Speaker to Conservative Temple: Emulate Chabad
While some South Florida synagogues have closed their doors and others struggle with fewer people, a prominent Jewish scholar will offer some advice this weekend: Make newcomers feel like part of the family.
Synagogues should adopt welcoming techniques used by Chabad Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement known for inviting newcomers to the rabbi’s house for dinner, said Ron Wolfson, a synagogue expert from a Jewish university in Los Angeles.
Wolfson is the keynote speaker at this weekend’s Community Shabbaton, a three-day series of lectures, Shabbat services and community service projects at Miami’s Beth David Congregation, which turns 100 next March.
In his 2006 book, The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community, Wolfson tackles the issue of temples becoming irrelevant. It starts with how they welcome people.
“Most synagogues think of themselves as welcoming to strangers, but when you push them, there are things they can improve,” he said.
He suggests adding better signage in the parking lot and in the buildings so people know where they are going, having members greet guests and explaining the worship service.
Even more important: synagogues must offer an experience – whether a worship service, class or event – compelling enough to convince a person to return again and again, he said.
All those steps are part of a larger effort to create a deeper sense of community within the temple based on a web of strong relationships among its members.
According to Wolfson, the Chabad Lubavitch movement does this exceptionally well.
“The members of Chabad, their hospitality is over the top. If you have a Shabbat meal Friday night, there will be a lot of guests. You have a different relationship with someone after you have broken bread together,” he said.
Chabad offers services for free – religious education, day camps, meals – without the obligation of membership dues that can turn people off, added Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami demographer who studies changes in the Jewish population.
“Some people are going Orthodox. They want to take advantage of these activities, but it doesn’t mean they are Orthodox in their thinking,” he said.
“This is not rocket science. Synagogues have depended on programs and hope that people show up. So much time and energy has been put into programming that not enough energy has been put into building relationships on the level that I’m talking about,” Wolfson said.
Losing Members
Wolfson, an education professor at American Jewish University, is best known as the co-chair of Synagogue 2000, a decade-long project aimed at imagining the synagogue of the 21st century and improving the way Jews worship.
“We spent 10 years studying synagogues intensely and worked with more than 100 of them in North America. In well over half of them, we found synagogues were not doing exciting things,” he said. “There was a revolving-door congregation. Adults were not deeply engaged. It was essentially a fee-for-service operation.”
The number of Jews who belong to synagogues is a fraction of the community: 39 percent of Jews in Miami-Dade County and 27 percent in Broward, according to a 2008 study by Professor Sheskin.
In recent times, synagogues have had to merge or close their doors as the Jews have moved away or did not renew their membership.
According to Sheskin, there are 121,000 people in Jewish households in Miami-Dade and 206,700 people in Broward. His own temple, Beth Ahm Israel in Cooper City, has seen its membership halved from 600 to 300 families now. The congregation put its building up for sale in 2009.
In 2009, members of the Reform congregation Bet Breira and the Conservative Samu-El Or Olom temple in Kendall merged their groups in a mock-wedding procession, with participants hoisting the Torah scrolls under a chuppah, or wedding canopy. The latter synagogue was the product of an earlier merger — between West Kendall’s Samu-El and Westchester’s Or Olom — caused by members moving from one community to the other.
Timely Message
Rabbi Ed Farber, who heads the Conservative Beth Torah synagogue in North Miami Beach, said, “The question is not, ‘Which synagogue should I join, but why should I join?’ ” he said.
Beth Torah has attracted 70 new families in the past year by offering services in Spanish for Latin American Jews. It also makes sure they are integrated into the community, which has more than 600 families.
Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, of the Reform Temple Judea in Coral Gables, said Wolfson’s message is timely. Both Goldberg and Farber said they had read Wolfson’s book.
“You can get information from anywhere, but there are not many places where you can get real community,’’ Goldberg said. “That’s what people want. Wolfson is great at helping congregations figure that out.”
