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A Rebuilding Congregation Seeks Members, and Its Incentives Abound

By KATIE ZEZIMA

Published: August 6, 2005

MALDEN, Mass., Aug. 3 - The advertisement laid out a number of reasons why Orthodox Jews should move here and join Congregation Beth Israel: daily services, plenty of parks for children to play in, and a subway ride of only 15 minutes to Boston, five miles south.

But it was the synagogue's offer to help pay for a home that prompted Jonathan Myron, a software engineer in Woodland Hills, Calif., who spotted the advertisement on a Jewish Web site, to call the synagogue and make inquiries about moving across the country.

Trying to rebuild a once-thriving Orthodox community, Beth Israel is offering low-interest loans to people who buy a home in Malden and agree to become active members of the congregation. The loans are meant to help with down payments, at no interest the first year and 1 percent to 2 percent after that.

While no one has yet taken out a loan, the 150-member congregation has brought in three new families with its year-old advertising campaign, which also offers other incentives including tuition assistance for Jewish day schools, free transportation there and a wide array of programs and classes.

"Anyone who moves here is helping build a community," said Rabbi Yitzchak Zev Rabinowitz, who has led the congregation for eight years. "We're trying to build a vibrant, young community that follows the Orthodox tradition."

Religious bodies' use of incentives and advertising to draw people to a particular congregation or geographical area is hardly unheard of. The Archdiocese of St. Louis, for example, previously offered Roman Catholics outside the city $5,000 to put toward buying a house if they settled in one of three racially diverse neighborhoods within St. Louis. And Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said synagogues in communities including Sharon, Mass., began advertising to Jewish families years ago.

"But the Malden offer seems to be better funded and broader than others I have heard about," Professor Sarna said.

The offer was made possible because over the years the congregation's members donated generously to it. The board of directors invested the money well, said Andrew Shulman, the synagogue's program director, and Beth Israel now has a large endowment.

Low-interest home loans in particular are attractive to Orthodox families. Driving is forbidden on the Sabbath, and so congregants generally try to live within a mile of their synagogue, a circumstance that drives up demand for housing and its price.

Many Orthodox families in the Boston area live in the Brighton neighborhood or the adjacent suburb of Brookline, where kosher restaurants and Judaica stores abound. But the housing market is tight around the synagogues there, causing many families to rent tiny walk-up apartments for thousands of dollars a month. So Rabbi Rabinowitz has home prices on his side: the average price of a single-family home in Malden for the first half of this year was $350,000, compared with $1,040,000 in Brookline and $480,150 in Brighton.

The one thing Malden lacks, though, is availability of services. Kosher groceries, for instance, are hard to come by.

"We know we're more affordable, and that's the hook," Rabbi Rabinowitz said. "But you can't draw people into something that's not there, and that's why we've established so many things as a synagogue."

Additional plans for the massive synagogue, which once housed an indoor swimming pool, include an expanded children's room; a ceremonial bath, or mikvah, where the pool's showers now stand; a gym with separate hours for men and women; and additional use of the industrial kosher kitchen, which the synagogue rents to kosher caterers. There is even a room where prospective congregants from out of town can stay overnight.

Beth Israel has also built an eruv, a bounded area that expands the domain of the home, allowing certain otherwise forbidden "work," like pushing baby carriages, on the Sabbath. Beth Israel's eruv is a mile square, its borders marked by rope tied to utility poles.

Such efforts, and the congregation's warm reception, led Ellen Zagorsky-Goldberg and her husband, Sam Goldberg, to trade the cramped two-bedroom Brookline apartment where they were raising three daughters for a four-bedroom colonial-style house with a yard.

"It's really great to be in a place where every person makes a difference," said Ms. Zagorsky-Goldberg, adding, "It's a small community, but it's a really quality group of people."

Beth Israel is the center of what was once a more active Orthodox religious life in this city of 56,000, where kosher butcher stores lined what is now Route 60 and children stopped by the local bakery for onion rolls after Hebrew school.

The synagogue's membership peaked in the 1960's, when about 300 members attended weekly services.

But the congregation's children grew up, left for college and never came back to Malden, which gradually became grittier as the promise of urban renewal faded.

Now the synagogue is advertising its incentives on the Internet and in national Jewish publications. Mr. Shulman, the program director, said dozens of families from around the country had inquired.

Mr. Myron, the 28-year-old software engineer whose interest was drawn by the synagogue's offer to help pay for a home, and his wife, Andi, 33, thought for a time about leaving Southern California. Andi, who grew up in Chicago, missed the seasons. The couple visited Beth Israel last fall and liked everything about it, but, with Mr. Myron's computer programming business doing well, decided against moving now. They will re-evaluate matters in the next year, he said.

The congregation's leaders acknowledge that change will not happen overnight, and say the program is focusing on building for the long term.

"It will take time," Rabbi Rabinowitz said. "But you'll be part of a growing community. You'll be part of something beautiful."