Temple Beth Or survives, thrives
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O ver Memorial Day weekend in 1981, the idea for Temple Beth Or surfaced in a hot tub during a conversation between two Everett doctors on a work retreat in Victoria, B.C. Neither soaker knew the other was Jewish until they started talking.
Dr. Tony Roon told Dr. Reynold Karr that he hadn't been able to find a rabbi to do his son's circumcision ceremony. Roon ended up performing it himself using notes of prayers and blessings that Seattle rabbis had sent him.
Both surgeons wanted their children to have a Jewish education, but the synagogue in Everett belonged to an Orthodox congregation, and it didn't have a school.
When the doctors returned home, they made a list of all the Jewish families they knew and sent them letters. Eventually, in fall 1985, members of the group started a religious school in rented space at the Luther Child Center in Everett. They depended on volunteer teachers, some of them parents who weren't even Jewish.
They borrowed churches for Jewish holiday services, wrote a curriculum and decided in 1986 to become a Reform congregation. A few years later, they took over the synagogue of Everett's Orthodox congregation — the most conservative of three major movements of Judaism — and formed the center of a vibrant Jewish community.
Snohomish County Jews make up only a tiny fraction of the estimated 37,200 Jews in the Seattle area, according to a 2000-01 study by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.
Today, about 150 families belong to Temple Beth Or, the only temple in Snohomish County and a congregation that, like other Reform synagogues across the country, is reaching out to new members. As part of an 18th-anniversary celebration in June, the congregation will honor the members of a long-standing Orthodox congregation who set aside their differences to keep Judaism in their synagogue.
Into a new world
When Billy Sturman was 12 or 13, he rode the train from New York to join his father in Everett. It was 1919, and the blizzards were so bad the train windows iced over. Outside Chicago, his mother said, "Billy, where Dad lives, we're going to all freeze to death," Sturman recalled in a 1985 interview for a Washington State Jewish Historical Society program.
But when the Polish immigrants got to Everett, they found "a new world," he said. "It's summer; the sun was out; the trees were blooming; the grass was green, just like coming into a new world from the mountains."
They found a faithful Jewish community and joined the Montefiore congregation of Orthodox Jews, which built a synagogue on Lombard Avenue in 1926.
A hired rabbi led services on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The rest of the time, a member of the congregation taught Sturman and his peers to write letters in Yiddish and read the religious literature of the Torah.
They formed a community, opened shops, got married. There was no kosher butcher in Everett, so they ordered kosher meat from Seattle and had it delivered once a week on the Interurban trolley.
"We had 40, 50 families," said Sturman, who died in 2002 at age 95. "The synagogue used to be packed. In fact, we had to bring in extra chairs because more people came."
The congregation built a dance hall out the back of their synagogue, and in the 1930s, it held dances on the weekends as fund-raisers. Though it never had a permanent rabbi, visiting rabbis came for religious holidays to lead services at the synagogue.
But over time, the group dwindled. Younger generations grew up and moved. Death eventually claimed the older members, but Sturman remained "the heart of the synagogue," Roon said. He kept Torah scrolls at his house to protect them and let visiting rabbis stay in his extra bedroom.
By 1985, when Sturman was interviewed, he was distressed by the size of the congregation.
"Somehow lately, we can't bring up the Jewish crowd we used to have," he told his interviewer. "I don't feel really good about that. I'm really depressed on account of that."
The Orthodox congregation was down to about a dozen people. The dance hall had been condemned. The congregation couldn't afford to fix it.
The divider comes down
In 1988, the two doctors and the other 20 families or so that had joined the Reform congregation abandoned plans to buy land in Snohomish and, at Sturman's urging, bought the Everett synagogue and its Torah — scrolls containing the Jewish holy books in Hebrew — for $1.
They tore down a divider in the aisle that separated the men's section from the women's section and brought in chairs to replace theater-style seats. The liberal Reform and more conservative Orthodox congregations were one.
"The very first thing we did was take out the wall — the divider," said Vicky Romero, a founding member of Temple Beth Or.
At the first service, Sturman greeted the Reform members at the door, saying, "You can sit where you want."
At the first service, Sturman greeted the Reform members at the door, saying, "You can sit where you want." It was a new era: In Orthodox services, men and women had sat in separate sections.
"They understood we were Reform," said Temple Beth Or's vice president, Cheryl Waldbaum, a founder of the congregation. "They were fine with that. They were happy to leave a legacy, I think."
The building that houses Temple Beth Or is the longest-standing Jewish synagogue in the state, according to Roon. When the Reform group moved in, it was "sort of like a phoenix growing from the ashes," he said.
Now the Sunday religious school at the temple is overflowing. Temporary walls in their sanctuary and a portable classroom out back serve as classrooms Sunday mornings. The temple bought the houses on both sides to expand.
"We're a little bit too big for our building, but we're getting by," Rabbi Harley Karz-Wagman said.
About once a year, Karz-Wagman leads an introductory Judaism class for people who wish to join the faith. This spring, the temple received funding from the Union for Reform Judaism for advertising. About 10 people came to the three Thursday-night classes.
The classes are part of a nationwide effort by Reform Jews to teach people about their religion. They start with the basics: holidays, prayer, basic theology. Anyone who is curious can attend the classes, which are aimed mostly at non-Jews considering conversion, Jews who want an adult-level class on the basics and interfaith couples.
Catholics welcomed
Vance and Mary Bonds of Everett had wanted to get married in the Catholic Church, but Vance couldn't find his baptismal certificate. Instead, they had a casual wedding at a nondenominational minister's house. They wanted Vance's children baptized, but the church told them they had to get permission from the kids' biological mother, even though she was no longer involved in their lives.
So after a few years, they tried the Episcopal Church, but "there were a lot of things we still didn't like," Mary Bonds said.
Disenchanted, they commenced a search for a religion they could live with. They watched televangelists and tuned into Discovery Channel specials about different faiths.
They laugh sheepishly now when they talk about the night, around the end of last year, that they got up the nerve to go to a service at Temple Beth Or.
The couple e-mailed the temple to ask what they should wear. The temple e-mailed back that it didn't matter. They changed clothes several times anyway.
"We were really afraid to go there," Mary Bonds said, and her husband agreed. "I thought they wouldn't be welcoming, especially once they found out we were Catholic."
They were wrong. The first Friday night they were there, the congregation sang Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," a tongue-in-cheek song about the Jewish holiday. It was fun and lighthearted.
"To me at least I feel like I'm right there, like God is just right there," Mary Bonds said.
The Bondses, especially Mary, felt they had found a place that taught what they already believed about God and humanity.
"I think that people are looking for spiritual meaning in their life, and so they're looking for a fit of what they already believe or what they think that they believe," said Waldbaum, Temple Beth Or's vice president.
Now the Bondses go often. They're studying Jewish traditions and picking up Hebrew from the service handouts, which list the readings phonetically beside the Hebrew for those who can't read the language.
The other day, Vance Bonds bought a yarmulke on eBay. Mary Bonds wears a Star of David on a chain around her neck and finds herself searching the shelves at Safeway for kosher foods.
A sense of belonging
Three years ago, Temple Beth Or co-founder Romero had emergency abdominal surgery. The mother of two was in the hospital for a week and laid up for a month after that. It could have been a disaster. But the Jewish community at Temple Beth Or made dinner for her family, she said. They ran errands, they called, they stopped by.
"The word goes out," she said.
The temple has something called the Mitzvah Corps, a phone and e-mail chain that ensures anyone in their community gets help if they need it.
Romero wasn't Jewish when she helped start the community. She was, at first, leery of starting a religious group when she didn't have intentions of converting.
"I cannot imagine that we'd leave this area," said Romero, who is now Jewish. "This has become our family and this community has become such an important part of our lives."
"You kind of fall in love with the community that way," said Rabbi David Fine, who was rabbi at Temple Beth Or from 1993 to 1998 and now is the regional director for the Pacific Northwest Council of the Union for Reform Judaism.
Vance Bonds was in a car accident recently and lost his job the same week. When he told people in the congregation — people they had known only or a few months — they all wanted to help. Something the rabbi said encouraged him, too: He told them it didn't happen for a reason. After years of the explanations Christianity had tried to offer, they said they found that refreshing.
"People in Temple Beth Or care about each other, even if they don't know them," Fine said.
A half-hour before a recent Friday-night service, people were already filing in. It was a diverse group. Some wore yarmulkes on their heads; some wrapped their shoulders in prayer shawls. There were middle-age couples, single moms, lesbian couples and teenagers.
The president of the temple greeted Vance Bonds, wondering why no one had told her sooner that Bonds' friends call him "Sonny." She carried on about the electrical work Vance is helping out with in the building, promising to put him to work on another project soon.
Another woman grinned at the Bondses' son and daughter, who are 4 and 5. Her eyes sparkled, and the kids know to call her "Auntie," the name all the children at the temple call her.
When the congregation stood and began singing in Hebrew, the Bondses still couldn't understand the words or read the blocky letters on the page. Those things didn't matter. They belonged.
Emily Heffter: 425-783-0624 or eheffter@seattletimes.com
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