders, Glickman said, to shepherd their communities through this change. “There’s some impending spiritual crisis that we’re on the verge of,” he said. He was helping organize a symposium at HUC to consider these and other AI-related issues — seeking a spiritual solution, he said, to a spiritual problem.
Meanwhile, he was already encountering ChatGPT-written bar mitzvah speeches from the students he tutors. That put him in the position of his HUC professors: Should he discourage kids from using it, or — conceding to inevitability — try to steer them towards using AI responsibly?
It was a theme across interviews: The future rabbis I spoke to were more worried about how the generation after them would learn than they were about their own trajectories. Today’s students, after all, largely passed their studies prior to rabbinical school without ChatGPT; they were wary of atrophy only because they knew they had muscles to begin with.
Even Blumenfeld, the Maharat student, was not sure she would recommend her Socrates bot to younger students. “Because I had experience learning and teaching before AI, I know what the result I’m looking for is, and know how to ask the right thing,” she said, whereas kids at that age hadn’t yet developed those skills. “As teachers,” she added, “we need to learn how to teach.”
They also need to teach how to learn, and why to learn. YU’s Englander recalled a thought experiment shared decades ago by the university’s former president Rabbi Norman Lamm: If you could implant a microchip into your brain that gave you complete knowledge of the Torah, would you ever have to learn? Lamm’s opinion was that learning in fact had primacy over knowledge — that the toil of studying the Torah was not just a means to an end, but a form of worship in and of itself.
“This might be a little bit more of a mystical notion, but from the standpoint of accessing Hashem, it’s only accomplished through learning the text and struggling with it, not being told what the text says by a third party,“ Englander said. The reason he could generally detect when ChatGPT was hallucinating the Talmud, he added, was because he had put in the hours studying it himself.
The post How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I. appeared first on The Forward.
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Belgium Joins South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at UN Court
A general view inside the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at the start of a hearing where South Africa requests new emergency measures over Israel’s operations in Rafah, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Belgium officially became the latest country to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the United Nations’ top court on Tuesday, as international pressure mounts on the Jewish state despite a US-backed ceasefire that has so far paused the two-year conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced that Brussels has requested to join the South African case by filing a declaration of intervention, allowing it to participate without being the original plaintiff.
Belgium joins several other countries in the case, including Brazil, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Libya, Bolivia, the Maldives, Chile, and “Palestine.”
Earlier this year, South Africa vowed to continue its genocide case against Israel despite the ceasefire in Gaza, the most significant effort yet to halt the two-year Middle Eastern conflict.
Speaking before parliament in Cape Town, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa affirmed that the US-backed peace deal “will have no bearing” on the ongoing legal proceedings against the Jewish state.
Ramaphosa promised to continue seeking “justice for the people of Gaza,” while reiterating false accusations that Israel committed genocide under international law during its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Israel has strongly rejected all allegations of genocide, calling South Africa’s case “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Ramaphosa’s continuing push comes amid ongoing international pressure, with the US, South African political leaders, and the local Jewish community all expressing opposition to his government’s actions, accusing it of pursuing an anti-Israel campaign instead of addressing the country’s own pressing issues.
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community have lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, which may take years to go through the judicial process, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign.
Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide. The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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US Professor Who Was Suspended After Calling for ‘War on Israel’ Requests Reinstatement in Lawsuit
Illustrative: A student puts on their anti-Israel graduation cap. Photo: Angelina Katsanis via Reuters Connect
A University of Kentucky professor who is serving an interim suspension for promoting an antisemitic petition which called for “Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean See” on Friday asked a US federal judge to reinstate him even as an investigation into his remarks is ongoing.
The instructor, Ramsi Woodcock, teaches at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. In July, he shared a petition which implored “every country in the world to make war on Israel until such time as Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine.” Using a variation of the “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free” slogan that has become a signature of anti-Zionist groups around the world, he echoed language that has been widely recognized as calling for the destruction of Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state.
Woodcock also self-identifies as an “antizionist scholar of law and economics” on his website, where he introduces himself as a scholar “who recognizes that my country is currently committing a genocide of Palestinians through the colony that we maintain in Palestine called the ‘State of Israel.’” The academic goes on to state, “I oppose the genocide and the existence of that colony. I believe that the international community has a moral and legal duty to go to war to liberate Palestine and end Israel.”
The University of Kentucky responded to the incident in July by suspending Woodcock and banning him from campus, citing his “disturbing conduct” and “calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin.” In reaching a decision, the university drew from state guidance based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as well as its own principles.
“We condemn any call for violence and the views expressed online certainly do not represent the institution’s views. They express hate,” university president Eli Capilouto said in a statement. “While someone in his or her personal capacity may be free to express themselves, the university is also free to make clear that the individual’s personal views are not those of our community.”
Citing the university’s obligations under Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act, he added, “Let me be clear: the views expressed by this employee, if accurately attributed, are repugnant. Importantly, too, if such individual expressions threaten the safety and well-being of the university’s students and staff, we are obligated to act to protect our community and our people.”
Woodcock sued the university in November, arguing that the decision to suspend him violates his First Amendment rights and “degrades the quality of education the University of Kentucky.”
In his latest legal action, Woodcock, testifying on Friday at the US District courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky during an evidentiary hearing, demanded to be allowed to teach during this upcoming spring semester and denied the allegations against him. For its part, the university continues to pay his salary but maintains that he must remain inactive until it concludes its investigation into his alleged misconduct.
The judge presiding over the case, Danny C. Reeves, did not issue a ruling, as he is awaiting the filing of two additional motions calling for the lawsuit’s dismissal or abeyance, pending the outcome of the university’s investigation. According to the Kentucky Lantern, he did say in court that Woodcock’s team has failed so far to show a “nickel’s worth of harm.”
Following the hearing, the university said, “We were pleased to defend the university’s decisions to investigate Professor Woodcock and to reassign him during the investigations.”
Woodcock is not the first professor to face disciplinary sanctions for using the campus as a platform for calling for violence against Jews.
In September, Cornell University canceled the course of a professor who according to the school violated federal anti-discrimination law when he expelled an Israeli student from class. Later, the professor reached an agreement with the administration which allowed him to retire rather than serve out his punishment.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), university faculty and staff have exacerbated the antisemitism crisis on US college campuses by politicizing the classroom, promoting anti-Israel bias, and even discriminating against Jewish colleagues.
The actions by faculty provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists have perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to the survey, released in September.
The survey of “Jewish-identifying US-based faculty members” found that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it. Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent).
Additionally, 50 percent of respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, an education nonprofit, published a groundbreaking study which showed that the FSJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.