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Jewish community embraces diversity, oneness
Rabbi Rabbi Mendel Wolovsky lights the candles on a 9-foot menorah in Montgomery Village on Thursday night at the "Light up the Night" in celebration of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah.
JOHN BURGESS/PRESS DEMOCRATPublished: Sunday, December 5, 2010 at 8:48 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, December 5, 2010 at 8:48 p.m.
As dusk turned to dark and a bearded young rabbi readied for the ceremony, about 50 people mingled between a tall Christmas tree crowded with decorations and a nine-foot menorah billed as Sonoma County's largest.
Facts
Editors Note
This story is part of "Faith in Sonoma County," a yearlong series profiling the varied ways people worship on the North Coast.
There were Jews belonging to Shomrei Torah, a Reform congregation that, with about 1,200 members, is the county's largest synagogue.
There were members of Beth Ami, the Conservative synagogue housed not far from Montgomery Village, where the Thursday night menorah lighting was about to take place.
There were congregants from Chabad Jewish Center, the Orthodox synagogue hosting the event to celebrate the second of the eight nights of Hanukkah.
And there were Jews belonging to no synagogue at all.
The gathering, which captured both the diversity and oneness of the local Jewish community, celebrated the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights. The eight-day festival that concludes Thursday at sundown commemorates the rededication of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem nearly 2,200 years ago.
“I love them, they're a wonderful group of people,” longtime Beth Ami member Pat Thomas, 83, of Santa Rosa, said of the Chabad congregants. “And it's me, I'm Jewish.”
In 2004, there were 23,106 Jews in Sonoma County, according to a study by the Jewish Community Federation, a Bay Area advocacy group. That makes Jews the county's third-largest religious group.
A monotheistic religion that traces its roots to Abraham — as do Christianity and Islam — Judaism considers the first five books of the Old Testament as Torah, or “Law.”
But within the faith, there are, as in other religions, many branches.
In Sonoma County, along a line that can be roughly described as stretching from conservative to liberal, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews have found a religious home.
And in Petaluma, about 120 Jewish families worship and study at B'Nai Israel synagogue, the county's oldest, which recently broke from the Conservative movement and is now not affiliated with any one branch of Judaism.
The congregation split from Conservatism over questions of whether Jews could marry non-Jews and whether children whose mothers are not Jewish are considered Jewish. The Conservative movement, as does the Orthodox, says no on both counts, although both do allow people born to non-Jewish mothers to convert.
B'Nai Israel Rabbi Ted Feldman said the decision to leave the Conservative movement was initiated by congregation members and reflected the ongoing search for identity that many Jews consider a key part of their religious experience.
“It's one of the things that I'm attempting to do, to encourage the congregation to express who they are as a Jewish community,” Feldman said.
The quest for identity, said Richard Kahn, owner of a Sebastopol automotive repair shop, led him to rejoin organized Judaism in 1981 after many years of being “neutralized” from it.
“I woke up and went, ‘What am I doing? This is not me.' And the next day I joined and started being Jewish again instead of nobody,” said Kahn, 64, who belongs to Beth Ami.
In the synagogue, he said, he found a structure that helps him to grow and live spiritually as a Jew in the larger world of mostly Christian America.
“Being able to practice, it means a lot to me. I like the Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) every Friday night, I like the ritual meals, I like going to services,” he said. “It's nice to be distinct in one way, because I know we're all Americans. But it's nice to be Jewish.”
For many, being Jewish is more than, or separate from, simply a religious identity. According to the 2004 Jewish Community Federation study, only 12 percent of Sonoma County's Jews are affiliated with any of the county's five synagogues, which rabbis and synagogue officials say is an ever-present challenge.
“It's not easy to maintain a vibrant Jewish community here, and the affiliation rate is one reason,” said George Gittleman, Shomrei Torah's rabbi.
“Such a small percentage
The low affiliation rate — combined with a struggling economy — will force Beth Ami to let go of its rabbi, George Schlesinger, when his contract ends in July, said Patty Bernstein, president of the synagogue's board of directors.
“The revenue that we get simply cannot sustain our congregation,” which has 180 families, she said. “We're having to downsize, simply because we can't afford to exist as we have been doing.”
The tight-knit congregation hopes to hire a part-time rabbi, she said. But at a synagogue where 70 percent of the members are older than 55, the key is to freshen the congregation.
“When you're looking to build and sustain and make a vibrant community ... if we don't have more and younger and involved people below 55 coming in, that's the point of no return then,” she said.
Many of those not belonging to a synagogue still maintain a connection to Jewish life, through holiday celebrations, Jewish weddings and Hebrew studies. In many ways out of sight of the organized faith, they constitute a significant slice of the Jewish community.
“As I like to say it, ‘There's Goldsteins in them thar hills,” said Gregorio Pehrson, 62, of Cazadero, who helped start the 23-year-old Russian River Jewish Community in Guerneville, which offers classes and stages cultural events such as a well-attended Friday night Hanukkah party.
“I would consider our group not really religious, it's cultural,” said Pehrson, who, as DJ Gershom, hosts a KGGV radio show playing only Jewish music by performers from Al Jolson to Lenny Bruce to Jubilee, a Petaluma-based klezmer band.
Even among those who are affiliated with a synagogue, sometimes the attraction has less to do with Judaism than in how they view Jewish values.
“I'm not particularly religious,” said Madeleine Rose, 64, of Forestville, a Sonoma State University sociology lecturer. “For me, being Jewish has social, political, ethical meanings about being involved in the world, caring about the world and helping to heal the world.”
Rose, who over the years has spent time in Quaker and secular Jewish communities, joined Shomrei Torah in 2009.
She doesn't attend services regularly but is active on the synagogue's social action committee, which has worked on Jewish-Muslim relations, immigrant rights and opposing efforts to outlaw gay marriage.
“It's been really meaningful for me,” she said.
Others in the county's socially progressive Jewish community have gravitated to Ner Shalom in Cotati. The synagogue belongs to the Reconstructionist movement, which has in many ways set the path for liberal Judaism. In 1984, for example, it became the first branch of the faith to allow gay, lesbian and transgender rabbis.
“A lot of people in our congregation see themselves as part of the fringe, socially and politically, and they have enjoyed being part of Ner Shalom because it is on the fringe,” said Irwin Keller, the synagogue's Reb, or lay spiritual leader.
A gay man who makes his living performing with a drag a cappella group, Keller, who had not belonged to a synagogue for years, joined the 60-member Ner Shalom in 2006, looking for “a religious home for my kids.”
In 2008, he was asked to become Reb. He said the inclusive values that made him feel at home are a signature of Ner Shalom, which has special services to accommodate Jewish children with severe disabilities and their families.
“Seemingly, they delight that the official spiritual leader is a drag queen,” he said. “And if I'm the person pointed to as leadership, then there aren't many people walking through that door who aren't going to feel welcome.”
The practice at Ner Shalom, B'Nai Israel, Shomrei Torah and Shir Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Sonoma, of allowing interfaith marriages is something that differentiates them in terms of religious opinion from the Chabad and Beth Ami.
There are other differences.
Chabad does not ordain gay or lesbian rabbis — because Orthodox practice does not allow open homosexuality — while the Conservative movement that Beth Ami represents does.
Where some Conservative Jews say their branch of the faith is, as Kahn puts it, “more demanding than other practices,” their Chabad counterparts might say their branch is the truest to Jewish law.
“I'm sure that Orthodox way is the only way really compatible with the Torah and the others are just a way to make Judaism easier,” said Olga Labunskaya, 51, a Santa Rosa software engineer.
Such differences of opinion, interpretation and practice are central, many Jews say, to their shared faith.
“They say, you take two Jews, you get three synagogues,” said Pehrson.
Or, as Kahn put it: “We argue and debate and most of us are pretty sure we're right.”
For all of that, the rabbis say, there is room within the faith.
“Jewish tradition is so broad and so varied,” Keller said. We have mystical tradition that is very caught up in the idea of a great oneness ... a great endlessness that we can tap into.”
At the other end of the county's spectrum of Judaism, Chabad's founder, Rabbi Mendel Wolovsky, said: “Everyone sort of comes in really where they are most comfortable, and that's really our job, to create the smorgasbord so they can do that.”
On Thursday at Montgomery Village, Wolovsky stood by the nine-foot, nine-branched menorah while candles were given out to the gathering of Jews, children ran around the legs of adults, and boxes of warm lattkes, the iconic Jewish potato pancake, waited to be opened.
Before lighting the menorah, Wolovsky led the crowd in a rhythmic, sing-song blessing: “Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai E-lo-he nu Me-lech Ha -olam A-sher Kid-de-shanu Be-mitz-vo-tav...”
The crowd sang along, at times in tune, often tunelessly, but certainly together: “...Ve-tzi-va-nu Le-had-lik Ner Cha-nu-kah.”
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