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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.  


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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Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages?

One day, when Sabrina Hakim was out for a walk with her father, he started speaking a language she could not understand.

Sabrina figured he must be speaking Judeo-Kashi, a variety of Judeo-Iranian. Her father spoke this language as a child in the Iranian city of Kashan before he moved to the capital, Tehran. Since Jewish people haven’t lived in Kashan in decades, at least not in large numbers, the language “faces possible extinction,” according to Rutgers University linguist Habib Borjian.

Sabrina felt that in order to best care for her father, she had to learn this language. “I would just ask him questions, like, how do you say ‘Are you hungry?’ How do you say ‘I’m tired?’” she told me. “I was asking questions about words or phrases that we could use in his care.”

A reader consults a Judeo-Kashani glossary. Photo by Lauren Hakimi

As time went by, her interest in Kashi evolved from purely practical to cultural. She started scrawling notes on the backs of receipts, and now, Sabrina says she has some 200 pages of notes from conversations with her dad, and she is helping to create a dictionary of the language.

Sabrina’s father, who died in February, is one example of someone whose dementia helped his descendants work with professional linguists to preserve a rare Jewish language. Since dementia affects shorter-term memory more than longer-term memory, it’s not unusual for multilingual people with dementia to begin speaking the language they learned first. As a 2009 study put it, “the language with the best recovery may be the earliest acquired language, the language of greater use, or the language spoken in the patient’s environment.”

Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and the director of the Jewish Language Project, said that, while she has long been aware of this phenomenon, she has noticed it most recently with speakers of Judeo-Iranian languages. Historically speaking, that makes sense: In the mid-20th century, when people who are now elderly were children or young adults, many Jews from small cities all across Iran moved to Tehran, oftentimes to avoid antisemitism or enhance economic opportunities.

In Tehran, these people might have spoken their hometown language with their families, but standard Farsi with pretty much everyone else. They had also studied Torah and knew some Hebrew. But even as their brains held room for three languages — and later, when they fled Iran altogether, for yet a fourth language in the country where they wound up — those hometown languages remained deeply rooted in their minds.

,

Ashton, an 18-year-old from Great Neck, New York, had always been close with his grandmother, Mommy Po-Po, who began showing signs of dementia more than a year ago. (Ashton requested to be identified only by his first name so as to keep the details of his grandmother’s condition private)

Mommy Po-Po was born around 1939 in the small Iranian city of Tuyserkan in Hamadan province. Though she later moved to Tehran, she continued speaking Judeo-Tuyserkani, a language Borjian told me is at even greater risk of extinction than Judeo-Kashi.

Ashton’s aunt and Mommy Po-Po’s youngest child, Dina, told me that her mother usually speaks Judeo-Tuyserkani when she’s confused. In the last few months, Dina said, “whenever she talks to me, she feels that we live still in Tuyserkan, and I’m one of her sisters.”

Dina thinks memories of Tuyserkan comfort her mother. “I think she likes to go back there, when everything is OK, when my father was alive, when her father was alive, when she had her mother next to her,” she said. “I think she feels warmer when she thinks about back then.”

Around the same time that his grandmother’s illness was worsening, Ashton got in touch with Borjian, who was studying Judeo-Tuyserkani but didn’t know anyone who actually spoke it. “He gave me a huge list of words, and he said please translate all these” into Tuyserkani, Ashton said. He worked with his great-aunts, who still live in Iran, to get the words translated.

Now, Ashton, like Sabrina, is creating a dictionary. He has also started recording interviews with Mommy Po-Po, which he hopes to use in a documentary. Ashton “speaks better than me in Farsi and Tuyserkani,” Dina said.

Sabrina has also gotten praise from her family about her new language skills.

At first, when she started speaking Kashi with him, he might respond in Farsi, “een chert-o-perta chiye?” What’s all this gibberish? “My accent was so bad,” Sabrina said. But as time went by, her Kashi became more and more comprehensible. “Maybe about a month before he passed, one time I was saying something, and he said, ‘where did you learn to speak Kashi? You’ve never been to Kashan.’”

Of course, he’s the one who taught it to her.

The post Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages? appeared first on The Forward.

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I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire

“We can’t hear you, Zohran,” read one New York Post headline this week: “Pro-Hamas crowd goes quiet on Trump’s Gaza peace deal.”

“It seems awfully curious that the people who have made Gazans a central political cause do not seem at all relieved that there’s at least a temporary cessation of violence…Why aren’t there widespread celebrations across Western cities and college campuses today?” the article asked.

The Post wasn’t alone in voicing that question. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition posted on X that “The silence from the ‘ceasefire now’ crowd is shameful and deafening.” Others went so far as to imply that the protesters had been lying and never actually wanted a ceasefire — because what they really wanted wasn’t freedom and security for Palestinians, but the ability to blame Israel. If pro-Palestinian voices had really wanted a ceasefire, the thinking went, they would be celebrating.

I read these various posts and articles and thought of Rania Abu Anza.

I have thought of her every day since I first read her story in early March 2024. Anza spent a decade trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization. When her twins, a boy and a girl, were five months old, an Israeli strike killed them. It also killed her husband and 11 other members of her family.

A year and a half later, a ceasefire cannot bring her children, her husband, or her 11 family members back. They were killed. They will stay dead. What is there to celebrate?

This does not mean that the ceasefire is not welcome, or that it is not a relief. On the contrary: It is both. Of course it’s a relief that the families of hostages don’t need to live one more day in torment and anguish. Of course it’s a relief that more bombs will not fall on Gaza.

But celebration implies, to me anyway, that this is a positive without caveats. And in this situation, there are so many caveats.

The families of the surviving hostages will still have spent years apart from their loved ones, in no small part because their own government did not treat the hostages’ return as the single highest priority. The families of those hostages who were killed in the war will never again sit down to dinner with their loved ones, who could have been saved. And it is difficult to fathom what’s been taken from the hostages themselves: time spent out exploring the world, or with family and friends, or at home doing nothing much at all but sitting safely in quiet contemplation.

And a ceasefire alone will not heal Israeli society, or return trust to the people in their government. It will not fix some of the deep societal problems this war uncovered. A Chatham House report this August found that, “Israeli television ignores the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while the rhetoric is often aggressive. Critical voices, from inside Israel or abroad, are attacked or silenced.” If the country is ever going to find its way back from Oct. 7 and this war, a ceasefire is a necessary precondition, but not a route in and of itself.

In Gaza, Palestinian health authorities have said that about 67,000 people — not distinguishing between combatants and civilians — have been killed by Israel’s campaign in response to Oct. 7. A full third of those killed were under the age of 18. The ceasefire cannot bring those children back to life.

It cannot turn back time and make it such that Israel admitted more than minimal aid to the embattled strip. It will not undo the damage that has been done to the people of Gaza who were denied enough to eat and drink and proper medical care. It will not give children back their parents, or parents back their children. It will not heal the disabled, or make it so that they were never wounded.

It will not change that all of this happened with the backing of the United States government. (This is to say nothing of the West Bank, which has seen a dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements and escalation of settler violence over the course of the war). And as American Jewish groups put out statements cheering the ceasefire, we should also remember that it does not reverse the reality that too many American Jews were cheerleaders for all this death.

Protesters calling for a ceasefire have regularly been denounced as hateful toward Jews or callous toward the plight of Israelis; American Jews who called for one were called somehow un-Jewish. (Yes, some pro-Palestinian protesters also shared hate toward Jews; the much greater majority did not.) The charge of antisemitism — toward those calling for a ceasefire, those calling for a free Palestine, and those who called attention to Israel’s abuses during this war — was used to silence criticism of Israel and of U.S. foreign policy. Some American Jews went so far as to call for the deportation of students protesting the war.

A ceasefire doesn’t change any of that. It can’t.

I have hopes for this ceasefire. At best, it will allow people — Israelis and Palestinians and, yes, diaspora Jews — to chart a new, better course going forward. But it almost certainly will not do that if we delude ourselves into thinking of this as a victory or a kind of tabula rasa, as though the lives lost and hate spewed are all behind us, forgotten, atoned for. The last two years will never not have happened. What happens next depends on all of us fully appreciating that.

The post I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire appeared first on The Forward.

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University of Sydney Suspends Staff Member After Viral Video Shows Verbal Assault on Jewish Students During Sukkot

University of Sydney staff member verbally assaulting Jewish students during a Sukkot celebration on campus. Photo: Screenshot

The University of Sydney has suspended a staff member after a viral video showed her verbally assaulting Jewish students and teachers during an on-campus holiday celebration, sparking public outrage over one of Australia’s latest antisemitic incidents.

In a video widely circulated on social media, a university staff member — reportedly of Palestinian Arab background — is seen approaching a group of Jewish students and teachers during a campus holiday celebration, shouting antisemitic insults at them.

The incident has sparked public condemnation and renewed calls for stronger action against rising antisemitism on college campuses, as the local Jewish community faces an increasingly hostile climate and a surge in targeted attacks across the country.

During a Sukkot celebration organized by the Australian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) on campus, attendees — including students, teachers, and the university’s rabbi — were approached by a woman who asked them, “Are you Zionists?” while they gathered to participate in the annual Jewish festival.

“A Zionist is the lowest form of rubbish. Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth,” the university staff member can be heard saying.

She then identifies as an “Indigenous Palestinian” and continues hurling antisemitic insults at the group, calling them “child killers.”

“You are a filthy Zionist,” she said. “You colonized us.”

University security personnel tried to intervene as the incident escalated, but the staff member refused to leave and continued filming the group.

The woman is then seen in the video pointing at the group and shouting to a security officer: “Look at this rubbish, look at these parasites.”

University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott announced that the staff member had been suspended pending further investigation and offered a personal apology to the affected Jewish students and staff.

“We’re disturbed and appalled by the vision that depicts verbal abuse and harassment on campus,” Scott said in a statement. “Such conduct is utterly unacceptable, and we are taking immediate action under our codes of conduct, including suspending a staff member involved pending further assessment.”

“Hate speech, antisemitism, and verbal harassment have no place on campus, online, or in our wider community,” he continued. “We deeply apologize to any staff, students, or visitors who are distressed or impacted by this incident in any way.”

University officials referred the incident to New South Wales Police, who have opened an investigation into the matter.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) strongly condemned the incident, calling for swift action and prompt intervention by the authorities.

“This is the real face of antisemitism in Australia today. It hides behind an anti-Zionist mask,” the statement read. “This woman aimed to intimidate, threaten, offend, and humiliate a group of Jewish students just because they were Jewish.”

Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

According to a report from ECAJ, the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, a significant increase from 495 in the prior 12 months.

The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.

Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, the local Jewish community has faced a wave of targeted attacks, with several Jewish sites across Australia subjected to vandalism and even arson amid an increasingly hostile climate.

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