Shul with a Pool: The "Synagogue-Center" in American Jewish History (review)

Mordecai Kaplan is often thought of as the originator of the synagogue-center movement in America. Though Kaplan was indisputably a key figure in the center movement, David Kaufman amply demonstrates in this engaging and informative work that mixing secular with sacred was nothing new in America by Kaplan's day. Kaufman cites five institutions to make his point: the Reform Temple, the YMHA, the settlement house, the Jewish school, and the immigrant shul.

Kaufman credits the synagogue-center idea to Henry Berkowitz (1857-1924), a member of the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in 1883. The principal problem Berkowitz and the other early HUC graduates of his day faced was a serious drop in synagogue attendance. "Our Jewish congregations," bemoaned the American Hebrew, "have gradually surrendered their influence to the social clubs" (p. 13). Berkowitz responded, as many of his colleagues imbued with the ideals of Isaac Mayer Wise did, on two fronts: religious and secular. On the religious front Berkowitz inaugurated Friday night observances and other religious services traditionally conducted in the home. On the secular front, he initiated or encouraged programs related to physical training, education, culture, entertainment, and the like.

Berkowitz is credited with creating a synagogue umbrella organization called an "auxiliary" in the late nineteenth century to oversee non-religious activities within a congregation. This, according to Kaufman, marked the first attempt to develop a religious-social synthesis in America. The idea caught on. In less than a generation Cleveland's Temple, under the leadership of Rabbi Moses Gries, would become the first congregation in America to build its own gymnasium.

Kaufman turns next to the YMHA and the settlement house. Both institutions were created by Jews of German origin, mainly for new generations of Jews with tenuous ties to their faith. What both institutions did, Kaufman argues convincingly, was to increasingly incorporate religious activities into their programs. Thus the Y met the Temple from an opposite point to achieve, like the Temple, a socio-religious synthesis.

Beginning as cultural and literary societies in revolt against traditional definitions of Judaism, the Y movement developed institutions in the 1870s and 1880s that reached out to those whom the synagogue could not attract. The Y soon became an auxiliary pulpit for Reform and Conservative rabbis. "Not religion but literature, and not Bible but post-biblical history," observes Kaufman, "were the topics of study, though they were being taught by rabbis" (p. 68). By the 1900s holiday celebrations and Friday evening religious exercises became routine Y events. Since the home of the German-Jew, for whose children the Y was originally intended, "was no longer enlivened by Jewish tradition," Kaufman notes, "the YMHA stood ready and willing to become the center of Jewish life" (p. 75), "reflecting both an expanded responsibility and a new emphasis on religious-social integration" (p. 86).

Like the YMHA, the settlement house is depicted as a religiously unaffiliated Jewish agency interested in both Americanizing and Judaizing its members at the same time. Kaufman points to New York's Educational Alliance as "the first true Jewish center to emerge from the settlement movement" (p. 103). Under the leadership of David Blaustein, the Alliance presented a wide array of Americanizing activities under the same roof such as after-school classes in biblical history, the ethics of Judaism, and the Hebrew language. Blaustein shut down secular work on the Sabbath and introduced a "people's synagogue" featuring the fiery orator Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (p. 112).

What David Blaustein is to the settlement house, Samson Benderly, in Kaufman's view, is to Jewish education. As head of the New York Kehillah's Bureau of Jewish Education, Benderly and his "boys"--Alexander Dushkin, Isaac Berkson, Barnett Brickner, et al.--turned the Talmud Torah into a Jewish center. A disciple of Ahad Ha'am and John Dewey, who advocated providing children with social clubs and recreation along with education, Benderly...