synagogue spotlight
What’s happening at ... Congregation Beth Or
Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen
Continues to Thrive
Jarrad Saffren | Staff Writer
O n Dec. 7, Rabbi Gregory Marx
presided over the funeral of the
last living founder of his synagogue:
Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen.

The man, who died at 104, was a mem-
ber of one of the six families that started
Beth Or in 1955.

It was a sad day, according to Marx.

As the rabbi put it, he will now look out
on the High Holidays and see another
empty seat.

But, at the same time, he will see that
most of the chairs are still full.

Congregation Beth Or has lost about
100 families over the past five years,
according to Marx. The congregation
is down from its all-time high of about
1,100 households. But it still retains
an active membership of roughly 985
families. The last founder may be gone,
but the synagogue remains.

And it doesn’t just remain. It is strong,
with a recently paid-off mortgage, 450
students in the religious school, 185
kids in the preschool and more than 100
weekly attendees at hybrid Shabbat ser-
vices. Marx has been the temple’s spiri-
tual leader since 1989 and spent much of
that time raising money, he said. Now,
as he prepares for his retirement in June
2024, he is excited to have the resources
to spend more on members than on
interest payments, as he put it.

“We’ve weathered the storm,” he said
of the larger movement away from syn-
agogue membership.

Marx learned from original congre-
gants that Beth Or was built on a helpful
spirit. Members came from “well-es-
tablished, well-heeled congregations,”
the rabbi said, with assigned seats that
placed wealthier congregants up front.

At Beth Or, they did not want the same
arrangement. Instead, they wanted their
new Reform temple to be egalitarian.

People could sit where they wanted, and
everyone would help with more than
just their wallets.

Members had to pitch in with their
hands and feet because the synagogue,
as Marx explained, “didn’t have the
22 Congregation Beth Or members are devoted to helping the synagogue and the
community around them.

Courtesy of Congregation Beth Or
resources it has now.” So in the 1950s
and ’60s, if there was a job that needed
to be done, congregants came by and
did it. They painted the walls; they
moved furniture to set up for events;
they mowed the lawn; they plowed
the snow.

“There was a can-do spirit,” Marx
said. Today, Beth Or has enough money to
hire people to mow the lawn and plow
the snow, according to the rabbi. But its
members maintain that spirit. They just
focus it outward a little more.

Every year on Christmas morning,
Beth Or congregants travel around
town “doing mitzvahs,” Marx said. A
couple hundred people volunteer for
tasks like bringing food to hospital staff
members and gifts to children in the
hospital. One year, they did a highway
cleanup. Earlier in 2022, Beth Or congregants
raised $110,000 for Marx to bring with
him to the Jewish Community Center
in Krakow to help refugees from the
war in Ukraine. The money provided
child support to a group of mostly
women. The Maple Glen synagogue also
DECEMBER 15, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
keeps a disaster fund that it can use in
any situation. It sent money to Houston
after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, to
Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that
killed more than 100,000 people and to
California after the deadly Camp Fire
in 2018.

“Our community is all about giv-
ing. Giving to one another and giving
locally,” said Gwen Silverstein, the syn-
agogue’s president and a member in her
22nd year. “We all believe that we get
more from what we give.”
Silverstein, now in her second year as
president, said she gets the same type of
support that members used to give each
other in the temple’s early years. When
she needs something, people come,
whether it’s a repair, an issue relating to
COVID or a financial concern.

The longtime member raised both
of her daughters in the synagogue,
sending them through preschool, bat
mitzvahs and confirmation. Both girls
made friends at Beth Or whom they
went to camp with and traveled to
Israel with. Silverstein said the girls
now consider those friends to be
family members.

“They got to make new friends
Rabbi Gregory Marx
Photo by Dara King
Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen
Photo by Dara King
and create a Jewish community,” the
mother said.

And then hopefully, that microcom-
munity will come back to the bigger one
in Maple Glen, explained Amy Abrams,
the temple’s executive director and a
member for 27 years. Beth Or, even
without any founding members left,
has many multigenerational families,
according to Abrams.

“You want to build Jewish identity in
the children so hopefully they will come
back with their children,” she said. JE
jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com



d’var torah
Will We Be Judahs or
Einsteins? By Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin
I Parshat Vayeshev
just fi nished reading “Th e Other
Einstein” by Marie Benedict, pub-
lished in 2016.

How disturbing was this depiction of
Albert Einstein’s fi rst wife and collabo-
rator, Mileva Maric, a brilliant mathe-
matician who may have been the actual
author of the theory of relativity. How
distressing was Einstein’s abject neglect
of his family and his attempts to erase
Mirac’s scientifi c contributions from
history, depriving her of sharing the
Nobel Prize.

My view of his greatness has been sig-
nifi cantly dampened by this (somewhat
fi ctionalized) account of his personal
cruelty toward her.

nitely a heroine, paired with the ances-
tor from whom most of us Jews claim
our descent: Judah, son of Jacob.

Th e behavior of this childless widow
seemed debauched when she seduced
her father-in-law Judah by disguising
herself as a prostitute, seeking to be
impregnated by him. Yet her actions
were driven by noble intention: continu-
ing the family line of her deceased hus-
band Er. In contrast, aft er his wife died,
Judah relinquished his responsibility as
tribal leader by squandering his “seed”
with a prostitute while on his way to a
festival with a friend.

To guarantee payment for sexual ser-
vices, Tamar shrewdly demanded that
Judah leave with her his seal, cord and
staff until he can send payment. When
Judah’s friend attempts to deliver pay-
ment and retrieve the personal eff ects,
the prostitute is nowhere to be found.

his reputation would be ruined. Th e
baby is left with her parents, and they
wed. When that child dies of scarlet
fever, Einstein seems relieved. Although
the groundbreaking discoveries in phys-
ics resulted from their combined study
and collaboration, he removes Maric’s
name from their publications.

As his reputation grows, his mis-
treatment of her increases. She and her
children are dependent on his earnings.

She has no opportunity to proclaim to
the world the truth, that these were her
ideas, her mathematical fi ndings; the
articles were her compositions. Finally,
when infi delities are revealed, she mus-
ters the courage to fi nd a lawyer who
craft s a divorce agreement entitling her
to the cash award for the Nobel Prize
that she is certain he will win. She leaves
with her children; Einstein marries his
cousin, leaves for America and goes on
to fame and fortune.

Life presents us all with opportuni-
ties to transcend the fear of shame and
to do what is right. Will we be Judahs
or Einsteins? JE
Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin, emer-
ita of Temple Adas Shalom in Havre
de Grace, Maryland, is an artist of
Mosaic Midrash, which is displayed
at Beth David Reform Congregation
in Gladwyne. Th e Board of Rabbis of
Greater Philadelphia is proud to pro-
vide diverse perspectives on Torah com-
mentary 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.

Life presents us all with
opportunities to transcend the fear
of shame and to do what is right.

As we read this week Parshat
Vayeshev, how striking are the remark-
able parallels between the alleged hero-
ics of our ancestor Judah, son of Jacob,
and Albert Einstein.

Both men lived in times when men
utterly controlled the fi nancial and
social fate of women, when their word
would be believed over any woman’s
claim. Both of them could have had their
reputations marred by being shamed by
a brilliant, yet powerless woman. But the
diff erence in their reactions to this risk
spells the diff erence between accom-
plishment and true valor.

You, our readers, may not be familiar
with the 38th chapter of Genesis. Th e
story of Tamar was never taught in the
religious school I attended, nor in the
day school my children attended. With
its references to a harlot, masturbation
and burning at the stake, even adults
may be alienated from what seems like
a sordid tale.

Th at is indeed sad; Tamar was defi -
Judah worries about becoming a laugh-
ingstock. When Tamar does become pregnant
and the news is revealed to Judah, he
resolves to have her burned, as is his pre-
rogative as tribal chief. Why? Because
having had sexual relations with one
outside his household, when she is his
son’s widow, could bring shame to
Judah. Tamar then presents to Judah his
personal eff ects. Judah rises above his
fear of being shamed, publicly acknowl-
edging that Tamar was in the right. He
declares that he would claim her and her
off spring as his family and his future.

Tradition tells us that as a result of
Judah’s acknowledgment, God decided
to appoint him as the ancestor of King
David, and of us, the Jewish people.

In contrast, Einstein, when con-
fronted with the news that Maric is
pregnant with his child out of wedlock,
refuses to acknowledge the child, fi nds
excuses not to marry her, claiming that
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