Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on December 16, 2014

Four decades ago, one of the area's oldest synagogues moved from its longtime home in the city to a sprawling campus in Pikesville, becoming part of a sweeping postwar exodus of Jews to the northwestern suburbs.

A few members of Chizuk Amuno didn't want to go. They arranged to buy their building in Reservoir Hill, reorganized under a different name, and prayed for the best.

"We had no idea whether we had any future or not," says Efrem Potts, the first president of Beth Am Congregation and its longest-tenured member.

Today, Beth Am is the largest Conservative congregation in the city, one of the few non-Orthodox synagogues with a growing membership, and a force for change in a non-Jewish neighborhood.

This weekend, it marks its 40th birthday with two days of food, klezmer music and dancing. Longtimers will share tales from the past. Its young rabbi will unveil plans for the future.

The festivities coincide with Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish holiday that begins at sundown on Tuesday. The timing is fitting.

"Hanukkah means 'rededication,' and I absolutely do think they're rededicating," says Deborah Cardin, assistant director at the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore. "It makes great sense that they'd do this on Hanukkah Sabbath."

Cardin was referring to the sixth day of Hanukkah this Saturday, when the celebration's biggest events are scheduled.

Hanukkah plays a key role both in Jewish history and in the history of Beth Am, a congregation of about 500 families affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

The holiday commemorates a triumph in the year 165 B.C., when a band of Jewish warriors having watched enemy forces ransack the Temple of Jerusalem and ban their faith recaptured the place and rededicated it as a house of worship.

See more here:

Forty years later, an urban synagogue celebrates its birth

Category: Synagogue
Tags: