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How one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations added 900 new members in 8 months
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
TORONTO (JTA) — At a time of declining synagogue affiliation rates and following a pandemic slump, one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations gained 900 new members in just eight months.
Launched in July 2022, an initiative called the Generations Membership Program attracted young families to Beth Tzedec Congregation here by removing membership dues for anyone under the age of 40.
The success of the no-dues model surprised leaders of the synagogue, whose next challenge is to strengthen the connections between the new members and the congregation.
“We were all surprised by how much uptake there was,” said Yacov Fruchter, the synagogue’s director of Community Building and Spiritual Engagement, Yacov Fruchter.
With over 4,000 members, Beth Tzedec is one of the largest Conservative congregations in North America. However, over the past decade, Beth Tzedec has suffered from a decline that has affected the Conservative movement, once North American Judaism’s largest denomination. In 1971, 832 congregations identified with the movement, a number which dropped to 562 by 2020. The number of Conservative Jews also dropped from 1.6 million at its peak to a half million by 2020, according to data from the 2020 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews.
The decline of the Conservative movement left Beth Tzedec struggling to attract new members while old families fell out of touch with the congregation. “Ten years ago, our membership was at 2,400 households, but I think that number was inflated,” said Rabbi Steven Wernick, its senior rabbi. “Into the pandemic, we saw membership drop to 1,700-1,800 paying units,” or families. That’s a decline of approximately 25% over the 2010s.
As director of education, Daniel Silverman oversees Beth Tzedec’s congregational school as well as bar/bat mitzvah educational programs. Silverman said that it was difficult to attract and maintain younger congregants due to shifting cultural perspectives and financial stresses that have worsened over recent years.
“It was hard to help people understand that synagogue was worth their time when we put up a relatively high [financial] barrier,” said Silverman. “People of this generation are not going to be inclined to join and pay money to join a synagogue in the way that their parents and grandparents were.”
Beth Tzedec’s membership dues are adjusted for each family unit depending on how much the family can pay. That doesn’t mean that membership is cheap, however. For the highest-earning members of the congregation, dues can be up to $6,000 annually per family.
Ariel Weinberg, 17, belongs to Beth Tzedec and participated in Silverman’s bat mitzvah educational program. When she becomes an adult, she said she would be happy to pay a portion of her salary for synagogue membership but wants her experience to be more than simply attending for the High Holidays.
“That’s a lot of money to put forth every month when I only use it twice per year,” Weinberg said.
Voluntary dues programs like Beth Tzedec’s have been growing in recent years. Synagogues adopting the model cite research showing that potential members see belonging to a synagogue as less of an obligation and instead want to be shown what a synagogue has to offer, as Rabbis Kerry Olitzky and Avi Olitzky argued in their 2015 book on membership models.
Wernick said that the way younger generations view synagogue membership is fundamentally different from previous generations.
“The traditional synagogue membership model was pay first and engage later. So what we decided to do was, engage first, and then we’ll talk about money later,” Wernick said.
Boosting membership on paper is one thing; creating active, engaged members who show up for worship and take part in programming is another. To demonstrate Beth Tzedec’s commitment to engaging the new cohort, the shul recently hired an engagement specialist and the board is also in the process of hiring a new cantor or rabbi. Leadership has also committed to meeting one-on-one for a “coffee date” with each new member of the congregation to strengthen new connections.
“The goal is to make a place as large as Beth Tzedec feel small and personal,” said Silverman.
Leadership’s attempts to better connect with congregants have already resonated well with new members. After Rebbecca Starkman and her family joined Beth Tzedec in September 2022, her husband met with Wernick as part of the “coffee date” initiative.
“He really, really enjoyed it,” said Starkman. “It also made him feel connected, connected and comfortable.”
When Wernick became Beth Tzedec’s chief rabbi in 2019, he set out to address Beth Tzedec’s membership woes. As the former CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the congregational arm of Conservative Judaism, he used his expertise to devise a plan that would reverse the previous trend in Beth Tzedec’s affiliation.
“What I attempted to do at USCJ was to help synagogues reinvent themselves for the 21st century,” Wernick said.
Part of that idea, said Beth Tzedec’s president, Patti Rotman, meant rethinking the congregation’s membership model. “It couldn’t just be transactional. It had to be transformational,” Rotman said.
Prior to the implementation of the Generations program, Beth Tzedec had attempted strategies to improve engagement. Previously, membership for families under the age of 25 was set at only $50 per year. The congregation was able to support this program as membership dues only accounted for 30% of operating income, the rest coming from other sources.
According to Wernick, as of 2022, only 5% of Beth Tzedec’s operating income came from families under 40. As such, the switch to no-fee membership for the under-40 cohort did not cause a significant financial impact.
“So you already had a circumstance where those over 40 were already paying for those under 40,” Wernick said.
In the months prior to the implementation of the Generations Membership Program, Beth Tzedec undertook a significant amount of research into synagogue engagement in Toronto. Based on the 2018 Environics Survey of Jews in Canada, they learned that 70% of Jewish Canadians belonged to a congregation, more than double the percentage in the U.S.
“If there’s 200,000 Jews in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], then 30% are not affiliated,” said Wernick, “and then if you break it down by how many people are in their 20s and 30s, we’re talking about 16,000 Jews.” Out of the 16,000, Wernick estimates that approximately 30% grew up as part of the Conservative movement, while 30% grew up unaffiliated.
Geographic research told Wernick that prior to July 2022, there were around 500 households in the vicinity of Beth Tzedec in need of a shul.
Rabbi Steven Wernick, senior rabbi of Beth Tzedec in Toronto, previously served as CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. (Courtesy of USCJ)
Beth Tzedec was able to focus its social media campaigns on neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of young and unaffiliated Jews in the vicinity.
“We targeted the unaffiliated, we targeted the previously affiliated to Beth Tzedec, but who had dropped off for more than three years, and we targeted based on geography,” as well as the study by Environics and information from UJA-Federation of Greater Toronto.
Even with the sophisticated marketing campaign, Wernick said that the synagogue expected it would only gain around 20-50 new households per year.
“Just because you give it away for free doesn’t mean that people are going to come,” said Wernick.
By the end of the first day of advertising, 50 new families had signed up.
“We are well over 420 new households,” Wernick said. Seventy-five percent of the uptake are brand-new members while the remainder are former Beth Tzedec members who had fallen out of the fold for more than three years.
The 420 household figure represents mainly families, as well as couples and individuals. Beth Tzedec President, Patti Rotman, estimates that approximately 900 new individual members became part of the synagogue in the eight months since the program was inaugurated.
When it comes to reinvigorating community life, gaining new members is not the only task at hand.
The membership drive “is only mile one of a marathon,” said Silverman.
“The most difficult part is, how do you then keep people connected?” said Fruchter. “You have to have the capacity to develop the relationships that you are starting.”
As self-identified Modern Orthodox Jews, Rebecca Starkman and her family attend synagogue regularly. Because her primary congregation only meets every other week, Starkman had been attending Beth Tzedec for years prior to joining under the Generations program.
“I had been attending loosely since since 2015,” said Starkman. “We had always been members at this other congregation but had not joined Beth Tzedec until this past September.”
Starkman said that it was the financial barrier that had been preventing her and her family from officially joining Beth Tzedec.
“We didn’t feel like we had enough finances to pay membership at two organizations,” said Starkman. “The program definitely gave us the motivation to make the leap to being part of the shul.”
Starkman said that she knows of other families who were also in her situation, attending Beth Tzedec services without becoming official members due to the financial barrier.
“There are three other families who did the same thing we did,” said Starkman. However, one family was over 40 and still could not join the congregation under the program. Nonetheless, for families who are lucky enough to be covered, Starkman said that the program is definitely a motivating factor to join Beth Tzedec.
Weinberg said that the Generations program will also improve diversity within the congregation.
“Our mandate really is to build a stronger Jewish future with youth and young professional engagement as our priority. And to go with that,” said Rotman, “we are also at the forefront of equity and inclusion.”
According to Rotman, Beth Tzedec maintains a vigorous diversity and inclusion committee dedicated to ensuring that the synagogue is an inclusive environment for everyone.
Given the local renaissance that Beth Tzedec has undergone, Rotman stresses the importance of bringing down barriers as the best way for synagogues to engage the current generation of Jews.
“Our goal is to inspire and enable Jews to live meaningful Jewish lives and the best way [to do so] for the under-40 cohort is to remove the barrier to membership,” Rotman said.
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The post How one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations added 900 new members in 8 months appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Settlers torched a West Bank mosque — and the milquetoast Israeli mainstream response won’t suffice
For more than two years, masked settler mobs in the West Bank have torched mosques, burned Qurans, uprooted olive trees, attacked olive harvesters, and rampaged through villages — all with almost no consequences.
Just this week, masked settlers torched a mosque in Deir Istiya, burned Qurans and scrawled hateful graffiti on its walls — only two days after dozens of settlers attacked a village near Nablus, injuring several Palestinians and burning a warehouse. “All state authorities must act decisively to eradicate this phenomenon,” said President Isaac Herzog, calling the strikes “shocking and serious.”
But Herzog would be naïve to expect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to heed his call. And the West Bank is rapidly turning into an emergency of explosive proportions.
The sharp rise in attacks on Palestinians and their property began in late 2022, when Netanyahu’s calamitous coalition took over, and ramped up with the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. The United Nations counted more than 1,400 incidents between October 2023 and October 2024.
But while the war in Gaza has reached a ceasefire, the violence in the West Bank shows no sign of abating: Independent trackers reported a record 264 settler attacks in October 2025 alone.
Add to that the Israeli military’s own violent record in the West Bank, and the picture is grim. In 2025 alone, the U.N. has documented at least 178 Palestinian deaths linked to settler and military violence.
If you look for the state’s corrective force you will find a yawning gap. In the most chilling scenes — in Huwara in February 2023, and in coordinated attacks on several villages this month — groups of masked young men have attacked Palestinian civilians, while soldiers and police have either arrived late or failed to stop the violence. Israel’s own watchdogs and human-rights organizations document a pattern of non-prosecution that even predates the current government. Yesh Din, which systematically tracks police investigations into Israeli civilians’ violence against Palestinians, shows that roughly 94% of files from 2005–2024 were closed without indictment, and that only about 3–6% of investigation files lead to conviction.
Which raises the obvious question: When attacks are so frequent and prosecutions so rare, who benefits?
Since late 2022, the survival of Netanyahu’s governing coalition has depended on hard-right parties whose leaders and bases overlap with the radical settler movement. Two ministers who matter — Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are both unapologetic advocates for settlement expansion and the vision of Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank, which they refer to by the biblical name of Judea and Samaria. Ministries and offices that oversee law enforcement in the West Bank — including the Civil Administration and Ministry of National Security — are effectively controlled by figures sympathetic to settlement expansion and skeptical of aggressive policing of their own supporters.
This political reality filters down into operational choices. When enforcement agencies are staffed and supervised by officials who owe their political fortunes to the settlement movement, enforcement will not be robust. Arrests — where they occur — rarely lead to charges that stick. In the first half of 2025, for example, there were hundreds of complaints, but only a fraction were opened as criminal files, leading to scant dozens of arrests.
Why would a democratic government tolerate this?
The answer isn’t just about coalition management. It’s about the government’s fundamental ideological sympathy with settlers, and the absence of a credible alternative plan for the land and people under Israeli control.
For decades, the West Bank settlement project could be dismissed as reversible, or up for bargaining in a final-status negotiation. But every new outpost has served to make a contiguous Palestinian state less viable, bringing Israel closer to incorporating millions of Palestinians — without giving them full citizenship or political rights.
The mainstream right lacks a plan for this demographic reality. But the far right has one: apocalyptic warfare and the eventual removal of Palestinians from the land, an outcome that extremists see as inevitable. That is why people like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir appear indifferent to the destabilizing violence, if not actively encouraging of it: instability is a feature, not a bug, for those prepared to use it to remake reality.
Now, the mainstream right has put itself in a position in which it cannot govern without the far right — so it has ceded moral and policy ground to radicals. The true spirit of Zionism — which is humanistic and humane — is suffering.
Which brings us back to Herzog. President Donald Trump, during his Knesset speech last month, urged him to pardon Netanyahu of all charges that he is currently facing in court. This week he did it again, in a letter claiming that Netanyahu is facing “a political, unjustified prosecution.” Herzog’s office said he held Trump “in the highest regard,” but that anyone seeking a pardon had to submit a formal request — something Trump lacks the ability to do.
I have a better idea. Pardon Netanyahu on the explicit condition that he leave politics altogether, forever. And have a new coalition, free of his corrupting influence and the morally destructive politics of the far-right, set to work to clean up his mess.
The post Settlers torched a West Bank mosque — and the milquetoast Israeli mainstream response won’t suffice appeared first on The Forward.
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This Jesus horror movie could have used more heresy
Historically, Christianity has carefully controlled its interpretations and texts; texts that portrayed Jesus in anything other than a glowing light or complicated the narrative the early Church hoped to spread — anything that made him look too human or too flawed — got taken out of the canon and declared heretical.
Which means most people are not familiar with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal and perhaps Gnostic text about Jesus’ early years, from toddlerhood to his tweens. In it, Jesus is depicted as a wise but petulant child who, like any kid, has occasional temper tantrums. But, as the son of God, his are a bit more impactful; he curses and smites everyone who annoys him. (He does resurrect some of them once he’s calmed down.) He also uses his powers for deeply mundane and childish tasks, like animating his toys or making his work easier. It is, in short, not a particularly virtuous or divine depiction.
This is why The Carpenter’s Son, a new movie written and directed by Lotfy Nathan that takes its inspiration from the apocryphal gospel, has upset Christians. It’s also because the film is a horror flick full of roaring demons and horned snakes pulled from the throats of the possessed.
Pop artist FKA Twigs stars as Mary, and Nicolas Cage as Joseph — the movie doesn’t name any of its characters, so technically they’re playing The Mother and The Carpenter, respectively, but we all know who they really are — who are struggling to parent their powerful child (a constantly glowering Noah Jupe). After a bloody, screaming birth, they flee Herod’s soldiers’ attempts to throw their infant into a giant bonfire; years later, when they finally settle down, Jesus has some weird run-ins with the villagers, including a beautiful but demonically possessed young woman named Lilith and a leering, scar-covered child who lives among lepers and is as evil as she seems to be. Snarling demons ensue.
Before the movie came out, many Christians passed around petitions and wrote blogs about the film’s blasphemy. But The Carpenter’s Son is not, in fact, subversive at all. First of all, Jesus is not a petulant toddler; he looks to be around 20. All the notable anecdotes from the apocrypha are missing: He hardly smites anyone, doesn’t animate his toys and never even blinds the neighbors. In fact, he repeatedly rejects temptation, death and evil. There’s even a cheesy CGI halo, the appearance of which made the audience snicker the night I saw the film.
Despite the various demons, this makes for a plodding, moralistic movie that adds little to the basic Christian story other than a few jump scares. (It is not aided by the acting, which amounts to Jesus scowling, Mary looking stricken and Joseph yelling in the blustering way only Cage can.)
But there are hints of something more interesting, if only Lotfy Nathan, who both wrote and directed the film, had been bold enough to embrace the text that inspired him. The scarred child tells Jesus that Joseph, who is constantly exhorting his son to pray harder and more often, is an “oppressor,” and questions whether the difference between good and evil is so clearcut; despite being demonic, she is also the one who encourages Jesus to help the possessed. She and Joseph worry that the world is too unclean to truly be a creation of God, and wonder if Jesus is truly “righteous.” Moments like these nod to Christian gnosticism, which posited that the earth was created by a false God and is evil.
These kinds of questions are heretical in mainstream Christianity. But Judaism preserved many similarly extratextual ideas in the form of the Midrash, a set of interpretations that I often describe as “rabbinical fan fiction” because of their tendency to write in entire characters and plotlines that didn’t exist in the original biblical text. For example, in one midrash about the Binding of Isaac, in which God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son but stays his hand at the last moment, Abraham actually succeeded but Isaac’s soul returned and he was resurrected; in another, Satan appears on the pair’s journey to the sacrifice to tempt Abraham to disobey.
For Jews, these stories — however outré they may be — are not heretical. It’s kosher to discuss and consider the questions they raise about the nature of the patriarchs and other lauded figures, making for a rich discourse over the centuries. This openmindedness and cultivation of unorthodox stories has also, not incidentally, made for better entries into the horror genre; the past decade has seen Jewish horror movies drawing from myths of golems, dybbuks, the practice of guarding the dead before burial and even the horror of an overbearing Jewish mother. The open canon provides a rich text from which to mine.
Had Nathan felt free to do the same with the apocrypha, perhaps The Carpenter’s Son could have been an interesting and affecting movie full of mysterious questions about the nature of evil and God. After all, the idea that God could be a demon, or even that God might be too capricious and chaotic to be trustworthy, is far scarier than demons being demonic.
The post This Jesus horror movie could have used more heresy appeared first on The Forward.
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Ritchie Torres Faces New Socialist Opponent in Democratic Primary Race Amid DSA Victory Lap Over Mamdani Win
US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) speaks during the House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, Sept. 30, 2021. Photo: Al Drago/Pool via REUTERS
Public defender and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizer Dalourny Nemorin has launched a primary challenge against US Rep. Ritchie Torres in New York’s 15th Congressional District, setting up a competitive intra-party contest in one of the nation’s poorest districts.
Nemorin announced her campaign on Wednesday at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, where she emphasized housing affordability, public housing conditions, immigrant services, and economic hardship as central issues facing the district. She said many residents feel underserved and argued that the district requires “a new type of leadership.” The area has a median household income of about $44,000, with more than 30 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
Torres, first elected in 2020, is a high-profile Democrat known for his work on housing oversight and for being the first openly LGBTQ Afro-Latino member of Congress. He currently serves on the House Committee on Financial Services and has been a vocal supporter of Israel, a position that has drawn national attention and, in some cases, criticism from the Democratic Party’s left wing.
Nemorin, a member of the far-left DSA, is directly targeting Torres on campaign financing and foreign-policy stances, criticizing his acceptance of contributions from real-estate developers and from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She argued these ties reflect a misalignment between the congressman’s priorities and the needs of the district. Torres’s campaign has previously defended its donor base as consistent with his longstanding policy positions and record.
“I think the country is talking about a new type of representation, a new type of Democrat, a new type of leadership, which is what Zohran’s race represents,” she said, referring to Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City last week.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and anti-Israel activist, is also a member of the DSA, which appears to see his victory as a sign of momentum. The organization has reportedly created a list of far-left demands for Mamdani when he assumes office. Most of the demands concern boycotts targeting Israeli-linked entities.
Nemorin’s challenge highlights ongoing divisions between establishment Democrats and progressive organizers in New York City. Her campaign launch drew a largely young audience, signaling an effort to mobilize voters who have historically had low turnout in the district. Her campaign has said it will focus on door-to-door organizing and outreach in public-housing complexes.
Since entering Congress, Torres has positioned himself as an outspoken ally of Israel. As the Democratic Party has continued to grow increasingly critical of Israel over the past two years, amid the Gaza war, Torres has staunchly defended the Jewish state’s right to defend itself from existential threats such as the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups. He has also spoken against rising antisemitism in New York City, even calling on local universities to adopt more vigorous policies protecting Jewish students. However, his strident support for Israel has sparked ire among the left flank of his own party.
Torres enters his reelection bid with significant advantages, including incumbency, name recognition, fundraising capacity, and a political network built over multiple election cycles. Primary defeats of sitting members of Congress remain rare, but progressive groups have succeeded in previous New York races when able to drive high turnout among younger voters and renters. Torres is expected to receive huge levels of support from the Jewish community within his district.
Moreover, Torres represents the poorest district for young people in the country, which is majority black and Latino, demographics with which far-left candidates have historically struggled. Observers have also pointed out that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo won Torres’s district during this year’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City over the more progressive Mamdani, suggesting that the district possesses a deep reservoir of moderate voters.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for June 2026. Both campaigns are expected to center their messaging on housing, affordability, and constituent services. However, Torres’s opponents, including former New York assemblyman Michael Blake, have taken repeated swipes against his record on Israel, indicating that they will attempt to center the war in Gaza as a main point of attack during the primary. In his launch video, Blake attacked Torres for supposedly supporting a “genocide” in Gaza.
“I am ready to fight for you and lower your cost of living while Ritchie fights for a genocide,” Blake said in an announcement video.