Small Town Jewish Life
In Bausman, Pennsylvania, just outside the town of Lancaster, there is a tiny little lamb tombstone with no name on it.
The record of this is almost lost to time; there’s a small line about it in David Brenner’s The Jews of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: A Story with Two Beginnings. An infant was the first burial in what was then the Chizuk Emunah Cemetery (there were three Orthodox shuls that ultimately folded into one), a baby of the Feldser family.
As it would happen, that baby was a great-aunt, Rosie, who died at seven months of age. My great-grandmother, Leah, had 7 living siblings, and this sibling, born between her brothers Sydney and Aaron, who died in infancy.
My Jewishness skipped a generation. My great-grandmother’s generation walked away from the Litvak tradition and embraced reform. Her father and maternal grand-father were founders of Lancaster’s Orthodox community, with her maternal grandfather being the first president of the congregation. Her uncle, Lewis Aaron Sulcov, was among the first Jewish graduates of Yale. He’s buried today at Shaarai Shomayim’s cemetery.
Though I grew up largely outside of my maternal Jewishness, when I returned, discovering I had this familial connection within Lancaster’s three congregations: Degel Israel, Beth El, and Shaarai Shomayim, was a wonderful thing. While the majority of members of all three communities are from outside of Lancaster County at this point, there are a handful of families. When I first joined Beth El in the early aughts when I returned to Lancaster—and where I met and married Leah, I discovered many of the older congregants remembered my family, cousins, even my grandmother from the early graduating classes of McCaskey High School.
There’s a power in that. Now that we’ve been in the Jewish community of Bangor, Maine, for a decade, I see much of the same connection local Jews have to the history of their community in the same way my family did in Lancaster.
I also see the same challenges…while my grandparents’ generation is now gone here as well, their kids, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren moved away or married out. Same story as my family. Same story as what produced me.
Lancaster, at least, is growing. The county’s entire population is over twice the size it was when I was born there fifty years ago, and the Jewish community has grown along with it, on both the frum side and the not-frum side. It’s magnificent to visit home and see both the Reform and Orthodox sanctuaries swollen with people for services.
When I return to Bangor, or when we visit other small communities throughout the country or Canada, I am filled with this aching, empathetic sense of loneliness and isolation. Maybe they had to move to one service a month with a visiting rabbi. Maybe they only convene for the High Holy Days. I am always left with the impression that there were once people in these places who put a lot of effort into community building, but now, that is gone, and we’re coasting on the efforts of a previous generation.
I try to do my part, but my generation (Generation X) and younger don’t seem as invested in community-building. It’s not just Jews, either. My Blue Lodge as a Freemason is just as aged. There are a handful of younger people, but the common thread is there was a parent who was very invested, and children honor their parent by staying just as invested.
I don’t have answers on how to fix this other than to keep my nose to the grind. I told my congregation’s Board of Directors recently that this is absolutely my last year as president. I’ve been doing it for seven years, from COVID, to budget shortfalls, to huge remodeling efforts. I am tired, and with smicha looming in December, I think as a rabbi I’ll be able to attack this problem from an altogether different angle. I also turn 50 on Thursday, but I still don’t find myself tired. Across the spectrum, I’m more productive than I’ve ever been. In 2025 I wrote a book, my band produced an album. I became an executive with a healthcare industry nonprofit. Early this year, I published a huge SaaS project.
Still, I’ve run out of steam as a synagogue president.
I wish it weren’t true. These communities need you. There is so much tooling out there. There’s a huge supportive infrastructure being constructed and maintained by wonderful people, especially here in Maine. It still requires you.
I think it’s among the purest and most noble of Jewishness, where you maintain it in a space at best indifferent to your presence or at worst hostile to it. That’s small town Jewish life.
Consider, in a crowded sanctuary, when you say “hineini,” good chance it may not be heard. There are Jews who matter: big donors, rabbis from rabbinical dynasties, dynamic personalities. You, “average Jew”, may not. Here, that’s not the case. There’s a good chance you’re number ten. If you can get up and daven or lane, bonus points. In any case, in a small community, there is never any doubt that you matter.
