West Virginia Jews: Few, But Lively In Faith

BECKLEY, W.Va. - The snow outside Temple Beth El was knee-deep, but the two dozen Jews who gathered recently for a Friday-night service didn't bother to heat the building. They use it only once a month.

They sang and prayed in Hebrew and English, reading from photocopies of a prayer book they are thinking of buying. Purchases are not made lightly when a congregation has just 30 members and each visit from a student rabbi costs $500.

This week they will gather at home instead of at the temple, celebrating the eight days of Passover with elaborate seder feasts. The holiday marks spiritual freedom, as well as God's delivery of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.

"This is a time when they really take possession of their Judaism in their individual families," says student rabbi Margot Crowson. "It's one of the few times of the year they all feel confident in their own ability to express their Judaism. They realize they don't need me."

Passover is also a time for Jews to actively embrace their faith instead of taking it for granted, says Crowson, a student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati who travels an eight-hour round trip from her home in Georgetown, Ky., to lead monthly services.

"But in small communities like Beckley, every Friday night that they do something for shabbat, every time they bring in a student rabbi, they are doing something. They are not taking it for granted," she says.

"It's a miracle this place exists," Crowson marvels. "Ordinarily, in any congregation there is a core group that does things. Here, the core group is exhausted because they're all it. There is nobody to pinch-hit."

Relying on student rabbis

Across the nation, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations says, about 500 Jewish communities too small to support full-time clergy rely on student rabbis like Crowson for guidance. And while many of those communities have stabilized, some in West Virginia are being lost to history.

In the 1930s, more than 7,000 Jews lived in West Virginia. Today, just 2,000 remain in a state of 1.8 million - an overwhelmingly Christian, Bible Belt state.

Jews helped develop the state's economy, arriving as pack peddlers and setting up shops in coal-camp towns in the early 1900s. They flourished for a half-century until the mines were mechanized and jobs were lost. Then people left in droves for easier, more lucrative work in other states.

Unlike other Appalachian states, though, West Virginia had no big cities where Jews could migrate. Its two largest cities, Charleston and Huntington, have populations of about 60,000. The Jewish communities, small to begin with, were hard-hit by the exodus, which continued in the 1980s when the coal industry fell on hard times. And still the numbers dwindle.

Just last month, remnants of a Fairmont congregation left their quarters in a hotel basement to merge with Morgantown's Tree of Life, leaving the state with just nine active congregations. There are two in Charleston and one each in Wheeling, Huntington, Williamson, Bluefield, Beckley, Parkersburg and Morgantown.

Rabbi Julie Spitzer, now director of the Greater New York Council of Reform Synagogue, once led the Williamson congregation, driving five hours each way to get there from Hebrew Union.

"There's a wonderful spirit that you might think would be beaten down with so many seeming hardships - maintaining the community both financially and in terms of numbers," she says. "In spite of all of that, there really is a commitment. It's much harder to find in a large city, where you can take a Jewish community for granted, where you can choose to belong or not belong."

100 churches, 1 temple

In Beckley, a town of about 20,000, the Yellow Pages list more than 100 churches - and one temple.

Crowson conducts her services largely in English, reserving Hebrew for most of the songs and about half of the prayers. "In Hebrew, the sound of it makes them feel part of something," she explains. "In English, they do more than feel. They understand what they're saying, and they're connected."

Rabbi Julie Schwartz, who oversees Hebrew Union's student-rabbi program, says students like Crowson travel to their congregations every other weekend for a stipend of about $350. An additional $150, covers travel expenses.

"They cram a lot into a weekend," Schwartz says. They attend shabbat dinners and services on Fridays and havdallah suppers welcoming the new week on Saturdays. They run Hebrew lessons for children and religion classes for adults. They visit shut-ins.

"It's painful for students to leave," she says. "You do fall in love."

Assigned to Beckley, Crowson heard it was a dying congregation. "But I don't believe it's dying. Yet. And don't think it's going to die anytime in the foreseeable future," she says. "It's not dedication to Judaism; it's dedication to the community."

Joe Golden has lived in Beckley for more than 20 years. "There are stages in the vibrancy of this temple," he says. "It's not a battle. It's a rebirth."

The congregation found new vitality when some of its younger members began classes for children in 1991. Student rabbis were brought in around 1993.

"Just as it dwindles down, there's this sudden influx of people," agrees Stan Selden, a lifelong member. "They're just here. . . . If you have one person who seems to be the only one who can do something and then he disappears, someone else always steps in."

Selden grew up listening to Rabbi Isadore Wein, now retired to Florida, and has had to adjust to the student rabbis. "I got used to a set way of doing things," Selden says. "The student rabbis changed all that. They make you think about the meaning as opposed to just the environment."

Tom Sopher, whose family helped found Temple Beth El, says services were limited to two or three times a year before student rabbis came. Now, there are 10 a year. Still, there are some Jews in Beckley who don't attend.

"They're like Christians who think they don't have to go to church every Sunday," he says. "If you don't go to temple for 10 years, you're still Jewish. They say `It'll be there.' Where's it going?"

Even in the face of apathy and adversity, some communities thrive. In Charleston, the conservative B'nai Jacob synagogue is booming with 240 families, and the B'nai Israel temple has 145.

Outreach is crucial

Rabbi Victor Urecki, who leads B'nai Jacob, says the number of children attending Sunday school has doubled to more than 70 since he arrived in 1986, largely because of outreach to interfaith couples.

That outreach is critical to the survival of West Virginia's remaining Jewish communities, he says. In Beckley, for example, only one couple were born Jewish.

"If you're a larger Jewish community, you can set your own agenda. You can exclude people for whatever reason," Urecki says. "If you're too small, you don't have any numbers to play with."

Appealing to interfaith families through their children is a natural. "The Jewish spouse probably would like to raise their children in the Jewish faith. The non-Jewish spouse assumes that the Jewish community is a very cloistered, cliquish group," Urecki says. "The feeling is she would be treated as an outsider. No, we want him. We want her."

It's the young adults without children who are hard to attract. People in their 20s and 30s are looking for love, Urecki says, and rarely seek or find a Jewish spouse. Often, they leave the state.

Michael Subit, 22, of Wheeling, would like to stay in West Virginia. He'd also like to marry a Jew. But he has dated only two Jewish women. He recently broke up with a Catholic because she wasn't willing to convert - and neither was he.

"Judaism is more a part of my life than anything else right now," he says. "I like being Jewish so much that I don't see any other way."

Jennifer Ruben, a 22-year-old senior at West Virginia University in Morgantown, is dating a Jew for the first time in her life. "I knew who all the Jewish boys were," she recalls of her teenage years, "and I knew I wasn't going to date them."

Urecki understands the dilemma and is hard-pressed to advise young people.

"My mind tells me they need to look elsewhere because the pool of people is just not there. My heart wants to keep them here," he says. "So I tell them to go on sabbatical to New York, get married to a Jew and then come back."

In small towns, he says, the Jewish experience can be more profound.

Urecki was born in Argentina, grew up in Portland, studied in New York and moved to Charleston after he married.

"I hated the oppressiveness of New York. It was too overwhelming a Jewish community," he says. "I wanted to be in a place where I could live as a Jew but be part of a community and share in their lives, the ups and downs. I know every single Jew in Charleston - and beyond, probably.

"Here, a bar mitzvah is a community event. When a child is born, it's a community event. When we do a naming for a child, the whole community comes out," Urecki says. "You don't get that in a big city."

The same is true in Beckley, where one line of a song means so much to the congregation that it often opens and closes the monthly service: "How good it is and how pleasant when we dwell together in unity."