Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Thursday September 6, 2007

More synagogues opening doors for free on High Holy Days

by sue fishkoff
jta

When 63-year-old Steven Fruh was growing up in Manhattan, his parents did not belong to a synagogue. “They couldn’t afford it,” he says.

At the High Holy Days, they would buy one ticket between them, for the congregation’s overflow service in the basement.

“As a kid, I was very affected by this second-rate, third-rate thing,” he says. “That’s what I grew up with — this one ticket my parents shared, and not even in the main sanctuary.”

The only thing that’s changed since then is inflation. And as summer drew to a close, tens of thousands of unaffiliated American Jews began the yearly hunt for affordable Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services.

Tickets for those services are usually free for dues-paying members of a congregation, but can be quite expensive for non-members, if they are even available. Price is driven by demand — these are the only two times of the year that many Jews, synagogue members or not, step inside a shul. And while the extra crowd puts pressure on a synagogue’s resources, it can also be a major source of revenue.

In recent years, however, more synagogues have begun opening their doors for free on the High Holy Days.

Last year, Congregation Sinai, a small Conservative synagogue in San Jose, offered free services for the first time. The congregation president, Steve Dick, reports they took in more money than in any previous year, as many of those who attended for free made substantial donations afterward.

“People enjoyed the services and wanted to contribute,” Dick says. “Some even became members. The year before, when we charged for tickets, people felt that was their donation.”

The congregation gave away 100 tickets for this year’s services, though they were all gone as of press time.

Last-minute High Holy Days ticket-shoppers can always check out http://bayarea.planitjewish.com. While few of the events are free, many are comparatively inexpensive or priced on a sliding scale. And, as they do every year, Chabads in San Francisco, the South Bay and the East Bay, among others, are holding free High Holy Days services. (There’s a “local event finder” in which readers can enter their zip codes on www.chabad.org.)

The Orthodox Union offers a list of “beginners minyanim” for the High Holy Days on its Web site, at www.ou.org/community_services/minyan. Some are free, while others are low-cost.

Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, says the movement encourages synagogues to offer free tickets to a non-member for a year or two, in the hopes that they’ll join eventually.

Most congregations will give tickets for free to those in financial need, but the person has to ask for it, a process many find embarrassing.

Many synagogues will let young Jews in for free or at a highly reduced rate. But fewer are willing to open their doors gratis to adults beyond college age. “In the liberal movements, a lot of their economic model is built around the number of Jews that only come to synagogue three times a year,” says Golin, “so they say, ‘we have to make those days how we support ourselves financially.’”

But Brenda Barrie, executive director of Beth Shir Sholom in Santa Monica, says she doesn’t think it’s true that synagogues need the holidays to stay afloat. Last year her congregation took in $7,500 during the holidays, but that barely covered renting a hall, paying for security and providing food and drink.

Even some congregations that charge for tickets draw the line at actually turning people away. Conservative Congregation B’nai Israel in Danbury, Conn., for example, charges for tickets, but doesn’t check for them at the door.

Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a gay- and lesbian-friendly congregation in New York, has had an “open door” policy since its founding 15 years ago.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum says that for a community that has faced “so many barriers in coming to Judaism” over the years, offering free High Holy Days services “has a deeply religious meaning for us, it’s not just a strategic move.”

j. staff writer joe eskenazi contributed to this report.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.