President's Message

While on our summer vacation, Hiedi and I followed the advice I had often given my former Judaics students: when on a trip, do something related to Jewish culture and / or heritage. Pursuant to this, when our cruise ship docked in the small city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, we made our way to the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum.

We arrived at an expanded Victorian house that the museum shares with Conservative Congregation Shaarei Zedek (“Gates of Righteousness”), the only synagogue in the city of about 68,000, and one of three – none Reform - in the entire province. An excellent tour guide (a non-Jewish college student) showed us around both the museum and synagogue.  This didn’t take very long as the tiny congregation has only around 30 members. She explained how the house once belonged to the first Jewish couple in the city; we saw old photos of a downtown containing many Jewish-owned businesses (only one remains); she told us that Shaarei Zedek hasn’t had a rabbi for many years, though they continue to hold weekly lay-led services, and that the congregants have somehow managed to retain their Conservative identity over the years, even though kosher foods must be ordered from Montreal. Easily the most poignant part of the tour was when we saw the congregation’s religious school – a single classroom set up for four students.

We truly experienced a textbook example of a greatly shrunken Jewish community struggling to remain viable and relevant. It’s a somber thing to see in person. As a synagogue president, I can’t help but wonder if the Saint John Jewish community’s story contains any parallels to our own community’s present and future. Are there any signs we should take note of? What was the thinking of past rabbis and lay leaders of Shaarei Zedek as they watched their congregant base steadily decline? Could they have done something differently? It’s a scenario that raises some questions.

Clearly, any comparison of Saint John and our portion of the Metro Atlanta Jewish community can only be figurative. But, both worldwide and here in the U.S., Jewish communities and populations are stagnating at best, and declining in many instances. The example of Saint John is no anomaly; it is a trend, one we hope to avoid here.

B’Shalom and Good Yontif,

Tim Weiss