Uncategorized
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.
—
The post How one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations added 900 new members in 8 months appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The handwriting analysis that convicted Alfred Dreyfus is for sale
The false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French military, for treason against France in 1894 is remembered by historians as a flashpoint of antisemitism in modern history. It spread a renewed hatred and suspicion of Jews throughout French society, birthed Emile Zola’s famous J’accuse and spurred early Zionists like Theodore Herzl, who referenced the Dreyfus affair as proof that Jews could never be safe in Europe.
The case turned on a document known as the bordereau, a handwritten memo offering French military secrets to the Germans. But the handwriting didn’t resemble Dreyfus’ script. So, key to the case was the testimony of a celebrated handwriting expert, Etienne Charavay, whose analysis confirmed a theory that the bordereau was an example of “autoforgery,” a convoluted theory that Dreyfus was purposefully disguising his handwriting, yet it could still be identified as his — in short, that the lack of resemblance between the handwriting somehow was further proof of Dreyfus’ guilt.
However far-fetched, the theory that Charavay’s report advanced convicted Dreyfus in the public eye as well as in court. Now, those papers — tracings of Dreyfus’ writing alongside the script from the bordereau, an analysis of letter shapes and the expert report — are for sale by the Manhattan Rare Book Company at the Antiquarian Book Fair this week for the low price of $175,000. They are all the more interesting for the fact that Charavay emotionally recanted his testimony against Dreyfus several years after the trial, in 1899.
When I went to see the documents for myself at the fair, I found myself applying my own — admittedly amateur — handwriting analysis to the letters. In the first few pages of the dossier, composed of intact only slightly yellowed paper, Charavay outlines the differences between Dreyfus’ hand and the bordereau document, not similarities. There, his writing seems assured; it is unfailingly neat without corrections or ink marks.
But as Charavay turns to the similarities between the letters, arguing that there are, in fact, particular letters that bear a resemblance to those in the bordereau, he begins to repeatedly cross out lines and make cramped corrections. There are lines of analysis that look almost mathematical, comparing individual letters in quasi-equations. The conclusion of the report has almost as many lines crossed out as there are cleanly written.
When I spoke with Michael DiRuggiero, the owner of Manhattan Rare Books, and his colleague Jeremy O’Connor, both marveled repeatedly at the upside-down logic, which violates a cardinal sin of identifying writing. “As professionals who deal with manuscripts, you can’t argue from differences back to validating manuscripts,” O’Connor said. “He’s working his way back from a conclusion that the handwriting is not Dreyfus’.”
It’s hard to know for sure why exactly the French government was so set on convicting Dreyfus, or what pressures were operating on Charavay when he wrote his much-edited report.
“I don’t know if he believed it or if he’s trying to make an argument that he doesn’t believe,” DiRuggiero said. “I don’t know if that can ever be known, what’s in his head, but the French government wanted a scapegoat.”
Handwritten drama
Dreyfus’ handwriting and that in the bordereau were so obviously different that, before Charavay entered the case, there were many attempts to get Dreyfus to produce the same script. Another officer in the army, Major Mercier du Paty de Clam, tasked with the case, attempted to trick Dreyfus into writing out many of the same sentences as in the bordereau in hopes of reproducing the letters, without luck.
Initially, an expert in signatures at a bank was consulted on the handwriting in the bordereau; he said it appeared “spontaneous,” which is to say written fluidly and freely, an idea that would seem to contradict the later autoforgery theory. (Charavay initially concurred with the analysis of a spontaneous hand.) He pointed out many differences and concluded Dreyfus did not write the traitorous note.
But then a French police officer, Alphonse Bertillon — a forensic expert but not in handwriting — originated the “self forgery” theory, putting forth a report concluding that the writing was Dreyfus’. His testimony was not enough, but it influenced the three people consulted next, including Charavay.
Charavay had risen to a sort of celebrity in France a few years before the Dreyfus trial, when he proved that thousands of letters a collector had bought — including supposed writings from Julius Caesar and Mary Magdalene — were all forgeries. He used a newly scientific form of analysis, comparing individual letter shapes and fluidity with unprecedented precision.
At the time, DiRuggiero told me, science was increasingly being brought to bear in prosecutions. Forensics, including fingerprinting, was a new and buzzy frontier. Charavay’s advances in analysis brought him fame and credibility, as did his titles: the highest form of academic paleographic credential and an appointment as the premier forensic document specialist in the country.
“Without Charavay’s credential, the auto forgery theory is just a nutty theory,” said DiRuggiero. With it, however, papers ran with the story, including a piece in the antisemitic paper La Libre Parole, which had long campaigned against Jews in the French army due to their supposedly treasonous nature. With this, the case became a national controversy.
“If you’re told that’s probably Dreyfus’s hand and you pick up a newspaper and that’s what you’re told,” said DiRuggiero, “the public will just believe that.”
As time after the conviction continued, the public — which had divided into Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard camps — continued to debate the case, with prominent intellectuals including Zola and the novelist Anatole France defending Dreyfus’ innocence. Knowledge of the thin evidence began to disseminate, with Zola specifically castigating several of the handwriting experts by name.
Zola noted their reports were “deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.” Charavay, however, was not named, a fact O’Connor hypothesized may have been because he was friends with France and may have expressed his doubts in private, doubts France may have relayed to Zola.
In any case, Charavay emotionally recanted his testimony at Dreyfus’ retrial in 1899, just a year after J’accuse…! Dreyfus himself noted the speech in his memoirs. But it wasn’t enough. Though the real perpetrator, Ferdinand Esterhazy, had fled to England and confessed to journalist Rachel Sassoon Beer, Dreyfus was reconvicted. Eventually, he pled guilty in exchange for a pardon; it took several more years for him to be legally exonerated and reinstated in the army.
We will never be sure why Charavay testified against Dreyfus in the first place. Zola wrote in J’accuse…! that one of the handwriting experts “faced military pressure because he dared to come to a conclusion other than the desired one.” Perhaps Charavay bowed to the same. Based on the overwriting, he struggled to make the pivotal argument to himself.
What we know for sure, however, is that the papers are legitimate — DiRuggiero and O’Connor would never make the same mistakes Charavay did. When I asked them how they validated the dossier, they laughed. “There’s no question that it’s his handwriting,” DiRuggiero said.
The post The handwriting analysis that convicted Alfred Dreyfus is for sale appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel’s Eurovision Delegation Departs for Austria Led by Singer Noam Bettan
Noam Bettan, Israel’s representative for the Eurovision Song Contest 2026, poses in this undated handout photo. Photo: Courtesy of Kan, Timor Elmalach/Handout via REUTERS
The Israeli delegation for the 70th Eurovision Song Contest, led by Israel’s representative in the competition Noam Bettan, departed the Jewish state on Friday morning and traveled to Austria for the annual event taking place this month.
Israel’s national airline El Al shared photos on Facebook of Bettan aboard the plane taking him to Vienna, where he will compete in the Eurovision with his original song “Michelle.” The song features lyrics in Hebrew, French, and English. Bettan, 27, will perform the track at the Eurovision with five dancers on stage, Israel’s national broadcaster Kan announced.
The Ra’anana native, whose parents are French, will represent his home country in the Eurovision this year after winning the latest season of the Israeli televised singing competition “Hakochav Haba” (“The Next Star”) in January.
“I am very happy and excited to represent our beautiful country in the biggest music competition in Europe, on the biggest stage in the world,” Bettan said before taking off on Friday morning, as reported by Kan. “I am coming with an open heart, and I want to give all the light and love I receive from everyone, back to the whole world … We have given our souls to bring the most amazing performance possible on stage with lots of surprises. There is going to be great joy on stage! It is a great privilege and responsibility, and I will do everything to represent with honor.”
El Al CEO Levi Halevi said he is confident Bettan will be successful in the competition. “Noam is going to represent us in a challenging time when it is of great significance to represent the country with honor around the world,” he added.
The first semi-finals for the Eurovision, in which Bettan will perform, will take place on May 12, followed by another semi-final on May 14. The grand final will be held on May 16.
Thirty-five countries are participating from around the world. Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain have announced they will not air the 70th Eurovision Song Contest or compete because of Israel’s participation. Iceland and the Netherlands will also not compete in the Eurovision this year due to Israel’s inclusion, but they will broadcast the competition.
Eurovision Song Contest Asia will launch in November 2026 and will be hosted in Bangkok, Thailand.
Uncategorized
Albanian Prime Minister Promotes Kanye West’s Upcoming Concert in New 60,000-Seat Stadium
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. Photo: BANG Showbiz via Reuters Connect
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed on Thursday an upcoming concert in the country by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, despite a number of the rapper’s previous shows being canceled across Europe because of his past antisemitic behavior.
Rama shared a video on Facebook that features footage of the Grammy winner during his previous concerts, along with a message that announces the date of the concert in Tirana, Albania. The “Flashing Lights” singer will perform one night only on July 11.
The Yeezy founder will also reportedly have a temporary venue built for him in the city that will be called “Eagle Stadium.” It is expected to hold approximately 60,000 people and will be located near the Tirana-Durra axis, Albania’s Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Sports Blendi Gonxhja confirmed in a Facebook post, which was also shared on the ministry’s official Facebook page.
The Ministry of Culture noted that the concert will be paid for through ticket sales, but some partnered institutions will “facilitate” its progress, according to BalkanInsight.
“In every aspect, it is our obligation to welcome and facilitate the development of such events that bring numerous benefits to tourism and the economy,” the ministry reportedly said. It added that the concert “will have an extraordinary impact on the promotion of tourism and the local economy.”
The United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Switzerland have all recently canceled Ye’s concerts amid controversy over his past antisemitic actions and comments, which include selling T-shirts that feature a Nazi swastika, expressing admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, releasing a song titled “Heil Hitler,” and posting several antisemitic comments about Jews on X. Australia banned Ye from entering the country last year.
Italy is still set to have Ye headline its Hellwatt Festival in July, but Pina Picierno, vice president of the European Parliament and senior member of Italy’s Democratic Party, said the government should take action to prevent the concert from taking place. “The United Kingdom denied the visa. France effectively prevented the Marseille concert. Italy, meanwhile, is just staying idle with 68,000 tickets sold, as if nothing had happened,” Picierno told the local newspaper La Gazzetta di Reggio.
Ye apologized for his antisemitic and pro-Nazi comments in January in an advert in the Wall Street Journal. He attributed his offensive behavior to manic episodes related to untreated bipolar disorder and declared, “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite.”
As part of his world tour, Ye is set to perform this summer in India, Turkey, The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal.