AS NATIONAL RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENT DECLINES, CHICAGO-AREA SYNAGOGUE MOTIVATES 200 PEOPLE TO READ TORAH

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill., Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Chanting from the Torah scroll, a ritual observed three times a week in synagogues around the world, can be daunting. The Hebrew words cascade across the scroll with no vowels, punctuation or musical notation. The obligation is typically fulfilled by a paid reader or by a small number of well-trained volunteer congregants.

North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, a Conservative synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois, has taken a different path. At a time when just one in five Jews attend synagogue monthly and many Conservative and Reform temples have closed, its Team Torah committee radically expanded its community’s involvement.

Beth El’s first “Back-to-Shul Challenge: Everyone Reads Torah!” launched in fall 2021, post-COVID-19, with a “stretch” goal of 100 Torah readers during the Jewish year. It met that goal after just six months. As the current Jewish year, the program’s third, nears its end, the synagogue is on track for more than 200 people to chant from the sacred scroll.

“It’s an amazing accomplishment,” said Arnold Eisen, former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a nationally recognized expert on American Judaism. “This is a project that any shul (temple) of any denomination can make its own.”

There are adult classes in trope (the Torah’s musical notation) and outreach to parents and kids years before the bar or bat mitzvah. Emblematic of Beth El’s success in motivating what is a time-consuming commitment is that readers have ranged in age from 13-year-olds celebrating their bar or bat mitzvah to a 98-year-old congregant celebrating the anniversary of his bar mitzvah 85 years earlier.

A Team Torah posterboard in the synagogue’s lobby overflows with stickers naming each reader. Everyone reading for the first time in the year is given a large Team Torah sugar cookie.

“The sweet token is a symbol of the goodness that’s reflected when people take the time to read Torah and thereby work to repair the world,” said Rabbi Michael Schwab, Beth El’s senior rabbi.

Added Eisen, “When you’re chanting the Torah, as Jews have done for generations, you take part in a ritual more than 2,000 years old, and the Torah magically becomes part of you.”

Video of 98-year-old congregant Eli Krumbein practicing his Torah reading with Ritual Director, Hazzan Jenna Greenberg, here.

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SOURCE North Suburban Synagogue Beth El