Located on tree-lined Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts — part of Greater Boston and home to a vibrant, diverse Jewish community — today’s Temple Beth Zion would be barely recognizable to its founders. The building, a red brick Greek Revival with white pillars across the front portico, looks much the same now as it did in the last century. And we draw upon the same chesed and gevurah that surely inspired and sustained our ancestors. But who we are and how we observe have, like the world, changed.
Temple Beth Zion was founded in 1946 by 14 families who moved to the Washington Square area from Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. During that first year, High Holiday services were held at a nearby funeral home. The second year, they were held in the still-under-construction new building. As Gabe Belt, a teenager at the time, recalled: “The Temple had no roof, only walls, and there was canvas stretched across what would be the ceiling. Heat was pumped in by a heating company that had also donated the tent-like roof. The Holidays were late that year and it was cold. We sat through the services with our coats on.” (qtd in Koleinu 2001, by Judy Wurtman)
It wasn’t that there was nowhere else to daven in Brookline, which by then had been home to a thriving Jewish community for some three decades. Neither was the new shul promising to offer an alternative form of worship. At its founding, Temple Beth Zion, joined the mainstream of Brookline’s Conservative-minded Jewish community. The impetus was mostly geographic: as Jewish families spread further into Brookline, they felt the need for a new shul within walking distance.
The area teemed with Jewish life. There were synagogues, Hebrew schools, a Jewish community center, and such shops as Irving’s Candy Store, Max’s & Girsh’s Sunnyside Foods, Rubin’s Deli, Hecht’s Drug Store, and Bluestein’s Market. But even as the Jewish community flourished, it was changing. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Brookline’s Jews – like much of America – were growing less conservative. Except at Temple Beth Zion.
Despite progressive voices within its own membership, Temple Beth Zion refused to allow women on the bimah. Girls, though permitted to have a Bat Mitzvah, were barred from reading from the Torah. Eventually the rabbi was persuaded to allow women to play a role in services, albeit a marginalized one.
Such change was too little for some members, too much for others. Many of the shul’s aging population gravitated to other, more permissive (or less permissive) synagogues, whether in the 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: a shul within walking distance had become less important to Jews who, somehow, had gotten used to the idea of driving on Shabbat.
Fifty years after its founding, the once-vibrant congregation was in decline. By the late 1990s, membership had dwindled to approximately 50, a mere 12-15 of whom were active. If Temple Beth Zion was going to survive, it would require bold transformation, ushered in by an unconventional spiritual leader: Moshe Waldoks. In 1997, after careers as an academic, humorist, story-teller, lecturer, television producer and editor, Reb Moshe became TBZ’s new rabbi, introducing a banquet of novel offerings: meditation, liturgical experimentation, question-and-answer periods, dyadic prayer and English davening. Within three years, membership had grown nearly tenfold. Within a decade, we needed to bring on an additional rabbi.
Claudia Kreiman joined our community as Assistant Rabbi in 2007. Rav Claudia grew up in Chile and lived in Argentina and Israel before eventually moving to Boston. Her guiding passions – social justice, working with young people, and incorporating music into spiritual life – have all flourished at TBZ in the years since her arrival, along with the diversity of our membership.
In 2017, Noah Weinberg brought our community Shabbat Nariyah, an ecstatically spiritual, musical experience embraced by members of all ages. Two years later, we celebrated Rav Claudia’s installation as Senior Rabbi and gave thanks for Reb Moshe’s continuing vitality as he transitioned to Founding Rabbi. That same year, Rav Tiferet Berenbaum arrived in the role of Rabbi, Congregational Learning and Programming. All the while, working shoulder to shoulder with the interfaith community, we have broadened our engagement with tikkun olam, working for racial, climate, housing, and gender justice; justice for immigrants and refugees, and for members of the LGBTQ population. We have made changes to our building, both large and small, making it more accessible, inclusive and environmentally responsible.
Today our membership ranges from nonagenarians to little children to newly expectant mothers and fathers to singles and families of many different constellations. All that made TBZ so special upon its reimagining in the late 1990s – regular opportunities for contemplation and meditation, lively weekly Torah study sessions, a rich and eclectic rotation of free classes – is still going strong. Our identity is enriched by every individual coming through our doors: young members who fall in love and have babies, solo parents and people following single-life paths, newcomers to this land, people of all ability types, interfaith couples and families, Jews by choice, Jews of color, questioners of all kinds. Each new member teaches us more about who we are, what we have to learn and what we have to offer. We embrace our diversity while celebrating what unites us: we are spiritual seekers.