Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
Faye Shapiro is president of Congregation Beth El in Voorhees, New Jersey, a synagogue that her family first joined when she was just three years old. Despite her family moving away when she was 22, she quickly found her way back. Congregation Beth El just called to her.
“I moved back here with my husband around when I was 26, and we’ve pretty much been members ever since we got active young families,” she said.
Her kids joined the early childhood center at the shul, and that helped develop relationships that Shapiro still treasures.
“We really met our closest, dearest group of friends that we’re still friendly with now. We still get together for Shabbos dinners and for everybody’s bar and bat mitzvahs,” she said. “Now we’re starting to get into weddings.”
Beth El has been around for more than a hundred years, and membership has been steady for the last few years. The synagogue did not take a hit during and after the pandemic, with the total number of congregants virtually the same today as it was in 2019. While Beth El has moved around a few times over the course of its history, what matters is the spirit of the synagogue, and that has not changed, said Rabbi David Englander.
“We are an intergenerational community, with participants from infants to centenarians and everyone in between. We are committed to vibrant and uplifting Shabbat and holiday services, twice-daily minyan and Jewish education for all,” he said. “We are inclusive, welcoming and have a longstanding commitment to diversity, including being known for our affinity groups for Jews of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and LGBTQ engagement as well.”
The synagogue considers the different needs of its congregants and adjusts accordingly. As a Conservative synagogue, Beth El was not always egalitarian. When that switch was made, the needs of the old and new were met.
“In an effort to accommodate members who were not exactly in favor of egalitarianism, we kept a traditional service until we moved into our new building in 2009,” Shapiro said. “We kept a traditional service, for those who were not comfortable with egalitarianism but [it was] over by the time we moved here.”
Shapiro said a formative moment for her at the synagogue was seeing a woman cantor play on the bimah for the first time.
“When we hired a female cantor, her first year here, she taught a class on how to read Torah, which I took because as a child, girls were not allowed to read from the Torah here,” she said.
She has been an avid Torah reader ever since, and began tutoring b’nai mitzvah students soon after.
Shapiro and Englander said that Beth El is continuing to move in the right direction thanks to the work of congregants. Recently, they operated a campaign to raise funds to pay off the mortgage on the building.
“Hopefully I will hand off Beth El in the same way it was offered to me to steward for a while – strong and vibrant on a beautiful campus, and even more financially secure now that our mortgage is retired after a recently completed successful campaign,” Englander said.
Part of what has helped Beth El over the years is its willingness to change. For one, the congregation hasn’t been afraid to uproot itself and move.
The synagogue started in Camden and then moved to the west side of Cherry Hill. From there, it moved to the east side.
“That’s essentially where we are now,” Shapiro said. “[The moves were] really just due to the demographics of the area and where most of our members lived at the time and still do.”
In 2008, the congregation added the building it is in now, finalizing the space on Main Street in Voorhees. But while the community has been open to change, it has also maintained stability.
“I’ll never forget at the end of my final interview [being told], ‘Rabbi, we would like to offer you the opportunity to be just Beth El’s fourth senior rabbi since World War II,’” Englander said. “That put things in perspective for me! And I was deeply honored to accept.”
