Members of the new generation at 90-year-old Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim, last year’s alef class students receive gift siddurim, standing under a huppa spread over them by their parents.
May 29, 2008
Stephen Solomon was the president of Temple Beth El in Cranford when it merged with Temple Mekor Chayim in 1999, making him the last person to preside over the old congregation and the first to lead the new one.
Now he and his wife, Sidney, and her sister, Carla Berzon-Fink, are heading up the celebration of the congregation’s 90th anniversary.
The Solomons are one of three families at the temple with that name, all unrelated. But they might as well be family, as both Stephen and current president Bruce Solomon would have it. They say the key to the temple’s well-being is the haimish, big-family atmosphere and the members’ willingness to take on leadership roles. Hence the temple’s motto: “Warm place, cool shul.”
“This is what it has all been about — people who have taken the time out of their lives to step up and build a Jewish community,” Stephen Solomon said. “A congregation doesn’t last for 90 years unless people are willing to step up and be leaders.”
Stephen Solomon, past president of Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim, helped organize the congregation’s 90th anniversary celebration together with his wife, Sidney, and sister-in-law, Carla Berzon-Fink.
The all-day celebration at the synagogue at 338 Walnut Ave. in Cranford will take place on Sunday, June 1. It will begin with a reception at 1:30, followed by a Cantor’s Concert at 3, and go on to dinner, singing, dancing, entertainment, and a tribute to the temple’s many past presidents.
The event will be a tribute not only to the original congregation, but to the successful merger of the two congregations almost 10 years ago.
“It took two years to bring about the merger between the two congregations,” Solomon said. “I regarded it as a marriage, not a merger. It was a partnership of equals. We were trying to build a community.”
Now under the leadership of Rabbi Akiba Lubow, with Cantor Elana Cohen and director of education Tamara Ruben, the egalitarian congregation has a state-certified nursery school, a religious school that has received a “center of excellence” rating from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s education oversight body, and programs for teens, young families, and young adults, as well as Hadassah, Hazak, and many other group activities.
The congregation had its start in 1917, when 12 Jewish families from the surrounding area got together to form the Cranford-Garwood Hebrew Association. As Bruce Solomon has written, that was seven years before the Cranford Police Department force got its first motor vehicle, and two years after men in New Jersey voted against giving women the right to vote.
In 1934, the congregation became known as Temple Beth-El of Cranford and Westfield. It moved into its current premises in 1960. In 1999, the Conservative synagogue in Linden, Suburban Jewish Center — also known as Mekor Chayim — merged with the Cranford temple, and the current combined name was adopted.
Beth-El had more young families, but it was struggling to maintain numbers and income. Mekor Chayim, Stephen Solomon said, had a generally older population, but they brought with them the benefit of their experience.
In 1999, following the merger with Temple Beth-El in Cranford, Torah scrolls from Mekor Chayim in Linden were placed in the ark of the renamed Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim by, from left, Stephen Solomon, David Springer, Rabbi Gary Karlin (third from right), Elaine Myers, and Art Werschulz.
“They had a lot of fresh ideas and a different level of maturity,” Solomon said. “Also, the influx of additional resources helped flatten out the individual membership cost, and that has been a very important factor in attracting new members.”
The Walnut Avenue facility was flexible enough to allow for an expansion without needing additional building, and that meant the additional resources could go to manpower rather than construction.
“We were able to hire a full-time hazan and a full-time religious education director, and he was able to upgrade our religious school,” Solomon said.
A number of the senior members have retired and moved away, but the benefits they brought with them have continued, he said. Membership numbers have remained more or less constant, and an endowment has been established large enough to ensure the temple’s future financial security.
“You don’t want to have to keep going back to the membership asking for money,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to choose between paying to fill their gas tanks and paying for Hebrew classes. We have been able to draw on outside sourcing for revenue, so that now they don’t need to.”
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