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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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Yiddish startup brings together literature, listening parties and language circles in London
In one of the world’s earliest Yiddish comics, created by Samuel Zagat in 1912, Gimpel the Matchmaker strides ahead while glancing backwards over his shoulder. He’s moving steadily forward, but at the same time, he keeps one eye on the past.
It’s a fitting logo for Jargon, a London-based Yiddish culture organization that was founded last year, dedicated to exploring the past, present and future of the Jewish diaspora. Jargon draws on London’s rich Yiddish history – as well as the overlapping but distinct diaspora communities that have shaped the city for centuries – to imagine a future for Yiddish culture.
Historians Aleph Ross and M. Syd Rosen founded Jargon last year out of a “craving for more Jewish spaces that were platforming things that were about diaspora, that were about Yiddish, and also about more marginal, either esoteric or radical or counter-cultural Jewish characters,” Rosen told me in an interview. He said they had both long felt that these aspects of Jewish culture were “a major part of our sense of what Jewish history was in Britain,” but didn’t receive the attention they deserved in existing Jewish spaces.
Ross and Rosen began learning Yiddish together around five years ago, when Ross realized that she needed to understand Yiddish for a research project on her own great-great-grandfather, the London Yiddish writer Morris Myer. Still, the organizers see Yiddish as one of many aspects of “leaning into those threads of Jewish cultural identity that we felt have maybe gotten lost through processes of assimilation.”
The duo originally imagined Jargon as a bookshop selling Yiddish-language books alongside other Jewish literature, as well as hosting occasional events. In the year since they launched, that original vision has grown into a busy cultural program with pop-up events across London. Jargon hosts a regular shmueskrayz, or Yiddish-language conversation circle, modeled on the Berlin-based Shmues un Vayn group. At the same time, the group aims to “provide points of entry to [Yiddish] culture for different kinds of people,” including those who don’t speak Yiddish at all. With that audience in mind, Ross and Rosen also run a Yiddish-in-translation book club at a library.
“It’s explicitly about bringing attention to these works that are really cult or famous, or infamous, but [that], actually, very few people have read,” Rosen said. At book club meetings, Ross or Rosen sometimes reads a passage of the book out loud in Yiddish to give attendees a taste of the original.
For Jargon’s monthly pop-up events, the organizers often choose topics that touch on multiple different areas of interest – not just Yiddish language and culture. A recent event about the post-war Romani British poet Mark Hyatt, whose boyfriend was the Anglo-American Jewish poet Harry Fainlight, drew readers of both writers’ work as well as people broadly interested in Roma, Jewish, or queer poetry.
Rosen explains that Jargon seeks out this “slightly jumbled alternative read that we’re trying to put on our events, where they’re explicitly not the most obvious way of presenting a cultural product, and as a result they attract quite a weird and varied audience.”
Jargon’s location in London’s East End helps with that goal. Though Jargon is “semi-nomadic,” with events taking place around London, the group’s home base is at House of Annetta, a community space on Brick Lane, in the Shoreditch neighborhood of East London. Historically a center of Jewish immigrants, the neighborhood later became home to a large South Asian community and is now increasingly gentrified.
Being surrounded by multiple diaspora communities creates an opportunity to “think about the connections between these different stories,” Ross told me. In events like the Mark Hyatt talk, Jargon puts Jewish experiences in conversation with the stories of other minority groups in Britain – something the organization plans to do more explicitly in future programming.
At the same time, the area’s Jewish roots make it a fitting home for a Yiddish revival. “It’s so symbolic for people to feel like they can hear Yiddish in the East End again, even if they themselves never heard it,” Rosen said. “It’s got a heymish quality that people have a lot of fondness for.” That said, “we don’t want [the symbolism of the Yiddish language] to be the end point. We want it to be an entry point.”
During a fundraiser and listening party for the album Lider mit Palestine, a collection of new Yiddish songs protesting the war in Gaza, many audience members were encountering Yiddish music for the first time. Providing an accessible entry point to the language through music, the organizers said, made it possible to “advertis[e] Yiddish culture, but in a way that could actually appeal to people that didn’t even know such a thing existed as well.”
In the future, Ross and Rosen want to expand Jargon’s Yiddish-language book offerings. Since many Yiddish books are out of print, they try to find Yiddish literature secondhand or through donations and resell it on a pay-what-you-can basis. As well as broadening access to well-known Yiddish writers, they aim to introduce readers to more obscure works, offering a starting point for a deeper encounter with Yiddish culture. The goal, as Rosen put it, is for Jargon to be “the sort of environment where people say to themselves: ‘You know what, I’m going to read Isaac Bashevis Singer. Oh, and who’s this author that I never heard of next to him?’”
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How an Amish Mennonite school in Arkansas went viral with a song by an Orthodox Jew
Last month, Jewish social media was buzzing over a video of a choir singing the popular 2018 song “Tatty, My King,” composed by Dovid Edell, a former student of an Orthodox high school for boys in Waterbury, Conn. Normally, another rendition of a popular Jewish song wouldn’t cause such a stir, but the singers in this case weren’t the typical yeshiva grads of the Maccabeats; they were a co-ed a cappella choir of Amish Mennonite students from the tiny Calvary Bible School in Calico Rock, Arkansas.
Jewish viewers mostly expressed delight — “the Youtube algorithm is probably going crazy right now — frum people watching Calvary bible school,” one commenter put it, topping it off with a typed happy face — with only the occasional disgruntled remark about kol isha, the religious prohibition against men hearing women sing.
Curious about this rather unlikely collaboration, I called up Gabriel Jantzi, a self-described “amateur” musician who directed the choir, to ask about his introduction to Edell’s tune, how the project unfolded, and the choir’s surprising moment of minor fame in the Orthodox world.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
I’m 41 years old. I went to university for medicine, but I also really liked music. So I studied music, but I didn’t even minor in it, and I ended up as a veterinarian. [In the ensuing years] I have directed church choirs, and I directed my university choir for a year, and so that has been part of my life for the last 25 years. But it’s not like I have a master’s degree in choral composition or conducting.
I am a full-time farm and country vet in Ontario, Canada, and that’s what I do. This is a slow season in January and February, so it’s very convenient to take off time and do something that I really care about. So I’m also a pastor in a local conservative Mennonite church. I take great pleasure and derive a lot of energy out of working with young people who are interested in following God.
What’s your relationship to the Calvary Bible School?
I was a student there 20 years ago. Probably since its inception in the 70s, it’s been a destination for Beachy Amish Mennonite youth between the ages of 18 and 20 who want to dedicate time to study how to live a life that’s pleasing to God.
There are a lot of different names for all the different stripes of Mennonite. I grew up in the Amish Mennonite tradition. I got married, I moved a little bit. I ended up in a tiny bit different stripe. But at least in our communities, it’s not a big issue for me to go back to that tradition and say, here I am, what can I bring and what can I offer? So technically I’m not exactly the same stripe as the school, but I grew up in that stripe, if that makes sense.
I think the concept of moving a little bit along denominational lines, or even to sort of different expressions of one’s faith, would be quite familiar to many Jews.
I think that there are striking similarities between our communities here.
I think a lot of people understand who the Amish are and they understand who Mennonites are, but can you explain what an “Amish Mennonite” is? I know these boundaries can be fluid.
The Beachy Amish Mennonites care about traditions; we’re not throwing them out just because we want to move forward in a certain progressive way. Yet we are much more open to technology than what we call the Old Order Amish or Old Order Mennonite groups. When we use the term “Old Order,” we’re referring specifically to those groups that have said, “We’re going to welcome technology up until the 1800s or the early 1900s, and we’re going to maintain the horse and buggy style of life and so on.” [But Amish Mennonites] said, “No, we’re not actually against technology, we’re just hesitant to adopt everything new without testing it.” We care about probably many of the same traditional values that [Old Order groups] would, such as community and our church. And also just like they do, we put a great emphasis on our religion being a very practical religion. So it’s lived out in such a way that you can look at us and say, oh, they must have some reasons behind living a certain way.
How did you first come across this song, and what made you want to arrange it?
Anabaptists have a strong tradition of a cappella music, men and women singing together without the aid of instruments. We care very much about that: Every time we get together for a worship service, that’s how we sing.
We came across an a cappella cover of this song by Benny Friedman on Spotify and that really resonated with us. Not me personally, but some of these kids [in the choir] would actually be from a congregation that’s set limitations that you’re not even supposed to listen to instrumental music, so they could listen to this song.
And so they brought it to me last year at the Bible school and said, “Do you know this song?” And I said, “No, I’ve never heard of it.” I listened to it a bunch more and I realized why they liked it. It talks about some very universal questions that any kid who’s grown up in a tradition with God will have: Where are you? I’m told I need to come talk to you, but I don’t really want to. And as my relationship with God matures, it kind of develops into this realization that actually He’s been covering my back all this time and I never realized, so I really do want to stay on God’s team. Whether you’re an Orthodox Jew or you’re a conservative Mennonite, either way, as your relationship with God matures, those words really resonate and that progression really comes through in the song. So I thought, and my wife thought as well, that I should lead this song next year for these kids.
I have often taken music and arranged it to fit an a cappella group, and for some reason I just was not filled with any profound inspiration on how to do that for this song. So I asked a friend of mine named Wendell Glick [to arrange it.] He is a professional musician, he’s got a PhD in composition, he does this for a living. He’s also from [an Anabaptist] background, and led this choir for seven years before I did. So he knows this choir, which means he knows how to write music that stretches them just the right amount so that they do a good job of it. I really want to praise him for that.
He did a great job.
It worked for us. We’re only together for two and a half weeks, and we’re not professional musicians. Also, this choir is mandatory. That means 60% of the kids want to be there, 20% are OK with it, and 20% don’t like singing and they still have to be there. Actually, you can see [in the video recording] some of them are really feeling it and others are zoned out. And that’s OK!
For the first week [of practicing], we didn’t really like it. We’ve been very tainted by mainstream Christianity’s Protestant music that came in the 1850s, [whereas] this song has just a touch of minor key. It comes from a different culture, not quite what our mental ear hears. It took us a bit of time to get into it, but by the second week this was without a doubt the favorite song of my repertoire. Then at our local or in-house concerts, the audience just absolutely loved it. And when I say that, it’s not like we got a standing ovation; to us the highest compliment is when somebody says, “It made me worship God.” And those are the compliments we began hearing.
Did you ever have any interactions with Dovid Edell, who wrote the song?
Yes, I did. When I take a song, I make sure it’s licensed for use. I understand [Edell] had to get permission or talk with some rabbis to see whether it would be appropriate. And so he talked to the rabbis and then he called me up and I spoke to him about who wanted to sing it and I explained that the youth are all Christian. He was very nice about it and he said, “Just let them know that this was my conversation with God. It’s a personal song.” And I said, “That’s the basis on which it resonates with us as well.” He was gracious and let us use it.
Then when I was actually working with the students, I also communicated back to Dovid because he said, basically, “I have a few messages I want you to directly convey to the students.” Which made it very personal. Gen-Z loves to have some personal connection, right? When they perform a song, they love to have some personal connection to the composer. And that just made it for them. That was amazing.
Did you get any negative reactions?
I’m assuming — and I say this with respect because we also understand some of the traditions from the Torah — that some people found it offensive, that it’s a mix. Forgive me if I’m mispronouncing it, but I had never come across the kol isha idea so I was a bit sheepish that I walked into something without doing my research very well.
One of the things I care about is that people worry about pronunciation when they sing another language. One of my negatives is I did not ask Dovid how to pronounce “tatty.” I just kind of ran with it. In the future, I would probably be a little more careful about asking the original composer whether he wanted a certain emphasis and a pronunciation of certain words.
Did you realize how popular the video had become in the Orthodox world?
The lovely thing is the conductor is not mentioned in that video and you just see his back. So fortunately, from my viewpoint, very few people know who I am. If there’s any publicity here, I’m glad that the school gets it, because the school is blatantly about the glory of God. And to use a phrase that Dovid would have said, he just wants to spread light. So I want that to be the focus.
We read the comments, and I think I’d have two words to describe our reaction: First is delight, and second, we’re honored. We blatantly are Christians, not Jews, so we come at this and say this is a part of our maturity process to learn more about God’s son. But that being said, the song itself doesn’t speak whatsoever about the Messiah, it only talks about the relationship with God. And to us, it 110% resonated, just like it did for your community, so we are grateful that we could participate.
We care a lot about this school, but we understand it’s very arcane. All of 83 students were there this past term. Not many people know about it. So it was quite a thing that another community is interested in what we’re doing. But we also acknowledge that the song that we are singing is from that community. So yeah, it was kind of a good circle.
Did you have much familiarity with Jews and Judaism before this? Have you learned more about it through this experience?
Yes, we would have some familiarity. I hope I’m not coming across as cocky, but because we study Judaism, I think we actually have a bit more familiarity with Judaism than I think from what I read in the comments than they’d ever have with us. There are a lot of comments that were like, “Where did you get this song?” Well, guys, you put it on Spotify! But if you assume we’re all Old Order Amish that drive horse and buggy and don’t have Internet, then I can understand those questions. So I think we have some knowledge, although I had no idea about things like kol isha. Also, it was a surprise to all of us how much our performance of your song resonated with your community. I’m still not sure why.
I can think of two possibilities. One is that it’s just a very beautiful rendition, so it’s hard to imagine not being moved by it. But I also think Jews are often happily surprised to see a group of non-Jews embrace or respect a piece of Jewish culture, particularly Orthodox culture. A lot of the time, people anticipate negativity.
Well, that’s very nice of you to say. Those words really make me feel fuzzy and warm inside. We have great respect for your culture. We think God brought the Messiah through your people. I realize that differs from the understanding of many people who wrote comments, but we have profound appreciation and love for your people.
We understand that we are the white Christians and Christians have had thousands and thousands of years of fighting with the Jews. So I know it’s hard to say, “Well, we’re not like that.” But I think I can speak for all Anabaptists and say we would strongly differentiate ourselves and say no, one of our fundamental professions or distinctions is this idea of love for all man. In fact, we won’t even go to war because we love people. Again, it comes back to we are honored that you let us use it. We were tickled pink and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other songs that I think could be used.
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Hezbollah enters Iran war, firing on Israel’s north, as US officials say more fighting is to come
(JTA) — Hezbollah fired on Israel for the first time since a 2024 ceasefire on Sunday, opening a new front in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran that began on Saturday.
Israel hammered Hezbollah positions in Lebanon overnight and said it had killed the group’s head of intelligence, Hussein Makled. Israeli officials said they expected further salvos from the Iranian proxy to the north.
The escalation comes as new missile attacks from Iran caused fresh damage and injuries in Beersheba and as the scope of the damage from the first two days of the war have come into focus. That includes sweeping damage in central Tel Aviv, where one woman was killed; a direct strike on a shelter in Beit Shemesh that killed nine, including three teen siblings; and strikes in Jerusalem that both injured Arab Israelis and sent shrapnel close to the holy sites of the Western Wall and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Both Israeli and U.S. officials say they expect operations to last for some time, with President Donald Trump suggesting a four-week timeline even as he indicated that Iranian officials had indicated a willingness to return to the negotiating table. Iran’s top security official, whom Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had identified as a leader in the case of his assassination, denied Trump’s characterization.
Military officials including War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday morning that they could not offer a timeline or details about the operations but said they were happy with the operations so far, which are designed to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and topple its Islamic Republic regime. Asked about the significance of the fact that Israel killed Khamenei, Hegseth responded, “I think Israel did a great job in the conduct of that operation.”
A fourth U.S. service member who was wounded over the weekend died on Monday, while multiple U.S. planes were shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait; their passengers survived.
The incident in Kuwait comes as Iran continues to fire on Arab states in the region, in a new escalation of regional conflict. An Iranian drone also crashed into a British base in Cyprus, causing Prime Minister Keir Starmer to agree to a U.S. request to use British bases to support efforts to destroy Iranian weapons. German Chancellor Frederich Merz is visiting Trump on Monday and may also agree to play a role in supporting the U.S.-Israeli operations.
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