Longmont welcomes first Jewish center

Longmont, Colorado – When Lisa Trank wants to attend synagogue, she drives roughly 15 miles to Boulder. She frequently travels there for other types of Jewish programs, too — including children’s events, adult classes or lectures — because Longmont has no Jewish community center, synagogue or rabbi.

Trank, 47, said she yearns for a nearby synagogue. Now, she won’t have to wait much longer.

In September, an ultra-orthodox rabbi from New York and his wife will begin setting up a Jewish center in town.

“I think it’s fabulous,” said Trank, the marketing director for Boulder’s Jewish Community Center and a member of Pardes Levavot, a Boulder Jewish Renewal congregation. “It reflects that the Jewish community is growing in Longmont, and it’s diverse enough that all aspects of Judaism can be reflected.”

Rabbi Yakov Borenstein, 24, and his wife, Shayna, 21, will move to Longmont from Brooklyn, N.Y., in early September to start a Chabad center, offering Longmont a synagogue, Jewish education classes and regular Jewish programming for the first time, Borenstein said. Chabad is an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism.

“There is a Jewish awareness in Longmont,” Borenstein said. “There is a strong yearning for it. A lot of people are very, very interested.”

Colorado has 10 Chabad centers, and this will be the third Chabad center in Boulder County. In Boulder, Chabad Lubavitch of Boulder County is in its 15th year. Chabad at CU opened at the University of Colorado at Boulder in September.

Chabad has approximately 3,500 centers worldwide, each of which raises funds individually to run the centers and pay for staff. Part of Borenstein’s job will be to raise private donations. The Longmont office will be an affiliate of Chabad Lubavitch of Boulder County and will be overseen by that group.

After settling in Longmont, the couple plan to offer synagogue services, adult education classes, a women’s group, children’s programming that includes a summer and winter day camp, a Hebrew school and possibly a day care. For their first project, the couple plan to hold high holiday services, probably at a Longmont hotel.

The location for the center hasn’t been determined; Borenstein plans to first rent space or offer programming out of his Longmont home and eventually buy property for the center.

Borenstein estimates that about 3,000 Jews live in the Longmont area. He acknowledges that his calculations — compiled from various Web sites, Jewish mailing lists and interviews with local Jewish residents — are not scientific.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews live in Boulder County, according to estimates from the Jewish Community Center in Boulder, but the center has no idea how many live in Longmont, said Linda Lowenstein, the center’s executive director.

Longmont resident Michael Wolin, who describes himself as a “moderately observant Jew,” met with Borenstein on one of his Longmont visits.

“It’s exciting,” Wolin said of the new Chabad center. “It’s an opportunity for the Jewish community here. We are on the map. Chabad is involved with Jewish outreach. It’s a different approach to Judaism. There’s a need for it, and I think (Borenstein will) meet with success.”

Jews living in Longmont either are unaffiliated or attend a synagogue in Boulder, Borenstein said. Others meet monthly with the Longmont Shabbat group, celebrate the Sabbath or other holidays within their own homes, or are not practicing their faith.

“Once people come down to us and check out Chabad, they won’t be intimidated,” Borenstein said. “We’re ultra-orthodox, but we are welcoming to every single person.”

Trank said the center’s establishment “reflects a healthy growth in Longmont. It gives an opportunity for all of Longmont to begin to understand the diversity within Judaism.”

The idea to bring Chabad to Longmont started about a year ago, when Rabbi Pesach Scheiner, director of the Boulder Chabad, told the group’s Brooklyn headquarters that Longmont would be an ideal community in which to start another center.

Scheiner said that, over the years, he has noticed Longmont-area residents attending Boulder Chabad events.

“We saw how the (Longmont) community was growing, and we felt it could support and use a Chabad rabbi,” Scheiner said. “We ourselves are orthodox; the people we are catering to are not orthodox. This is Judaism that has nothing do with divisions of orthodox and not orthodox.”

Borenstein, who works as a seventh-grade teacher in a Jewish school, grew up in Brooklyn in a family of emissaries following a prominent Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

As a child, Borenstein studied in a yeshiva, a Jewish school. He later studied in France and performed Jewish outreach in Hungary, Russia, Japan and India. He received his rabbinical degree from the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, N.J.

Shayna Borenstein is expecting the couple’s second child in July. They have a 10-month-old son, Meir Borenstein.