synagogue spotlight
What’s happening at ... Lower Merion Synagogue
I Lower Merion Synagogue a
‘Huge Extended Family’
JARRAD SAFFREN | STAFF WRITER
t’s Friday night in Bala Cynwyd.

The sun is setting. Work is ending
for the week.

Jewish families within a mile or two
of Old Lancaster Road open their doors
and start walking to Lower Merion
Synagogue. When they get to the
Orthodox shul, they open the door and
walk in.

“And you find your family,” said Lori
Salkin, a Merion Station resident and an
LMS member for about a decade now.

Salkin does this with her husband
and four children every Friday, as do
many congregants from a community
that includes more than 450 families.

LMS holds services, youth programs
and meals throughout the 24-hour
Sabbath period, and the “overwhelming
majority” of members take part to some
degree, according to the synagogue’s
programming and communications
director Nachi Troodler.

The shul that opened in 1954 with five
families and no building is now the larg-
est Orthodox synagogue in Pennsylvania,
per its website. It grew to 50 families
by 1967 and, despite a modern trend of
declining synagogue membership, never
stopped growing over the decades.

Rabbi Emeritus Abraham A. Levene
took over in 1967 and led LMS until
2008, overseeing multiple expansions
of the community’s building at 123
Old Lancaster Road. Rabbi Avraham
J. Shmidman replaced Levene upon
the latter’s retirement and remains the
spiritual leader. LMS’ history section
on its website credits Shmidman with
expanding “minyanim and program-
ming” and adding a mikvah.

Plus, for the first time in its history,
LMS hired an assistant rabbi.

“As we continue growing, it’s helpful
to have another person who’s able to
lend a hand and become an integral part
of the fabric of our community,” said
Troodler, a Bala Cynwyd resident who
has been a member for seven years.

During a typical summer Sabbath,
LMS hosts two Friday night minyans,
another at 7:30 on Saturday morning
24 and then another at 9 a.m. After Shabbat
morning services, congregants make
their way to a kiddush in the social
hall and “linger for quite some time,”
Troodler said.

“They talk to their friends; they talk
to the rabbi. They want to be there, and
they enjoy it,” he added.

Then, once afternoon services begin,
many of those same people walk back to
the synagogue for the second time that
day or since the previous night. It does
not matter if they have to walk more
than a mile multiple times in 24 hours.

They will do it to come back for after-
noon or evening prayer sessions.

As Troodler put it, there’s a lot going
on. And while not everyone comes to
every Shabbat service or activity, the
sanctuary is full week in, week out,
regardless of the season. During some
of the adult proceedings in the sanctu-
ary, kids go off for their own minyans,
Torah readings and discussions about
the week’s parsha.

“That’s how they learn to be leaders
in their own communities one day,”
Troodler explained.

LMS does not have a preschool, a reli-
gious school or a bar and bat mitzvah
program, though families can celebrate
their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs at
the synagogue. Its weekly programming
consists of a Talmud discussion group, a
speaker series and social events like sum-
mer barbecues, among other activities.

On holidays, members come together
for symbolic exercises like building and
decorating the Sukkah for Sukkot.

Just like on the Sabbath, they go to
their synagogue because they want to be
there. Salkin said it’s this “little pocket
of Orthodox Jews who are extremely
devoted to their Orthodoxy, and look-
ing for a place to call home and family.”
Josh Katz, a Merion Station resi-
dent and an LMS member since 2012,
described it as “a second home.” Katz
belongs to the synagogue with his wife
and four kids. He called it a place where
they all feel comfortable.

“It’s a part of who we are, what we do
as a family,” he said.

Congregants feel this connection to
AUGUST 18, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Purim at Lower Merion Synagogue in 2022
Photo by Nachi Troodler
Young congregants enjoy a Purim celebration at Lower Merion Synagogue.

Photo by Nachi Troodler
123 Old Lancaster Road, but really they
feel it to each other. During the pan-
demic in 2020, when they could not
gather in the sanctuary on Friday night
and Saturday, they made their own.

It was in each other’s backyards,
where they spent Shabbat after Shabbat,
even when winter hit and the weather
got cold. They would just be sitting,
talking and “clinging to each other,”
Salkin said.

On a recent camp day in early August,
Salkin’s son came home complaining
that a soccer ball had hit him in the fore-
head. The mother called two or three
doctors from the congregation. Within
a few minutes, the mother and son were
sitting in one’s driveway.

“We’re just a huge extended family,”
she said. JE
jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com