Building Communities, Nurturing Communal Life

by Joanne Palmer

Often we conflate religious communities with the buildings they occupy. We see big, solid, beautiful buildings and without thinking about it consciously we assume that the congregations those buildings house are now and always have been big, solid, and beautiful.

But unlike buildings, made of steel and concrete and brick, communities are made of people. They are organic. They must be planted, fed, nurtured, grown, and loved. That’s where Alim comes in.

United Synagogue’s Alim program is a synagogue incubator that “nurtures congregations through their first five years,” said Rabbi Paul Drazen, United Synagogue’s director of congregational services, who oversees it. Alim provides the nest, sustains the fledgling congregations, helps them find their wings, and then lets them fly off to their own futures. Each new congregation is likely to be supported by Alim for about three years. That’s how long the Bible demands that you wait before you eat the fruit of a tree you planted. “Alim itself is a baby,” he added. “It’s only two years old.”

Alim works with communities in a number of different ways; much of its approach depends on the stage the group has reached on its own. None has more than 20 members, but otherwise they differ from each other in many ways. Some already have formed and begun operations; they “want affiliation and the strength of a movement behind them,” Rabbi Drazen said. Recently, B’Nai Shalom Congregation of Halton-Peel in suburban Toronto and Surf City Synagogue in Huntington Beach, California, just joined United Synagogue through Alim. They’re both new and small, and are benefiting from the experience and guidance they get from the movement.

In other places, particularly where the Jewish community is just taking root or growing quickly, the Alim program has anticipated the need for a new congregation. Because Rabbi Jerome Epstein, United Synagogue’s executive vice president, had visited south Florida and read that the Jewish population of Wellington was growing, the region’s executive director, Harry Silverman, placed an ad in a Jewish newspaper to gauge interest in starting a Conservative synagogue. He is now working with a group likely to be the nucleus of a Conservative community there.

Another model is the small new synagogue that spins off from an already established one. That’s usually based on geography, and on a model some Protestant churches have pioneered. Here, the new community would be formed not in competition with another one but as an adjunct to it, would gain from the mother shul, and then would become increasingly independent as it grew in wisdom and experience. A similar model is based on generational rather than geographic differences. Sometimes younger people, particularly those who had been Schechter students, USYers, or Ramahniks, feel not entirely at home with the services their parents like. Alim can help them develop communities that is connected to but not necessarily part of the mother shul. “We help them establish a religious community,” Rabbi Drazen said. “They grew up in the Conservative movement; their loyalty is to Conservative theology and practice and it is very clear. The question, then, is how we can help them grow as a community and retain their loyalty. We have to stretch our current definition of what a congregation means to include those different approaches to a religious life.” “Through these models, we’re either helping new communities begin or helping existing congregations make a place for new communities in their midst,” Rabbi Drazen summed up.

Just as there is more than one way to become an Alim community, there are many ways to be helped by it. Once a new community has been identified or calls looking for help, Rabbi Drazen, who is based in New York, talks with representatives, helps them sort out their needs and begin to meet them, and then follows their progress. He also alerts the community’s regional director, who provides ongoing hands-on support. Through United Synagogue’s Torah Scroll Exchange, Rabbi Drazen matches established congregations with more sifrei Torah than they can use with new, scroll-less groups. And when they are ready, he walks the new groups through the affiliation process. By the time they graduate from Alim, the new congregations are members of United Synagogue. There are small grants from United Synagogue available to Alim communities, meant for materials, personnel, or programming. So far, funds have been used to buy new Etz Hayim chumashim, and to ship gently used siddurim and mahzorim. They have been used as well to pay the rabbis or cantors who work with the new communities one Shabbat each month or during the High Holy Days; to pay for occasional speakers or scholars in residence or other programming, and to help support the marketing programs that allow nascent communities to grow.

Although Alim is a United Synagogue program, Rabbi Drazen works closely with representatives of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbinical Assembly. The committee’s lay chair is Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal of Shaare Torah in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Shaare Torah itself is a small new synagogue, and Rabbi Blumenthal first served there was a student rabbi before he graduated from JTS. “So he’s been there and done that,” Rabbi Drazen said. The Emerging Kehilla Fellowship is a program sponsored by United Synagogue’s Alim, the Gladstein Rabbinic Fellowship, the RA, and JTS. The fellow, a rabbinical student at the seminary, spends many Shabbatot with the rabbi of a successful synagogue, and then uses the knowledge gathered there as the head of a new community. The program is multiyear, and weaves new rabbis, new communities, experienced rabbis, and firmly rooted congregations together into the web of Jewish life in North America.