Hurling Curses Amid The Whitefish

A tense meeting Sunday at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue revealed sharp divisions at the shul.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

There is nothing remotely community minded about the war that is gripping the Sixth Street Community Synagogue.

Tensions at the East Village Orthodox shul, which have been building between old-timers and newly recruited younger members for six months, erupted last Sunday morning at a meeting to elect new board members

The two sides hurled curses at one another in the shul basement, where a spread of whitefish salad and bagels had been laid out. At one point, someone suggested that the police be called in to restore calm. And when new member Spencer Schneider rushed into the hall urging members to vote on his yellow ballots, which touted a slate of new board members rather than the white ballots made up of more longstanding board members, he got an education in shul politics, East Village style.

“Who are you?” Schneider said when approached by a longtime member of the shul. The man replied, “I didn’t see you in shul yesterday.”

The battle for the soul of the 70-year-old Sixth Street Community illustrates just how dicey it can be to try to revitalize flagging synagogues. Longtime members feel the shul — which has seen its membership double since last spring — is being stolen out from under them by carpetbaggers, new members who don’t even live in the neighborhood and who rarely attend services. The new members say they have revived a shul that was on its last legs, and that the old-timers want to strip them of their voting rights.
“We hoped that maybe someone who lived in the community would join,” Schoenfeld said. “I’d take a lie detector test — there’s not one new member that has been here on Friday night or Saturday. Not even their leaders.”

At the center of the struggle stands Rabbi Simon Jacobson and his Meaningful Life Center. A popular and charismatic Lubavitch-born rabbi and author, Rabbi Jacobson moved the center’s headquarters to the Sixth Street Synagogue two years ago. In lieu of paying rent to the shul, he agreed to renovate the entire basement floor and pay the synagogue 30 percent of the proceeds from his programs.

Rabbi Jacobson told The Jewish Week that last spring he was approached by then-Board Chairman Matthew Pace, asking if he would encourage some of his participants to become shul members. The rest of the board was aware and in favor of a membership drive, part of which would solicit Rabbi Jacobson’s crowd as new members, according to board meeting minutes obtained by The Jewish Week.

“I said to them, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want? Because if people start becoming members, members are shareholders,’ ” Rabbi Jacobson said. “They said ‘We’re sure that’s what we want.’”

Within a few months of the initial membership drive, the synagogue population grew significantly. But for the old-timers, the effort seems to have backfired.  Continue reading…

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Lots of comments also on my article via Failed Messiah, but I have a bit of a problem with how they presented the story.