synagogue spotlight
What’s happening at ... Mishkan Shalom
Mishkan Shalom Continues to
Change With the Times
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
M 32
NOVEMBER 24, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Mishkan Shalom’s congregation
at an outdoor service
“I once said to somebody, ‘We
know what we want; we just
don’t know whether it exists,’”
Towarnicky said. "And it turned
out that we had to help found it.”
Th e summer of 1988 was spent
gathering stray members of syn-
agogues that Towarnicky and
Goldwyn had once belonged to and
creating committees to discuss the
logistics of including a religious
school as part of a new congre-
gation, as well as how to build a
community based on a statement
of principles. Another founding
member, Brian Walt, traveled to London to pick up
a Torah for the congregation that had been rescued
from the Holocaust.

Th e congregation had its fi rst offi cial service on Rosh
Hashanah in 1988 at Swarthmore Friends Meeting.

“It was quite an amazing event where people were
asked to take their tallitot and put them over their
heads so that there was like a whole canopy of like
400 or so 500 people ... and we called the congrega-
tion into being,” Towarnicky said.

Th e congregation fl oated around the Philadelphia
suburbs for years until 2002, when they found their
now-home in a factory-turned-furniture warehouse.

Aft er spending years keeping their arc and Torah
in Methodist and Quaker meeting spaces, Miskhan
Shalom fi nally had a place to call home.

In the past 20 years, the synagogue has come full
circle with its building, which now also contains the
offi ce for the building management company, a space
a nearby church rents out and for C.B. Community
School, which provides education for teenagers in the
foster care system.

Mishkan Shalom recently completed a fi ve-year
Rabbi Shawn Zevit (center) leads
a Jewish men’s retreat.

fundraising project of $1 million for the building,
allowing it to refi nance its mortgage, install a new
roof and create a new position of director of syna-
gogue operations, fulfi lled by Rebecca Phillips. One
of Phillips’ fi rst tasks in her position was to connect
the several congregants who suggested the installa-
tion of solar panels on the building’s new roof.

According to Newman, 132 families contributed to
the campaign, which she said was signifi cant for the
congregation. “It’s a young synagogue, so we don’t have legacy
donors,” Newman said. “We don’t have, until very
recently, second-generation Mishkan-ers.”
But as synagogue leaders look to the future, there’s
a real sense of optimism and pride in the community:
Th ey have fi nancial stability and have had modest
membership growth since the pandemic. Th ough
they’ve weathered the challenges of the pandemic
and experienced personal hardships, there’s always
been a will to adapt.

“We’ve found a way of thriving,” Zevit said. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Jean Brody
ishkan Shalom Rabbi Shawn Zevit, in
recent years, was reminded of the quote by
poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “We were made
for these times.”
For his High Holiday d’var Torah, Zevit explored
the phrase and fl ipped it on its head, saying to his
congregants, “We are being remade by these times.”
“We’re not isolated; no person is an island in that
way. I’ve been changed,” Zevit said. “I talked about
the ‘oy and the joy’ of mortality…I think the ‘oys and
joys’ are something that a progressive and inclusive
Jewish life leaves room for.”
Th ough Zevit cites the pandemic and political
landscape as defi ning moments for the community
and world, Mishkan Shalom, a Reconstructionist
synagogue in Manayunk, has always reckoned with
the topics of the day since its 1988 founding.

Now home to about 225 households and members,
Mishkan Shalom continues to be guided by the three
principles established in its creation: Torah, study;
avodah, prayer; and g’milut hasadim/tikkun olam —
acts of caring and repair of the world.

In addition to weekly services, a b’nai mitzvah
program and a growing religious school, Mishkan
Shalom supports dozens of political interests of its
congregants: Th ere are committees for immigration
and working rights, an interfaith peace walk and
conversations about Israel and Palestine. Th e syna-
gogue also has community liaisons that are part of
the Philadelphia Jewish LGBTQ consortium JProud,
as well as the Romero Interfaith Center, according to
board president Jean Brody.

“It’s a community of people who really are very
thoughtful about what they do,” said congregant
Keely McCarthy Newman, who organized the syn-
agogue’s recent fi ve-year fundraising project. “It’s
a community of activists, and even the people who
aren’t regularly activists are very clear of how their
actions aff ect others, and it’s such an intentional,
kind group of people.”
Mishkan Shalom emerged as a spiritual commu-
nity at a time when synagogues were not yet address-
ing or welcoming conversation about LGBT Jews,
interfaith and interracial marriages or discourse
about the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict.

In the 1980s, Mishkan Shalom founding member
Carol Towarnicky and her husband Ron Goldwyn
found themselves without a spiritual home. Th ey
joined a couple of synagogues that aligned some parts
of their Jewish and political identities but had yet to
fi nd a completely welcoming and fulfi lling space.