synagogue spotlight
What’s happening at ... the Jewish Children’s Folkshul & Adult Community
Folkshul a Long Tradition with
Contemporary Values
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
I 24
Folkshul members light candles for the High Holidays.

allowed the congregation to grow, even
during the pandemic and a zeitgeist of
synagogue downsizing.

“You’re Jewish if you feel Jewish,”
Beth Ann Margolis Rupp, Folkshul’s
executive director, said.

According to Rupp, Jewish secular
humanism celebrates Judaism beyond
its theology and texts. The congre-
gation eschews the label “synagogue”
and is lay-led, save for a director of life
cycles who facilitates celebrations of
birth, death and marriage.

“When I think about it from a Jewish
point of view, I recall all that is Jewish
beyond God,” Rupp said of secular
humanism. “So that would include cul-
ture, history, ancestry — which is our
human connection. Beyond the histor-
ical perspective, it is the culture with
the arts and music and everything else
that fits within that context.”
Rupp joined the Folkshul in 1982 as
a teacher. She stayed for a few years, left
to travel and focus on her career as a
teacher at the Philadelphia School, but
returned, becoming the community’s
director in 2019, then executive direc-
tor last spring.

Rupp’s story mirrors that of many
Folkshul members. The children’s edu-
cation program has a 90% retention
rate, with most breit mitzvah students
OCTOBER 13, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Folkshul has a high retention rate for young Jews, most of
whom opt in to continuing their Jewish education after their
breit mitzvah.

choosing to continue their Jewish
education at the Folkshul, even after
their milestone. Three teachers at the
Folkshul are Folkshul alumni.

The community’s secular humanistic
philosophy establishes broad Jewish
values while meeting the needs of indi-
vidual students and congregants.

“We look at the world from a scien-
tific and humanity perspective — how
those two things come together,” Rupp
said. “And the Jewish lens of that is
what affords us the strength of what is
the functional community, and that’s
what makes Folkshul work.”
Beyond retaining its young mem-
bers, Folkshul is starting to gain
attention outside of its immediate com-
munity. Between partnering with JCCs
and co-hosting tashlich with Jewish
Learning Venture, word is getting out
that the Folkshul is still alive and well,
according to program director Leah
Siemiarowski Wright.

“A large portion of it is that people
are finally realizing we exist,” she said
of Folkshul’s growing membership.

Siemiarowski Wright cites a 2020
Pew Research Center study that found
that 41% of Jews reported no affiliation
with a particular denomination. They
were called “Jews of no religion.”
“And they are Folkshul Jews; they
just don’t know it yet,” she said.

A spiritual catch-all and a home for
young Jewish families, the Folkshul
prides itself on its practicality, a secret
sauce to building community, even
if its congregants’ lives are busy or in
flux. Liz Goldberg has been a Folkshul
member for nine years. Her three chil-
dren — two twins in the ninth grade
and a fourth grader — are Folkshul stu-
dents. She appreciates that at Folkshul,
“everything happens on the Sunday.”
While her children are at religious
school, she and her husband can attend
adult education classes at the same
time. As the children have fostered
friendships through their Jewish learn-
ing, so, too, have the adults.

“As an adult, there’s not a lot of space
for you to just kind of get to sit and
interact with and get to know other
like-minded adults,” Goldberg said.

“That social network is really import-
ant to us as adults, and we have just
really appreciated finding this place
where we can be Jewish; we can talk
about our ethics and our values, talk
about what Judaism means to us, think
about how we can integrate it into our
lives.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Leah Siemiarowski Wright
n the early 20th century, the
Greater Philadelphia area was
home to dozens of Folkshuls —
Jewish organizations that provided
Yiddish and secular Jewish education
to children in the city’s Strawberry
Mansion, Overbrook Park and West
Philadelphia neighborhoods, among
others. Founded by Eastern European immi-
grants looking to pass down Jewish her-
itage and knowledge, Folkshuls thrived
by providing practical education to the
next generation of Jews — the children
of members of the Workmen’s Circle,
Labor Zionists and the pro-Soviet
Jewish People’s Fraternal Order.

But as the decades wore on, the
younger generations of Jews became
detached from their families’ immi-
gration stories, losing interest in the
language of their now-dead relatives.

By the ’60s and ’70s, Folkshuls merged
to create the critical mass to sustain
classes. By the 1980s, many had closed
altogether. And then, in 2022, there was one.

The Jewish Children’s Folkshul &
Adult Community, which claims to be
Philadelphia’s last standing Folkshul,
carries on the secular humanistic tra-
dition introduced to the Philadelphia
Jewish community more than a
century ago.

Home to about 85 adult members at
its Chestnut Hill location, the Folkshul
provides Jewish education and breit
mitzvah (its gender-neutral term for
Jewish coming of age) training to 47
children, from kindergarten to ninth
grade. Nine assistants, teenage alumni
of the Folkshul, are paid to help out in
the classrooms.

From the youth leadership develop-
ment program to its social and envi-
ronmental justice projects, meditation
groups and restaurant club, Folkshul
casts an intentionally wide net to
encompass its community. Its secu-
lar humanistic sensibilities pervade its
culture of welcoming others, which has