Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
Jonah Abrams is a 33-year-old husband and father who was raised in a Reconstructionist family in Elkins Park. He spent many years dedicating his professional and personal time to Judaism before one day he decided that less might be more. The year was 2014, and Abrams — who at that point went by Jonah Adams before changing his name when he married his wife — was visiting Ukraine to attend a Jewish conference.
Then, the Maidan Revolution broke out. There were protests and violence. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, more than 100 protesters were killed over the first two months of conflict. Abrams and the rest of the conference were quickly ushered out of the country as safely as they could be.
Three years later, Abrams told the story of this ordeal on the podcast “The Moth.” The South Philly resident said in an interview last week that he knew after this trip to Ukraine that it might be time for a change.
“I was just so burnt out from trying to have Judaism be both my work and my play, and I decided that I wanted it to just be my play. So I started working outside of the Jewish world,” he said. “But I also moved into Moishe House and I met my wife there.”
Since that fateful decision in Ukraine, Abrams has found that moving into a non-Jewish sphere in his 9-to-5 has allowed him to become more passionate about his culture in his own time. As mentioned, one of his first moves was to move into the Philadelphia Moishe House, which offers young Jews a place to live affordably and meet like-minded peers. There, he met his wife Danielle. The two have since started a family with the addition of their daughter, Miriam.
While Abrams may have been raised Reconstructionist, he has found a new home in what some might see as an unlikely place. At the Orthodox South Philadelphia Shtiebel, Jonah, Danielle and Miriam Abrams have found a group of people who care deeply about them.
“You might rightly ask, ‘If you’re not Orthodox, why would you go to an Orthodox synagogue?’” he said. “It’s because the people in the community are amazing. We love that the Shtiebel is both Orthodox and progressive. Men and women are separated, but there is also a nonbinary section.”
He added that the temple community is largely made up of young professionals and their children, which makes it different from a lot of houses of worship he has seen before.
“It’s mostly people our age with little kids, so we have just gotten such a sense of community. Especially since having a child, the Shtiebel has been absolutely incredible and really needed,” Abrams said.
Now, Abrams works as a project manager for Sterling Engineering, specializing in large-scale solar projects. In a quasi-professional, fully Jewish sense, Abrams is also involved with Tribe 12, a young Jewish professionals organization in the city. He had worked with the organization prior to traveling to Ukraine, meeting Danielle and becoming an engineer, but saw the chance to come back a few years ago and leapt at it.
“A friend came to me and said that he had tried to join a book club and was rejected because he was a guy,” Abrams laughed. “He casually said, ‘We should start a book club,’ but then he had a baby and got too busy. I knew that Tribe 12 was the place to go [for this].”
Abrams was initially drawn to Tribe 12 because it offers opportunities for people to be a part of the community in any way they see fit.
“Whether it be a whole big venture as a fellow or you just want to add your own little corner to the Philly Jewish community, Tribe 12 is where you go,” he said. “They’re really great at supporting and allowing you to do what works for you and your community. If this is your kind of Judaism, go do it, because Judaism is an incredibly diverse world.”
While Abrams had an interesting route to his current personal version of worship, Jewish values and traditions were always going to be a part of his life because he is deeply entrenched in the community. In fact, his family history makes him relatively notable in the close-knit Philadelphia Jewish circles, as his great-grandparents’ names are on the deed for Camp Galil in Ottsville.
“My great-grandparents owned a corner grocery store and they actually put the store up as collateral for the loan to buy the land that would become the camp,” he said.
Abrams worked various roles at the camp for much of his life and will always see it as a formative part of his Jewish identity and a place of pride for his family. He said that the values of the camp are strongly Jewish and Zionist, but that that doesn’t stop the campers and staffers from engaging in critical thinking and tough conversations.
“A lot of American Jewish institutions teach only the good things about Israel, and we talk about the controversies and how Israel is not perfect, but how we should be supporting it,” he said. “We want it to be better, not out of criticizing Israel, but out of love for Israel.”
Ultimately, Abrams knows that Judaism is not the same for everyone. With that in mind, he said, people shouldn’t be afraid to figure out what the best version is for them.
“I am involved in politics, and people used to say, ‘Oh you should work in politics,’ but I don’t want to do that because the moment it becomes my job, it isn’t fun anymore,” he said. “That was true for Judaism, but I [made a] change.”