About Us : Our Story
Project connects young Jews to heritage
By Rich Barlow
Spiritual Life -- The Boston Globe
June 11, 2005
Sunset mutely announces the Friday Sabbath. In the kitchen, under the watchful gaze of Aaron Ritzenberg's collection of Pez dispensers, challah for the night's dinner warms under a cloth embroidered with Hebrew and a Star of David.
Ritzenberg and his roommate, Maura Dudley, busy themselves with serving the 20-plus youthful guests in their small Somerville apartment. After the Sabbath candles have been lit and the prayers said -- and after the challah, pizza, and chicken have disappeared into hungry mouths -- everyone squeezes into the living room for Torah study.
The leader is Sara Schwebel, who, until recently, would never have imagined herself conducting a discussion of scripture. Schwebel, 29, was not active in a synagogue or Jewish life until she attended graduate school at Harvard about two years ago, and a rabbi there suggested she look into neighborhood get-togethers sponsored by Temple Israel, Boston's largest Jewish congregation.
Despite her lack of theological training, Schwebel says, ''I realized that the approach that Jeremy" [Rabbi Jeremy Morrison, who founded the neighborhood gatherings] ''teaches is very accessible, regardless of where you're starting."
Sabbath dinner discussions and other events happen once a month or so in the Cambridge-Somerville area and in other neighborhoods in Greater Boston. Temple Israel launched the meetings, called the Riverway Project, in 2001 as one response to a national concern: the spiritual torpor among many young Jews who don't affiliate with synagogues or lead anything approaching a Jewish life.
The Riverway Project predated the yearlong celebration of Temple Israel's 150th anniversary, which wraps up this month. But it is a perfect fit with that milestone.
Connecting young Jews to their heritage, neighborhood by neighborhood, is a case of going back to the future: Early in the last century, Temple Israel opened neighborhood religious schools for children of Jewish immigrants. The schools educated hundreds before the last one closed by the early 1980s. ''It was a sense of noblesse oblige," says Ronne Friedman, Temple Israel's senior rabbi. The Temple's leadership wanted to spread the new Reform movement and education to Jews who might not otherwise have exposure to them.
Over time, as Jews moved to the suburbs and coalesced into congregations, the need for the schools diminished. Now Jewish leaders face a new conundrum: Not only do half of American Jews not affiliate with a synagogue, many are not involved in Jewish activities of any kind, Friedman says. The problem is acute among the young; before the Riverway Project, Temple Israel counted perhaps 100 members in their 20s and 30s, out of a total membership of 1,600 households.
Temple Israel confined the Riverway Project within the temple's traditional membership area, taking care to avoid any perception of poaching potential members from other synagogues.
That Riverway has succeeded, Morrison says, is evidenced not just by the more than 1,000 young Jews who have attended the regular gatherings but by the fact that some participants have been lured to further involvement with the synagogue, enrolling their children in preschool or volunteering for various programs. It has been successful enough, Morrison says, that ''it's becoming something of a springboard for . . . moving forward to the next 150 years," with the temple brainstorming a similar program for older Jews.
In short, Temple Israel's neighborhood Judaism is like a Möbius strip. It loops back on itself, on the history of the temple, and at the same time stretches to infinity -- or at least organizers hope it will be a way of ensuring that the Jewish tradition endures.
When Morrison was first gauging interest in the Riverway Project, young people told him that the synagogues they had encountered either seemed interested only in their donations or stifled any questions challenging traditional thinking. When Morrison asked what they wanted out of Judaism, ''To a person, they said, 'We want ritual, social justice, and study.' "
Riverway is meant to meet those concerns, even for someone such as Jason Brown, a 32-year-old lawyer and agnostic. ''I'll admit that when some of the more God-fearing prayers come around, I may not recite along with the group," he says at the Somerville Sabbath. Still, he says, ''I do get a lot out of it. It's studying, it's moral grounding, it's spirituality."
Boston's Jewish Renaissance [Excerpts]
Fifteen years after a study on the rise of interfaith marriages had Jewish leaders bemoaning their religion's slow death, Judaism is thriving in Boston. What's more surprising is who's leading the revival.
By Doug Most
Boston Globe Magazine
November 6, 2005
A younger, increasingly active Jewish community has emerged in the last decade to restore Boston's oldest standing synagogue, rejuvenate its biggest one, and help to re-shape a religious landscape in the city.
In 1995, Jeremy Morrison, 34, didn't have a local option. The Brookline native went to rabbinical school in Manhattan. But he returned to Boston, where he launched the Riverway Project at Temple Israel in 2001 to entice young Jews back to the synagogue. "As our generation is getting married later and having children later, there is a widening gap of participation among people in their 20s and 30s," says Morrison, who has a boyish face, curly brown hair, and round glasses. "This generation was absent from synagogue life. Synagogues are graying. We can revitalize them."
At Temple Israel, Morrison plays the guitar and leads very musical services through the Riverway Project. But it wasn't music, he says, that first brought in his younger members.
"In the spring of 2001, I had house meetings with nonmembers. I asked, `What are your perceptions of your synagogue?' By and large, they were seen as negative," he says. He describes the feedback: " `You were not allowed to think critically. Synagogues were like country clubs - they were interested in our money.' " Even so, he says, people wanted to talk. Within a few months, he was leading Friday night Shabbat services in homes around Boston and signing up new members younger than 35 at Temple Israel for an introductory fee of $36 for the first year. (Dues rise, but the rabbi says he works with young members' budgets.) In 2001, Temple Israel had about 50 members under 35 without children. Now, it has more than 200. The Riverway Project not only has an e-mail list of 1,000, it also brought in $6,000 in membership fees the first year and $80,000 so far this year. And Temple Israel is using a similar approach to reach out to empty nesters.
"One big change is outreach," Morrison says, "especially to interfaith marriages. Plenty of rabbis don't perform interfaith weddings. I don't know how to walk that line. I perform interfaith weddings under certain circumstances. Most interfaith couples are asking questions even Jewish couples are not asking." Still, that doesn't mean interfaith couples don't make him nervous. "I think the test is going to be our generation's children. I think synagogues are where Jews are made."
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