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



d’var torah
Promises and Warnings
BY RABBI DAVID N. GOODMAN
J Parshat Eikev
ERUSALEM — Th e teeming
streets of the Holy City testify
to the diversity of its people —
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, religious and
secular. A fl ight delayed by a bout of
COVID-19 led me to spend an unplanned
Shabbat in Jerusalem and an opportunity
to refl ect on the last book of the Torah a
scant 20-minute walk to the place where
it was fi rst proclaimed.

According to Kings II, the Judean king
Josiah was commissioning a renovation
of the fi rst Temple when the chief priest,
Hilkiyah, reported the discovery of a
“scroll of the Torah/teaching in the house
of Adonai.” [II Kings 22:8]. All this was
happening about 2,600 years ago, in what
would be the fi nal decades before the
Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and
Solomon’s Temple.

Th e priest Hilkiyah gave the scroll to
the king’s scribe Shapham, who read it to
himself and then recited it to Josiah. Th is
scroll is believed to be the core of the book
we now know as Deuteronomy.

Th e story in Kings says that it was clear
that Jewish practice had drift ed far from
the fi rm monotheism of the Sinai cove-
nant. Some scholars give Josiah himself
credit with fi rmly establishing the wor-
ship of Adonai alone as the foundation of
the Judaism we recognize today — eth-
ical monotheism. Kings II tells of Josiah
purging the Temple and the kingdom of
shrines to other gods, Baal and Asherah.

Deuteronomy presents itself as a series
of addresses from Moses to the Israelites.

Th ey are about to enter the Promised
Land aft er 40 years of wandering in the
wilderness following their liberation. He
is about to die because of his own failings
as a leader. Deuteronomy recapitulates
the stages of the Exodus and restates the
laws that Moses received at Sinai.

It’s fascinating to think how
Deuteronomy might have sounded to
those who fi rst heard it in those last
decades of the kingdom of the House
of David. Th en, as now, the Jews were
living in a tough neighborhood. Imperial
powers were making it diffi cult, if not
impossible, for a medium-size king-
dom to maintain independence. Th e
Assyrians nearly overran Judea before the
Babylonians conquered it less than four
decades aft er Deuteronomy’s reported
discovery. Th is week’s Torah reading, Parshat
Eikev, opens with a triple-ask and a tri-
ple-promise: Moses tells the people that
if they “listen to ... and observe and carry
out” the teachings, God will “love, bless
and multiply” them and grant them pros-
perity and rich crops of wheat, barley,
grapes, fi gs, pomegranates, olives and
dates, as well as healthy and growing
fl ocks of livestock.

Th ey shouldn’t be afraid, Moses tells
them, of their inferiority in numbers and
strength to other nations they may face. If
they do their part, God will do God’s part
— as in the liberation from Egypt, when
a great imperial state fell to the power of
the Holy One.

But what exactly is the Holy One asking
of the people? Several things, all following
under the heading of showing respect and
giving obedience to the Creator of All.

Th e fi rst it mentions is expressing grati-
tude: “When you eat and you are satisfi ed,
then you shall bless Adonai, your God, for
the good land that God has given you.”
[Deuteronomy 8:10]. Th is is the basis in
traditional Jewish law for the obligation
to recite a blessing aft er a meal.

Th e second it mentions is refraining
from worshiping false gods — false doc-
trines, one might say — and coveting
their dazzling pageantry. Th e third is
staying humble. When you get fi nancially
comfortable, don’t take personal credit or
think it’s all because of your own work.

It is despite and not because of the con-
duct of the people that God is rewarding
them. Moses reminds the people of how
much they rebelled against the Holy One,
practically from the moment of their lib-
eration from Egypt, crowned by the wor-
ship of the Golden Calf. It is only because
of Moses’ pleas for God’s mercy that the
people weren’t destroyed in the desert.

Th e fourth ask is that the people to
mirror the Holy One in the way that
they treat those who are socially vul-
nerable. Adonai “enforces the rights of
orphans and widows and loves immi-
grants/strangers, giving them food and
clothing.” [Deuteronomy 10:18].

What we can take from this week’s
Torah reading is that “stranger-ness” is
relative, and that we should treat those
diff erent from us as we would want
to be treated — whether in Pharaoh’s
Egypt, Biden’s America or contemporary
Jerusalem. JE
Rabbi David N. Goodman is the rabbi
at Nafshenu Community in Cherry Hill,
New Jersey. Th e Board of Rabbis of Greater
Philadelphia is proud to provide diverse
perspectives on Torah commentary for the
Jewish Exponent. Th e opinions expressed
in this column are the author’s own and
do not refl ect the
view of the Board of
Rabbis. BUSINESS / LEGAL DIRECTORIES
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