If you want folks to come through your synagogue’s front door, try upgrading the low-grade diner coffee.
Down in Ron Wolfson’s home region of Los Angeles, synagogue lobbies feature bookstores, Starbuck’s or home-grown coffee shops sporting clever titles such as “Java Negillah.”
And that, according to Wolfson, is a good thing.
The director of the Whizin Center for the Jewish Future at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, Wolfson spoke at San Leandro’s Congregation Beth Sholom on Sunday, April 3. Representatives of each East Bay synagogue attended the event, the Richard Lesser Symposium for Synagogue Leadership, hoping to pick up some cues.
Wolfson’s driving point: You don’t need someone to say thank you for you to say you’re welcome.
“I told the group that a lot of you have greeters at the door of your synagogues, and that’s great. But it doesn’t help if I get past the greeter and someone throws me out of my seat,” said Wolfson, the co-founder of the Synagogue 2000 project.
Too many temple-going Jews see the synagogue as “a limited-liability partnership: I pay you dues, you give me a rabbi on call, some High Holy Day seats, a school for my kids and leave me alone. We believe the challenge for synagogues is not to be kid-centered or ethnicity-centered or corporate but take seriously what it means to be a sacred community.”
Congregants must put themselves in the shoes of an outsider. Wolfson asked the East Bay temple leadership how many of them could find their way into the front door of their synagogue from the parking lot.
“I hope it’s clearly indicated how to enter the sacred space of a congregation,” he noted.
“I hear story after story about how ‘sure, the front door is locked. Everybody knows you’re supposed to come in through the kitchen door.’ Well, that’s not true! A guest doesn’t know that.”
The kid-centered synagogue is an endemic problem; he points out how many families drop out of a temple after a b’nai mitzvah.
“I once drove onto a synagogue property and the biggest sign was the drop-off lane. The message is, drop your kids off and don’t come in. That’s crazy,” he said.
Temples simply must be more welcoming. And it isn’t a dollars and cents issue; sometimes relatively poor congregations excel at this while large ones falter.
“It’s really about the feeling you create when you walk in the place. It really has to do with that,” he said.
“Does the rabbi invite everyone to turn around and say Shabbat Shalom to their neighbor? Is there a booth after the reception where members of the board can hang out and ‘say come on by our information table and meet the leadership of our congregation?’ That doesn’t cost a thing.”
Temples can grow more welcoming if they take to heart that it is a mitzvah to welcome a stranger.
And if they don’t wish to grow more welcoming?
“Well, then they shouldn’t be in this business, in my opinion,” he said.
The attitude is “We have enough members. We don’t want any more. Fine. I honor that stance. My problem is, on a national level and even on a regional level, all these people come into synagogues and leave synagogues. It’s a revolving door.”