SOUTH PHILADELPHIA — On a cold weeknight, a few dozen people packed into a synagogue that defies every conventional rule of American Jewish life.

It is Orthodox and led by a woman. Its sanctuary is divided not into two sections, but three: men, women, and a small area for nonbinary congregants. It has no mandatory dues. And instead of struggling to survive, it is expanding so quickly that it has already outgrown its building.

Founded in 2019, the South Philadelphia Shtiebel has become a closely watched experiment in American Judaism — an urban congregation built from scratch in a neighborhood where no new synagogue had taken root in decades, and where most religious institutions had long since retreated to the suburbs.

A century ago, the idea of an Orthodox synagogue thriving in South Philadelphia would not have seemed unusual at all. In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was home to an estimated 150,000 Jews — mostly immigrants — packed into row houses within walking distance of work, markets and extended family.

Jewish life revolved not around grand sanctuaries but around dozens of small, informal prayer spaces known in Yiddish as shtiebels. More than a hundred of them dotted South Philadelphia’s blocks, often tucked into storefronts or private homes, intimate rooms where daily life and religious life blurred together.

Most of those shtiebels disappeared long ago, casualties of suburban flight and institutional consolidation. The South Philadelphia Shtiebel takes its name from that vanished landscape not as a reenactment, but as a wager.

The timing could easily have sunk the project. The Shtiebel launched only months before the COVID-19 pandemic upended communal life. Yet even during lockdown, around 40 people were still showing up each Shabbat. When the small Vespa scooter shop where the congregation first gathered became untenable due to the pandemic, the community improvised — meeting in backyards, public spaces and parking lots. Today, the congregation leases a two-story industrial building.

On a typical Shabbat morning, the sanctuary fills with roughly 175 people — a mix of young families, retirees, longtime Orthodox congregants and people still learning the prayers. And as attendance has grown, the question facing the Shtiebel is no longer whether it works, but what happens next, and whether this kind of community can scale without losing what makes it feel human.

What has emerged here is not a nostalgia project, but a congregation aligned with the DIY attitude of how people now choose institutions: voluntarily, relationally, and on their own terms.

Its growth has not been accidental. It reflects a series of choices — about space, ritual, leadership and belonging — made deliberately by its founder.

Welcoming the LGBTQ+ community

Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, the granddaughter of a rabbi who served pulpits across the country. She arrived in Philadelphia single and actively pursuing solo parenthood, but embraced the nonlinear turns of that journey, which led her to connect with and marry Daniel Krupka, a software engineer who had been serving as the congregation’s gabbai. Together they are raising a growing family.

She was ordained at Yeshivat Maharat, the Modern Orthodox seminary in the Bronx, and also holds a dual master’s degree from New York University in Jewish Studies and nonprofit management. She has been trained in community organizing, with an emphasis on relationships over programs.

She launched the Shtiebel with an acute awareness of how easily people fall through the cracks of Jewish life — not because they lack commitment, but because the systems around them are built for someone else.

“The approach here is that everybody is enough,” said Fruchter, 36. “We value the fact that you’re here and we’re not looking around at who’s not.”

Around 15% of the congregation identifies as LGBTQ+, Fruchter said. It’s a figure she offers not as a marker of ideology, but as a reflection of who has found their way into the room. That ethic is visible before a word is spoken. The sanctuary’s three sections all center around the bimah and are separated by a mechitza, or barrier, that still allows everyone to see, and hear, what is happening.

Fruchter is careful about how she describes the choice. It is not, she insists, an attempt to flatten difference or sidestep halacha, Jewish law, but an effort to acknowledge everyone. “We’re not trying to create a perfect solution,” she said. “We’re trying to create a place where people don’t have to disappear in order to pray.”

For Soren Simcha Barnett, a nonbinary congregant who uses they/them pronouns, that distinction mattered. When Barnett, 28, first arrived in early 2022, the idea of praying behind a mechitza was unfamiliar — and uncomfortable. “That would have been a red line for me,” they said. They had grown up in a Conservative synagogue and had never experienced gender-segregated prayer.

Still, they stayed.

What drew Barnett back was that they were taken seriously. They learned the melodies. On Shabbat mornings, they stand close enough to the action to help when the Torah is lifted off the bimah, hands ready, just in case. “I love being in the thick of it,” Barnett said. “We’re literally not in the margins.”

That sense of belonging, Barnett said, came with limits, though. About six months after they began attending regularly, Barnett asked Fruchter about expanding ritual roles for nonbinary congregants, such as leading services. Fruchter said no, a decision rooted in her reading of halacha.

“That hurt,” Barnett said. “I really wanted to be able to do everything I’m capable of.” But again, the disappointment did not send them away.

What mattered, they said, was not the answer but the process: that the question was taken seriously, and that the boundary was named rather than ignored. Barnett stayed. “I was willing to grapple with the complexity,” they said.

If Barnett’s story is about negotiation, Gary Saft’s is about commitment.

Saft, 35, a gabbai and the head of the Shteibel’s volunteer security team, is broad-shouldered, bearded, and impossible to miss. He grew up Reform and spent years assuming traditional Judaism had no place for him. “I didn’t see where I fit,” Saft said.

Saft began searching for a community after his father died in 2020, and he found it at the Shtiebel. Today, Saft prays daily, keeps kosher, walks to shul, and helps run services. “This shul is now a huge part of my life,” he said.

A sense of belonging

By all accounts, what holds the community together, more than anything else, is song.

For many congregants, music is the primary way in. Even those still learning Hebrew can participate fully, buoyed by a group that carries them along. Fruchter’s own voice is strong and steady, but it rarely stands alone. She sings with the room, not over it. Over time, congregants say, that has changed who feels comfortable raising their voice. Women sing loudly. So do people who might once have stayed quiet. Authority here is not projected; it circulates.

Lisa Levy, 66, a three-time cancer survivor, moved to Philadelphia after decades in New York City. She arrived newly retired and living alone. She describes herself as “conservadox” — committed to Orthodoxy, but wary of rigid lines.

What she did not encounter, she said, was pressure. “There are no dues,” Levy said. “You pay what you can afford. No questions.”

For Levy, that mattered. Many synagogues, she said, quietly assume a level of financial stability that leaves some people on the margins — especially older congregants or those navigating illness. At the Shtiebel, presence itself felt like the baseline contribution. “It’s more like a minyan than a shul,” said Levy, who lives three blocks away.

For Jamie Goldberg, 33, the Shtiebel became real when she started showing up pregnant.

Goldberg began attending in mid-2022, just before the birth of her first daughter. She and her husband, Stuart, had grown up in Reform and Conservative settings and spent years searching for something that felt both serious and accessible. “I learned the traditional prayers in my late 20s,” she said. “I didn’t grow up knowing how to follow along.”

Now she has two young daughters and serves on the Shtiebel’s advisory board. In the past year alone, she said, roughly two dozen babies have been born into the community. On Shabbat afternoons, families spill out to nearby playgrounds after naps, an informal ritual that has become its own gathering. Growth here is not abstract. It is measured in strollers.

That future comes with questions. There is no Jewish day school in South Philadelphia. Families will eventually have to drive children to the suburbs or help invent something new. After years of the Shtiebel’s children’s programming being volunteer-run, it’s now supported by a mix of people in paid positions and community members.

“It’s a place where people can grow,” she said.

Where the conversation never stops

During the week, the sense of belonging migrates online. The Shtiebel uses Slack, the  messaging platform, as its connective tissue: organizing meal trains, coordinating who will read the Torah at services, sharing names of people who are ill and need prayers, checking in on each other, offering extra seats at Shabbat tables. There is no need for a printed directory or a hallway bulletin board.

Steve Schauder noticed that immediately.

Schauder, 61, the executive director of the Jewish Relief Agency, moved to South Philadelphia last spring after what he called a “trial Shabbat.” He had previously been a dues-paying member of synagogues across denominations. What struck him here was not just the warmth, but the infrastructure beneath it. “It never stops,” he said of the Slack messages. “I wander on every day, just to take a look.”

Schauder was also struck by what didn’t happen at the Shtiebel. The synagogue is intentionally apolitical. It’s careful about keeping partisan politics out of communal spaces. Congregants span the ideological spectrum, he said, and that diversity is treated as a given rather than a problem to solve. “You can walk in there whatever your background and politics are,” Schauder said.

On a Shabbat morning, a Donald Trump voter might be sitting next to a Zohran Mamdani supporter. What matters is not agreement, but a choice, Schauder said, to prioritize what he called “joyful Judaism” over the culture wars that have fractured so many other institutions.

The Shtiebel has taken shape amid the quiet collapse of many American institutions — houses of worship, unions, neighborhood associations — leaving fewer places where people are expected to encounter one another across differences.

In that sense, the congregation is not only a Jewish experiment but a civic one: an attempt to rebuild habits of shared life in a society that has grown increasingly siloed, polarized, and private. What happens inside the Shtiebel — negotiating disagreement, making room for difference, choosing presence over purity — mirrors a broader struggle over whether communities can still hold together without demanding sameness.

But Fruchter bristles at the idea that the Shteibel’s success can be reduced to a program,  platform or politics. What she calls the synagogue’s “secret sauce” is not a tool so much as a discipline: “It’s being intentional about seeing and witnessing everybody with what they need,” she said.

Sometimes that attention registers in small ways. A congregant mentions liking Dr Pepper; it shows up at the kiddush they sponsor. Other times it demands structural work: rethinking seating for those with sensory needs, slowing down ritual explanations, or redesigning space so people who would otherwise drift away can stay. None of it is scalable in the abstract. All of it requires time, memory, and a willingness to keep revising.

“Folks who are stepping up and stepping in not only feel belonging,” Fruchter said, “but that they’re really being seen, cared for and nurtured.”

A model, and its limits

What Fruchter built has also reshaped the landscape beyond South Philadelphia. At a moment when many American synagogues are shrinking, consolidating, or aging in place, the Shtiebel has become an unlikely case study in what Jewish life looks like when it grows outward rather than inward.

But growth, Fruchter is quick to note, does not automatically produce stability.

Instead of mandatory dues, the Shtiebel operates on what she calls an NPR-style model, funded through voluntary monthly support. About 120 households currently donate each month, she said — including some supporters who don’t live in South Philadelphia but believe in the mission. Those recurring contributions cover about a quarter of the annual budget. The rest comes from a mix of larger individual gifts — typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range — and national grants supporting the Shtiebel’s work, including initiatives around Orthodox feminism and efforts to reimagine synagogue life.

The result is a congregation that looks robust from the outside, but still operates like a lean startup on the inside. In its early years, Fruchter lived in the synagogue to keep costs down. “I think what happens with that kind of growth is that the infrastructure struggles to keep up,” she said.

One constant challenge, she added, is perception. “Sometimes we’re seen as being very flush because of our success.” The reality, she said, is more fragile: building governance, raising money, and maintaining a physical space while attendance climbs — all at once. “That footing takes time,” she said.

That tension, between visibility and vulnerability, is part of what other Jewish leaders have been watching closely.

Rabbanit Leah Sarna, the spiritual leader of Kehillat Sha’arei Orah in the Philadelphia suburbs, credits the Shtiebel with shifting expectations.

“In Philly, Dasi really normalized the idea of a Modern Orthodox shul led by a woman,” Sarna said. When her own congregation went searching for a spiritual leader and hired her in 2024, she said, opening the role to women did not trigger the kind of upheaval it might have elsewhere. Fruchter even spoke at Sarna’s installation. “By then,” Sarna said, “people had spent a Shabbat at Dasi’s shul. It wasn’t theoretical anymore.”

Sarna said that because the Shtiebel has no membership dues, inclusion comes first, and fundraising never really stops. “That model means you’re constantly in a fundraising stance,” Sarna said.

In a neighborhood of young professionals who want to live urban lives, and not decamp to the suburbs, Fruchter’s approach has been especially powerful. The two congregations, Sarna said, have even developed what she called “purposeful handoffs,” directing people to the other as life circumstances change: city to suburbs, suburbs to city. Rather than competing, they function as part of a shared ecosystem.

Much of the Shtiebel’s cohesion still runs through Fruchter herself — a concentration of responsibility that has fueled its growth, and may yet test its limits. Asked whether the Shtiebel model could be replicated elsewhere, Sarna paused. The structure, she said, might travel. The person at the center of it might not. “You need someone who’s as talented and warm and magnetic as she is,” Sarna said. “That part is the least replicable.”

The greater Philadelphia area, where the Jewish population hovers around 350,000 people, may be uniquely suited to such experiments. “America was founded here,” Sarna said. “It’s the birthplace of ideas.”

The experiment has, perhaps, yet another advantage. Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia and a thought leader in the Modern Orthodox movement, believes congregations like the Shtiebel should also be seen as competing with Conservative shuls for a slice of the membership who may be looking for something more traditional.

“These sorts of shuls are often born on the decay of mainstream Conservative shuls, which are not growing or are hemorrhaging,” Saiman said. “There’s a market for a community with liberal sensibilities but whose liturgy and Shabbat and kosher practices are more traditional.”

The challenge ahead

For Fruchter, those dynamics are less abstract than personal. Many of the people who find their way to the Shtiebel arrive with long Jewish histories — years in Conservative congregations, half-finished religious journeys, fluency in tradition paired with frustration at the structures around it.

They haven’t rejected Judaism so much as struggled to find a community that fit the way they were living. The work of the Shtiebel, she said, has been to meet those people where they are, and then ask what kind of community they are willing to build together.

“In a shul today,” she said, “we shouldn’t bolt chairs to the floor.”

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(JTA) — In the lead-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, both the State Department’s antisemitism envoy and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum criticized Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for invoking Anne Frank in discussions of federal immigration raids.

The remarks by Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the antisemitism envoy nominated by President Trump, that “Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law” added fuel to an ongoing debate over the appropriateness of modern-day comparisons to the Holocaust. Other Jewish leaders have mobilized in force against immigration agents in the state.

“Ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust,” Kaploun tweeted Monday. 

He was responding to Walz’s press conference over the weekend, in which the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate stated, “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.”

Kaploun continued with a dig at the state’s large migrant community, the focus of chaotic Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity that has prompted intense criticism and led to the shooting deaths of two protesters. 

“Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud, and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today,” the envoy wrote. “Our brave law enforcement should be commended, not tarred with this historically illiterate and antisemitic comparison.”

His comments were followed two hours later by the Holocaust museum’s, which rebuked Walz while avoiding the subject of ICE operations. Walz, a former public school teacher, wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust education. 

“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the museum tweeted Monday. “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who is Jewish, last week rebuked a guest for comparing ICE detention facilities to concentration camps.

But in the week since, even some conservatives have joined the voices comparing ICE to the Gestapo, as a backlash against ICE has brewed. That backlash appeared to escalate in the hours after the statements from Kaploun and the museum, including from within the Trump administration.  

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander-at-large who has led federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and has himself decried growing comparisons between ICE and the Gestapo, is reportedly set to leave the city, and a judge has ordered acting ICE director Todd Lyons to appear in federal court. Pressure also continues to mount on other officials including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump’s Jewish far-right immigration advisor Stephen Miller. 

Kaploun’s comments about Anne Frank — echoed by other State Department officials — were the latest in years’ worth of controversies over whether her family are an appropriate analogue to modern-day immigration. The comparison also arose in response to the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and was incorporated into a 2021 animated adaptation of Frank’s diary.

Some historians pointed out that Kaploun’s remark that Frank “was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law” belies the fact that the Frank family had defied official papers ordering Anne’s sister Margot to report to a labor camp. 

“The Frank family ignored their call-up, meaning they were officially in Amsterdam illegally from this point on,” Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College, wrote on BlueSky. “The Trump administration is doing Holocaust revisionism to avoid the possibility of empathy for migrants.”

Others noted the escalation in Nazi race laws that progressively and systematically excluded Jews from public life in Europe.

“The German regime first created mass statelessness to facilitate the Holocaust,” historian and author John Ganz wrote in response to Kaploun. “In every European country occupied by the Nazis, collaborationist governments might nominally protect citizen Jews, but were happy and relieved to see stateless and ‘illegal’ immigrants disappear.”

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(JTA) — Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander-at-large who has led federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, pushed back against critics who compared ICE agents to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.

“They’re trying to portray Border Patrol agents and ICE agents as Gestapo, Nazi and many other words,” Bovino told CNN on Sunday, pronouncing the word “Gestapo” with a German accent.

At a press conference on Sunday following the killing a day prior of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents, Bovino again decried the comparison.

“When politicians, community leaders and some journalists engage in that heated rhetoric we keep talking about, when they make the choice to vilify law enforcement, calling law enforcement names like a Gestapo, or using the term kidnapping, that is a choice that is made,” said Bovino. “There are actions and consequences that come from those choices.”

Now, Bovino is reportedly leaving Minneapolis amid a backlash over the killings there. After The Atlantic reported Monday night that Bovino had been demoted to his former post in El Centro, California, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a post on X that Bovino “has NOT been relieved of his duties.”

His exit comes amid pitched debate about the appropriateness of Holocaust analogies in describing ICE’s actions in Minneapolis. Critics of ICE have frequently likened its practices to that of the Nazis, while both defenders of ICE and Jewish voices have decried such comparisons as inappropriate.

A centerpiece of the discourse has been a greatcoat worn by Bovino which some critics, and German media outlets, have said resembles the uniforms of Nazi soldiers.

“In his coat, Bovino looks like a Nazi officer,” Jörg Häntzschel wrote earlier this month in Süddeutsche Zeitung, a liberal German outlet. “Other countries also had these coats, but Bovino’s rest of the outfit completes the Nazi look: a closely shaved head, as if he’d gone to the barber with a picture of Ernst Röhm,” a leading Nazi.

Rebutting the critique, Bovino told NewsNation that the coat was “Border Patrol issue” and that he had purchased it in 1999.

Still, the coat has inspired multiple reflections on how Bovino’s sartorial choices might convey, coming as immigration enforcement has grown increasingly militarized and as U.S. government social media accounts have posted apparent white supremacist dogwhistles.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democratic potential White House contender in 2028, described Bovino’s attire as “S.S. garb” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week after calling the coat “Nazi-coded” on social media.

After news of Bovino’s demotion broke, Newsom wrote in a post on X, “Gestapo Greg is out. Keep the pressure up. It’s working.”

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