D’var Torah: On Synagogue Membership for Non-Jews

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 7 October 2022

On 20 May 2004, something amazing happened.

At their Annual General Meeting, the membership of North Western Reform Synagogue – better known as Alyth – voted in favour of an amendment to the synagogue’s then constitution.

 

So far, I grant you, not so amazing.

But the content of the amendment was truly very significant.

They voted to add what was then known as Rule 13a – that, for payment of a fee, non-Jewish family members could become associates of the synagogue.

 

Alyth became one of the first – if not the first – Reform synagogue outside of America to have a structure by which dual heritage households were formally recognised in the constitution.  Rule 13a and its successors in two subsequent constitutions created a formal way by which non-Jews could be involved and invested in the life of community.

When I joined Alyth four years later, this was such an established part of our communal life that I didn’t give it a great deal of thought.
We currently have in our community about 100 adults who are non-Jewish members of a Jewish household – about 1 in 25 of our adult membership.

 

I took this for granted until last week, when the decision of a different Reform synagogue to do the same warranted a page in the Jewish Chronicle, and a follow up article in The Times.  The article made it sound like this was a first – so when a member phoned to ask whether Alyth would be doing such a thing, I didn’t have the heart to explain that this conversation had happened here over 18 years ago.

 

Looking back at the notes of that AGM, what is remarkable is that it feels like it was uncontroversial.
The questions raised by members were practical ones – not whether, but how it would work. This was many years before we were able to bury dual heritage couples together, before we could officiate at dual heritage ceremonies of celebration, and 13 years before the changes to our status policies for inherited status – so Alyth was in some ways ahead of its time – most of these areas of discussion have been resolved in the period since.

Interestingly, the minutes state that in case of death for a dual heritage couple ‘prayers could be arranged in synagogue, and the couple buried jointly in a municipal plot’.  The concern, even eighteen years ago, was where this could happen – as the JJBS did not then have an area where it could be done – not whether. The idea that we should accompany dual heritage households through their full life journey was obvious.

 

I can find no evidence that anyone challenged the principle that non-Jews should be formally included and financially invested in communal life. The member who led on the changes told me yesterday that he remembers it going through without real objections.

 

Yet we should not take that lack of controversy 18 years ago for granted.
Because this is not the case even across Reform communities in the UK, as we discovered last week.
And, when Rabbi Jordan Helfmann shared the change in his community, some of the responses from individuals in other parts of the Jewish world were deeply unpleasant – this openness, this inclusivity is not, alas, the norm.

 

So we should, this evening, just take a moment to be proud.
That this community was one of the first – long before me, under the leadership of then Senior Rabbi Charles Emanuel – to acknowledge the importance of truly welcoming dual heritage families.

That ours is a community that privileges creating Jewish meaning and creating Jewish homes, rather than obsessing about the status of the people in them.

That Alyth is a community that truly honours the Jewish ideal, expressed in the Book of Isaiah, that “my house should be a house of prayer for all peoples”.