opinion
Why Your Synagogue, and Mine,
Needs a Pickleball Court
Andrew Silow-Carroll | JTA
T 14
DECEMBER 29, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Boaz Lazarus-Klein, 12, awaits a return during a pickleball match at Congregation Shir Shalom near Buff alo,
New York, where his father, Alexander Lazarus-Klein, is the rabbi.

social clubs. Over the years, synagogues have exper-
imented with all types of sports activities, including
bowling, basketball, and, more recently, Gaga. Why
not pickleball as well?”
Lazarus-Klein also told me in an interview that his
synagogue doesn’t do catering, so the “social hall
just sits empty except for High Holidays or bigger
events.” “Our buildings were built for just a few times a
year. It’s a shame,” he said. “We have tried as a con-
gregation to get our building more use. We rent to
a preschool, we have canasta groups, we have adult
education. But for large swaths [of time], especially
the social hall is just completely empty.”
Lazarus-Klein wrote that the pickleball sessions
have attracted regular synagogue-goers, as well as
“many others who had never been to any other syn-
agogue event outside of High Holy Days.”
The players also cross generations, including the
rabbi’s 9- and 12-year- old sons and congregants as
old as 70. “With a little ingenuity and a few hundred
dollars, our empty social hall is suddenly fi lled sev-
eral nights a week.”
I off ered the rabbi two other arguments for in-shul
pickling. First, hosting pickleball honors the spirit of
any synagogue that has “Shalom” in its name: By
bringing the court under its roof, the synagogue
avoids the turf battles between tennis players and
picklers that are playing out, sometimes violently, in
places across the country.

And I shared with Lazarus-Klein my obsession
with the synagogue as a “third place” — sociologist
Ray Oldenburg’s idea of public places “that host the
regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated
gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of
home and work.”
“That’s a great way of thinking of it,” said Lazarus-
Klein. “I think our membership does kind of use it
that way. It’s another base, not where they’re work-
ing and not where their home is, where they can
feel at home.”
The “shul with a pool” has long been derided by tra-
ditionalists who say the extracurriculars detract from
the religious function of synagogues. Kaufman quotes
Israel Goldstein, the rabbi of B’nai Jeshurun in New
York, who in 1928 complained that “whereas the hope
of the Synagogue Center was to Synagogize the tone
of the secular activities of the family, the eff ect has
been the secularization of the place of the Synagogue.

... [I]t has been at the expense of the sacred.”
Lazarus-Klein, who was ordained by the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, argues that
there is sacred in the secular and vice versa.

“I think a synagogue is a community,” he told me.

“A community is a place that supports each other,
and it’s certainly not just about Jewish ritual, right?
It’s about being together in all diff erent ways. And
the pickleball just really expands what we’re able to
off er and who we’re able to reach.”
Kaplan, I think, deserves the last word: The syn-
agogue, he wrote in 1915, “should become a social
centre where the Jews of the neighborhood may
fi nd every possible opportunity to give expression
to their social and play instincts. It must become
the Jew’s second home. It must become [their] club,
[their] theatre and [their] forum.”
It must become, I know he would agree, a place
for pickleball. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

Courtesy Alexander Lazarus-Klein
he weekday minyan at my synagogue has been
moved from the sanctuary to its airy social hall.

And whenever I attend I have the same lofty thought:
This would make a great pickleball court.

Pickleball, the subject of countless breathless arti-
cles calling it the fastest-growing sport in America,
is essentially tennis for people with terrible knees.

Players use hard paddles to knock a wiffl e ball across
a net, on a court about a third as big as a tennis court.

It’s weirdly addictive, and because the usual game
is doubles and the court is so small, it’s pleasantly
social. I play on a local court (I won’t say where,
because it’s hard enough to get playing time), where
a nice little society has formed among the regulars.

“A nice little society among the regulars” is also
how I might describe a synagogue. Or at least that’s
the argument I fantasize making before my syna-
gogue board, in a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-
style speech that will convince them to let me set
up a net in the social hall so I can play in the dead
of winter. I dream of doing for synagogues and pick-
leball what Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of
Reconstructionist Judaism, did for shuls and pools:
He popularized the notion of “synagogue-centers”
that would include prayer services as well as adult
ed, Hebrew schools, theater, athletics and, yes,
swimming pools.

I might even quote David Kaufman, who wrote a
history of the synagogue-center movement called
“Shul With a Pool”: “Kaplan was the fi rst to insist
that the synagogue remain the hub from which
other communal functions derive. Only then might
the synagogue fulfi ll its true purpose: the fostering
of Jewish community.”
Alas, the title “Mordecai Kaplan of Pickleball”
may have to go to Rabbi Alex Lazarus-Klein of
Congregation Shir Shalom, a combined Reform
and Reconstructionist synagogue near Buff alo, N.Y.,
which knows from winter. Last week, he sent me
a charming essay saying that his synagogue has
begun twice-weekly pickleball nights in its social
hall. About 40 members showed up on its fi rst night
in November, and it’s been steady ever since.

“When my synagogue president presented the
idea during High Holy Day services, many of our
members rolled their eyes,” wrote the 49-year-old.

But the rabbi countered by citing Kaplan and
paraphrasing one of his forebears, Rabbi Henry
Berkowitz, a 19th-century Reform rabbi who encour-
aged synagogues in the 1880s “to create program-
ming related to physical training, education, culture,
and entertainment to help better compete with