Rabbis Seek Out Unaffiliated for Holiday Services

Rabbis who minister to the unaffiliated sometimes face challenges that ordinary synagogues take in stride.

“I just realized today I’ve got to order yarmulkes (skullcaps),” Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz said one day last week as he pondered the problems of putting on a Jewish New Year service at the Bel Age, an art-filled hotel in West Hollywood.

Schwartz, who broke away from the Chabad organization of Hasidic Jews last year, is one of a handful of more or less independent rabbis who are staging special Rosh Hashanah services on the Westside this year.

Their goal is to get through to those Jews, estimated to be 75% of the Los Angeles Jewish population of more than 600,000, who belong to no synagogue and have nowhere to go for the holidays.

Some of them might feel a yearning for tradition or spirituality on the New Year, which begins Wednesday evening, or at Yom Kippur, which follows 10 days later.

But unfamiliarity with the Hebrew-language prayers, the feeling of being an outsider and the economic realities of synagogue life can make it hard for the unaffiliated to find a place.

Temple membership can cost several hundred dollars per family, and even synagogues that welcome outsiders during the holidays--when every seat is full and extra services are laid on in social halls--generally charge for admission.

“There’s always the issue of, ‘How come we have to pay in order to pray?’, but the reality is that it costs an awful lot to maintain a synagogue and retain the kind of staff that a synagogue needs to respond to the legitimate needs of the congregations,” said Rabbi Lennard Thal, a spokesman for the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

“It’s the height of chutzpah to expect that a synagogue will be there, and a rabbi will be there, and I don’t have to support it,” he said.

“Synagogues are open free for everybody every week of the year (except for the High Holidays),” added Rabbi Paul Dubin, executive director of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

He said synagogues provide Hebrew schools, learner’s services and pastoral advice year-round, all paid for by the membership.

“This is a season of the year, it seems to me, that most Jews who can afford to, give a donation to a synagogue,” Dubin said. “They shouldn’t be so angry that they’re asked to defray the cost of that service.”

But Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein, who runs an outreach program for Yeshiva University of Los Angeles, an Orthodox institution, said these arguments will not bring in those people who stay away.

“It’s not the fault of most American Jews that they don’t know the value of their Judaism. It just wasn’t made available to them,” Adlerstein said.

Adlerstein is the co-sponsor of a service that will be held at Yeshiva’s girls’ school on Robertson Boulevard, under the supervision of Rabbi Les Fried.

At regular synagogues, Fried said, “people for many years feel on the outside. At a service like this, everybody is on the outside and everybody is a beginner.”

While the standard High Holy Day prayers can last from early morning well into the afternoon, Fried said his version will last only two hours, “because there’s a limit to how far people will stretch their minds on one day.”

At Congregation Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills, Rabbi Joshua Berkowitz said the learner’s minyan, or prayer group, expects more than 200 people at its free service, which includes all the required prayers but also provides explanations and readings in English.

Although word of the learner’s minyan has spread by word of mouth, the synagogue also takes out advertisements to try to bring people in, he said, and many of them are interested enough to come back during the year.

“This dispels the notion that we’re the old-fashioned Eastern European Jew from the shtetl (village),” he said. “Some people are flabbergasted.”

Free services will also be held at B’nai David-Judea, an Orthodox congregation in the Pico-Robertson District, where Rabbi Yale Butler, publisher of the B’nai B’rith Messenger, will be running the “Ground Floor” session for the unaffiliated.

“He will go through the whole service, but the floor will be open for people to raise their hands and ask questions, so they can begin to understand what’s going on,” said Simcha Weinberg, the congregation’s chief rabbi.

The Chabad Hasidic organization is also providing free High Holiday services at several of its locations.

“There’s an inner stirring in the Jew that his address should be in a Jewish place of worship on the High Holidays, but he cannot pray in the overwhelming number of Establishment synagogues. He simply doesn’t know his way around,” said Jack Simcha Cohen, president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

Cohen, rabbi of Congregation Shaarei Tfila, an Orthodox synagogue in the Fairfax District, said that although many congregations are attracting new members, “a wider group is becoming more secular and less involved with religious activity altogether.”

Of the maverick rabbis, Tfila said: “There is a need, and they’re meeting it.”