Located on tree-lined Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts — a Boston near-suburb with a large and active Jewish population — Temple Beth Zion was founded in 1946 as a Conservative congregation by 14 families who had moved to the area from Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan and felt the need for a shul "within walking distance" of Coolidge Corner and Washington Square.
Brookline's Jewish community is nearly one hundred years old. Around 1911, enough Jews had moved westward, from Boston's older Jewish neighborhoods to Brookline's open spaces, to begin Brookline's first minyan. Many of these Jewish adventurers were moving, too, from the Orthodoxy they (or their parents) had brought from Eastern Europe, to Conservative Judaism. By the 1920s, Brookline had two synagogues: Temple Ohabei Shalom, and Congregation Kehillath Israel. By 1925, when Kehillath Israel first permitted men and women to sit together, the Conservative movement was clearly gaining followers, and speed. These two temples would be the forerunners of a Jewish population in Brookline which would grown to nearly 25,000 people by the late 1950s. Many of these Jews would have described themselves as Conservative, or were growing toward Conservative Judaism.
Thus, when Temple Beth Zion dedicated its new building (red brick, built in the Greek Revival style, with four white pillars across the front portico) in 1948, it was joining the mainstream of Brookline's Conservative-minded Jewish community.
According to TBZ member and area historian Michael Alan Ross (author of The Jewish Friendship Trail Guidebook to Boston Area Jewish Historic Sites), "to meet the needs of these Jews, all sorts of community and private resources evolved — ten synagogues, including the original first two; numerous Hebrew schools; Jewish Sunday schools; several Talmud Torah; a Hebrew college; a Jewish community center (albeit, across the line in Brighton's Cleveland Circle for many years); and a retail area on Harvard Street" featuring Jewish shops such as Irving's Candy Store, Max's & Girsh's Sunnyside Foods, the original Rubin's Deli, Hecht's Drug Store, and Bluestein's Market.
Our Jewish world — at least, the vibrant community which stretched from Kenmore Square to Cleveland Circle — continued to change. Like much of America in the 1960s and 1970s, Brookline's Jewish community was becoming. . . less conservative — except at Temple Beth Zion.
Despite progressive voices within the congregation, including that of former shul president Gabe Belt, the Conservative movement's haltingly slow but inexorable inclusion of women in shul life was vehemently opposed by the Temple's rabbi, who refused to allow women on the Bimah.
Eventually, Gabe convinced the rabbi to allow women to lead carefully-selected readings. This "progressive" step was too much for some members, and too little for others. For the shul's aging population, there were other, more permissive (or less permissive) synagogues to join — in the far-off suburbs ("nearer to the grandkids"), or in sunny, snowless Florida. Those who remained in Brookline could choose from many places to pray, and many chose elsewhere. Temple Beth Zion's original appeal — "within walking distance" of Coolidge Corner and Washington Square — was less important to Jews who, somehow, got used to the idea of driving on Shabbat.
Fifty years after its founding, many of Temple Beth Zion's members had moved away, or died. By the late 1990s, Temple Beth Zion was nearly gone, too.
And then, something remarkable happened in TBZ's corner of Our Jewish World. . . .
