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September 27, 2002/Tishri 21 5763, Vol. 55, No. 5
Finding a promised land
Individuals spur Jewish communal growth in rural New England
ANDREW MUCHIN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Staff, including Moishe Mendelovicii, right, gather in front of the Arlington Hotel in Bethlehem, N.H., a vacation destination for New York Hasidim. The little boy is part of the Strulovitz family that owns the hotel.
Photo by Andy Muchin/JTA
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Judi Wisch found almost everything she wanted - natural beauty, a relaxed pace and an interesting job at the Interlocken International Summer Camp - when she moved to rural New Hampshire in 1990.
All that was missing was the Jewish life she had grown accustomed to after five years in Philadelphia and eight years in Israel.
"I kind of looked around for the alternative Jewish community," she recalls. "It didn't exist."
So Wisch tried to create her own, forming a havurah (social group) that met to play music.
"It ended up being a Shabbat and holiday potluck for 12 years," she says.
Wisch trained the group's children for their bar and bat mitzvahs and led the services, held outdoors. She subsequently founded a Jewish family educational program in Peterborough, N.H., and now directs a Jewish supplementary school in Northampton, Mass., her new home.
Wisch isn't the only one creating Jewish community in the pristine landscape beyond Boston. Soon after arriving in New Hampshire, she discovered her kindred spirits at a Sukkot retreat sponsored by the Conference for Judaism in Rural New England.
"I joined the board right away," she says. "When you live out in the woods and you feel very Jewish and there was no Jewish community. This gave me a way to affiliate."
Wisch served a stint as executive director of the 19-year-old conference, a catalyst and resource for Jewish learning and community building in the one region of the United States where small-town Judaism is growing.
When CJRNE started, "there weren't the 30 rabbis, there weren't half the synagogues, (and) there weren't half the Jewish communities there are today," Wisch says. "It's kind of a maturing area."
Since Plymouth Rock's heyday, New England has attracted individualists who nevertheless organize themselves religiously. That's the template for the region's recent upsurge in Jewish life.
"In the '60s, Jewish flower children, Jewish New Yorkers, came up to Vermont in search of land, God, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," says Hinda Miller of Burlington, Vt.
The co-inventor of the Jogbra, a women's athletic garment, Miller now is producing "Echoes, Chants and Lullabies," a documentary on the inner lives of Vermont Jews.
Wisch takes Miller's point one step further.
"People who had moved up here and now have children are being pulled back to Judaism," she says. "It happens in places where there are no synagogues. People come together and start little schools."
It happens even in towns that already have a synagogue. Beth and David Strassler moved to Arundel, Maine, 20 years ago so that Beth could teach occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire.
The couple attended volunteer-led High Holiday services at Congregation Etz Chaim in nearby Biddeford for several years. When their son Joseph was born in 1984, he accompanied his parents to shul.
"It became very obvious to us that he was the only child at the service," recalls David Strassler, a physician. "We started to wonder, is this going to be OK?"
The Strasslers checked the Reform and Conservative congregations in Portland, Maine, a 45-minute drive away. But they didn't want to shlep that far, and resolved to provide Jewish services for children in Biddeford.
"We decided to have a Sunday school once a month. We had five or six families we knew who were interested," David Strassler says. "We coordinated it, revolving it around the Jewish holidays. At the same time, another woman wanted to get a Hebrew school going. It met for an hour and a half, once a week."
The schools merged to form York County Community Hebrew School. David Strassler began to teach Hebrew, in addition to teaching about Jewish holidays.
A decade ago, the Strasslers hosted a Hanukkah party that included 25 young Jewish families.
"Almost all of them were transplants, most of them were in mixed marriages, many of them had escaped Boston and New York," David Strassler says. "They were very much interested in their Judaism."
The Strasslers also invited "the older group from the synagogue," many of whom had lived in the area for 50 years and were shocked to see so many young local Jews.
"After that Hanukkah party the elders of the synagogue said, 'What can we do for you?' " David Strassler recalls.
Etz Chaim now funds some of the school's activities. Beth works part-time as Jewish community director, serving as co-principal and a teacher at the school, coordinating bar and bat mitzvah training and editing a newsletter.
The collaboration has been good for Etz Chaim, too. The High Holiday services have gradually grown from 25 people to 100-125 people, says David Strassler, who runs a family service for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that attracts about 60 people.
"If I had lived in Boston, New York or Long Island, I would never had found this passion," he says. "I would have sat back and probably been a High Holiday Jew."
Rabbis, too, are blazing new educational trails in rural New England. Rabbi Tobi Weissman moved to Montpelier, Vermont's capital, in 1993. She served on the CJRNE board of directors and taught and led services at local Congregation Beth Jacob.
Looking to provide intensive study of Jewish texts for adults, she founded the Yearning for Learning Center for Jewish Studies Inc., two years ago. The center's first five-day program, held at Beth Jacob, attracted people from Maine, New Hampshire and Montreal.
Weissman hopes to expand the center's programming outside of Montpelier, where it's housed at Beth Jacob. Meanwhile, she's helping to arrange visits by Rabbi Sholom Brodt, head of the Jerusalem-based Rural Community Beit Midrash Project.
Brodt, a former Montreal resident, is as likely to quote the neo-Hasidic Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach as the more traditional Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.
Over the past two years, he has taught in 16 communities in the eastern and western United States. In sessions of three to five days, he covers Talmud, Hasidism, Torah, meditation and prayer.
The Beit Midrash Project grew out of Brodt's teaching at CJRNE's summer conferences. At this year's conference, Brodt was one of a group of rabbis and educators who taught two dozen classes on subjects as diverse as Qigong healing, Hebrew calligraphy, canoeing, Jewish-Muslim dialogue, Torah chanting and parent-child Torah study.
Just as important for the 225 participants was a sense of Jewish belonging often absent in communities just this side of Eckvelt - Yiddish for the boondocks.
Judi Forman, a recent transplant to Lebanon, N.H., remarks that she hasn't found her Jewish niche there. She came to her first conference this summer, she says, because "it's really important to me to belong to a community."
Dolores Luber of Stowe, Vt., led a Shabbat morning discussion on humanistic Judaism at the conference. This Jewish approach is a recent discovery for her that she says finally offers her a fulfilling Jewish niche.
As her group of 10 spoke of the pros and cons of believing in God, the noise of boisterous drumming from the Jewish Renewal Shabbat morning service wafted down the hall. The group of 50 or 60 drummers, singers, dancers and chanters was the largest of the five minyans at the conference, which covered the Jewish gamut.
Ideas also are exchanged. When the Strasslers attended their first CJRNE summer conference 15 years ago, David Strassler recalls, "We met these people who were doing" what we wanted to do.
"Every year we're going, we're picking people's brains, we're getting more out of it," he says. "Now when we go, people pick our brains.''
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