Center to Serve Growing Community in South Carolina

It’s not a synagogue, not centered around prescribed hours of worship. It’s not about rituals performed within walls. It doesn’t even have a building, not yet anyway. Think more of a Jewish grandmother’s kitchen where the scent of challah bread lingers, the oven never rests and nobody leaves hungry. Even if they want to.

It’s where you can cry, kvetch, laugh, pray and always, always feel welcome at Shabbat dinner.

For centuries, traditions like these of the home, faith and culture have formed the essence of Jewish life. And that is what Rabbi Yossi Refson and his wife, Sarah, wanted to capture and re-create when they started Chabad of Charleston and the Low Country in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

Over the seven years since they moved to town, he from England, she from New York, the Chabad has operated and grown largely out of their Mount Pleasant home.

That is about to change.

The Chabad is poised to greatly expand Jewish offerings East of the Cooper with a new Charleston Center for Jewish Life, set to break ground in coming months.

No, it won’t be a synagogue. Instead, it will expand on what the Chabad has worked to tap into already, that very essence of Jewish life.

Starting gates

More than half of local Jewish residents aren’t members of a synagogue or any Jewish entity at all, Refson says. It’s a problem facing communities nationwide, according to a Pew Research Center study and others.

By wide margins, Jews say they identify with being Jewish. But they don’t join Jewish institutions as they once did, a change many fear is watering down Jewish identity and putting American Judaism at future risk of dissolving entirely into the melting pot.

So when the Refsons moved to town, they wondered what they could offer to draw in those unaffiliated masses.

“We wanted to tap into that deep connection with being Jewish,” Refson says. “We needed to find something that talks to them.”

Where to start?

First off, they realized being Jewish is about far more than synagogue worship. It’s also anchored in family, culture and shared history.

And that means food, especially traditional Jewish food. Meals connect people in ways worship services often cannot. And no other time feeds a hungry Jewish soul quite like Friday night Shabbat dinners to celebrate the sabbath.

“It tickles our Jewish souls, our Jewish brains, in all sorts of ways,” Refson says.

It’s why the Refsons’ Mount Pleasant home centers around a large dining room table where Sarah’s Shabbat dinners have become community legend, drawing everyone from philanthropist Anita Zucker to young adults just moving to town.

“We wanted to bring a positive experience to the community,” Refson says.

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