Religion

When Inwood Hebrew Congregation closed in 2005, Jason Rosenberger was one of a half dozen members still attending its services.

 

The 71-year-old former president of the synagogue and lifelong Inwood resident said as its older population died or moved away, there were few people left for the synagogue to serve.

 

“It’s a situation that you can’t do much about,” said Rosenberger, who had been a member of the synagogue since 1936. “You just start to dwindle away.”

 

Inwood Hebrew Congregation’s story is one familiar to many synagogues in upper Manhattan—a story of a once booming membership that declines as the neighborhood changes. But while several synagogues have shut down or merged in response to dwindling numbers, today just blocks away from the now-closed Inwood congregation, some synagogues in Washington Heights say they are experiencing regeneration.

 

Jack Greene, executive director and 30-year member of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in Washington Heights, said his synagogue, though now on the rise, was not immune to membership declines that hit others in the area like Inwood Hebrew Congregation.

 

“I’ve seen the cycle of when the Jewish community was at it’s strong point and then I saw it start to lose membership,” he said. “I saw it do some soul searching and now it’s growing again.”

 

He said that his conservative congregation has attracted new members by a recent change to egalitarian services. But Greene said the increase also reflects people’s desire to move to the area for its affordable housing stock, the convenience of downtown and midtown Manhattan and access to schools.

 

“It’s been that kind of magnet area,” he said. “In the past 10 years this area has been rediscovered by young families.”

 

He said if the Inwood congregation had been able to hold on longer, it might have benefited from parallel developments. “The change to co-op residences [in Inwood] is following what happened here in the Heights,” he said. “It may be that if [the synagogue] had stayed alive, it may have experienced similar growth.”

 

But Washington Heights never saw the same decline in its Jewish population as Inwood to begin with, said Rabbi Yosef Blau, a spiritual guidance counselor at Yeshiva University’s theological seminary. One of the reasons: the presence of Yeshiva, a private Jewish university in Washington Heights.

 

Blau, who was a student at Yeshiva College 50 years ago, said when he first arrived in Washington Heights, the Jewish population largely defined the neighborhood.

 

“The area from the 160s through Inwood was very Jewish,” he said. “Over the years the [Jewish] population has decreased but stayed very based in Washington Heights around Yeshiva.”

 

Blau said the neighborhood is now seeing an influx of mostly young Orthodox Jews, perhaps drawn by he neighborhood’s affordable housing. Yeshiva also has been buying buildings near its campus and encouraging students to move near the university.

 

“It’s created a young community,” he said. “We’ve seen a real reversal in the [Jewish] community, a real turnaround in the last 10 years.”

 

Inwood, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of resources for Orthodox and some conservative Jews, Blau said. A dearth of kosher bakeries and Hebrew schools have made it more difficult for Inwood to draw back its Jewish population.

 

“If people are going to stay, they’re going to stay where the resources are,” he said. “Washington Heights has all the components for Orthodox life.”

 

But Orthodox congregations are not the only ones experiencing growth. Reform synagogues, such as the Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation in Washington Heights, also have benefited from the return of the Jewish population.

 

Rabbi Scott Weiner, who has been at the synagogue at the northwest intersection of Fort Washington and 185^th Street since 2004, said this year’s Rosh Shanna services had a 15 percent higher attendance rate than last year’s. He said the increase stemmed from the changing face of the neighborhood.

 

“For us, like the rest of Washington Heights, there are pluses and minuses that come with a neighborhood in transition,” he said. “There’s been an increase in numbers and rapid change.”

 

The populations of both the synagogue and Washington Heights are seeing, along with more young families, same-sex couples and single parents, Weiner said. “It’s more heterogeneous,” he added. “We’re seeing diverse kinds of families.”

 

While synagogues on the rebound say they’ve escaped the fate of those like Inwood Hebrew Congregation, Weiner said it’s increasingly difficult to maintain synagogues because of the expense of staffing and programming while also staying current with members’ needs.

 

“It’s not like a business that wants to change its look,” Weiner said. “We can’t just close the door and re-conceptualize. We keep moving, and changing the tires on a car while it’s moving is more difficult than stopping to pull it over.”