Pioneering synagogues celebrate golden anniversary

Fifty years ago, a group of pioneering Jews banded together in the Conejo Valley, establishing the area’s first Conservative synagogue.

That same year, a group of deaf Jews and their families around the Los Angeles area decided they would not allow silence to silence their prayers.

The result was two congregations founded in 1960, both of which are celebrating their golden anniversary this month.

Festivities for Temple Etz Chaim (TEC) in Thousand Oaks take place Oct. 22. Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf, which meets in Northridge and calls itself the world’s first synagogue for the deaf, will mark the occasion on Oct. 24.

TBS’ story goes back to the 1950s, when members of the local Jewish deaf community dreamed of their own synagogue to accommodate their unique needs. Back then, trying to participate at services proved difficult for people like Bess Hyman, 91, a TBS member who has been profoundly deaf for more than 70 years.

“I stood up long after everyone else sat down. I could no longer follow the service,” she said.

At the same time, a woman named Rose Zucker was having troubling finding a way to provide her deaf daughter with a Jewish education. Eventually she met Rabbi Solomon Kleinman, then the regional director of what is now the Union for Reform Judaism, and it was with his help that the Reform temple — named in his honor — was formed. Its first Shabbat service took place June 10, 1960, at Temple Israel of Hollywood.

The synagogue offers an unorthodox worship experience, and not only because prayers are conveyed aloud and in sign language. There’s little Hebrew and no singing except during the High Holy Days.

“Because everything is translated to sign language and because so much of it is in English, it means that it’s much easier to access what we’re saying and understand it. In that sense, I think it’s very meaningful and very spiritual,” said current Rabbi Deborah Goldmann, who is partially deaf.

Other aspects of Judaism present unique challenges to a hearing-impaired congregation.

“The mitzvah for blowing the shofar is to hear the shofar, so how do you handle that?” said Rabbi Alan Henkin, who served at TBS between 1980 and 1990. Solutions varied, from inventing signs for the sounds of the ram’s horn’s notes to holding balloons that picked up its vibrations.

The important thing is that deaf Jews finally had their own house of worship.

“I had no Jewish life to speak of until I joined TBS,” president Joseph Slotnick said.

The temple — proud to be of the deaf, not for the deaf — once had more than 250 individual members and its own building in Arleta. Since selling the property 10 years ago, it has met at Temple Judea in Tarzana and, more recently, at Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, where Kleinman is rabbi emeritus.

Services take place twice a month, and social events are held weekly. That’s key because the temple’s social role has been just as essential as its religious one. Over the years, people gathered to play cards, watch captioned movies and have panel discussions.

One question is what the next 50 years will bring to the aging congregation of 70 members. At the time of TBS’ founding, there were no accommodations for the deaf, but that’s no longer the case.

“The whole face of deafness has changed tremendously in this last 50 years, especially with technology,” said Jan Seeley, temple administrator and interpreter.

No matter what happens, charter member Adele Podolsky said nothing can undo the synagogue’s most important accomplishment: forming lasting friendships and creating unity among the small, Jewish deaf community.

That same need for community is what brought together in 1960 some of the first Jews to move to the Conejo Valley. At the time, Thousand Oaks was just starting to be developed, and the Jewish population there was small.

“As new families moved in, we started looking for each other,” said Dolores LeVine, a charter member of Temple Etz Chaim who now lives in Northridge. “We all had young children, and we all had children who needed religious background — and where were we going to go? The commitment was to build something, to contact all people who had a Jewish name.”

According to Mark Cher, a longtime member who compiled a short history of Etz Chaim, someone took out an ad in the local paper seeking other interested Jews. At first there were only a dozen or so families involved, and services took place in a garage. The religious school met in the waiting room of a local doctor.

“Nobody ever missed Friday night services because if you missed, you wouldn’t have a minyan,” LeVine said.

But she didn’t consider it a hardship.

“It was a wonderful feeling of community,” she said. “You came to services not only for the spiritual guidance but to see your neighbors, to find out how everybody was.”

Modern Etz Chaim leaders speak of how enthusiastic, egalitarian and haimish the Conservative shul continues to be. But in other ways, it’s hard to compare the current congregation to the one back then.

Today it is a center of Jewish life that boasts more than 500 families, and instead of meeting in a garage or local church, its three-building campus is large enough to host programs for preschoolers, adults and everyone in between. The Conejo Jewish Day School began renting space there this summer as well.

“It’s become a full-faceted temple where there’s something for everybody,” said Larry Slomowitz, vice president of buildings and grounds.

All of this takes money, and despite past financial challenges and the current economy, President Nanci Cooper said Etz Chaim is on firm financial footing. To make sure it stays that way, the congregation is creating a long-term endowment fund.

Of course, Rabbi Richard Spiegel knows there’s more to a successful congregation than just a beautiful campus and an expanded membership roster — although he’s proud of both. It needs to be engaging and vibrant, and his deepest hope as Etz Chaim turns 50 is that it stays that way.

“My prayer,” he said, “is that we as a temple can really do our part to reach out to our members and our community and provide them with the insight and wisdom of our Jewish heritage and Jewish tradition.”