On a mission to bring ‘big changes’ to the US
MICHAEL GOLDSTEIN did not quite upset predictions when he became president of the United Synagogue in July. But unlike his younger brother, Jonathan, who a couple of months earlier was elected unopposed as new chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, he had to contest an election. And since he was not a US trustee and had to defeat a sitting vice-president for the top job, he was the outside candidate.
He has moved from one of the community’s youngest organisations, JW3, from which he has just stepped down after four years as chairman, to one of its most venerable. The US will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2020, during his four-year term.
Its 25,000 plus households make it British Jewry’s largest organisation. The central Orthodox community is “absolutely vital for the sustainability” of British Jewry as a whole, he believes.
But he has entered office against “a backdrop of significant erosion of membership in the last 20 years”, which he is pledged to try to reverse.
As members die, they are not being replaced and the proportion of those in the 20 to 40 age group has fallen.
The statistics, he says, are “compelling”.
When he speaks to larger constituent synagogues, “there is a constant theme that says there are significant amounts of young couples and families that are just not joining.” As a priority, he aims to reveal practical proposals to improve recruitment early in 2018. “We are working hard to see how we can attract those people. We are looking at our proposition both in terms of what member- ship offers and in cost,” he says.
As well as reviewing price structure, the US will continue trying to invest in areas which could form the nucleus of new synagogues — helping to find them places to meet or providing rabbinic support. One embryonic community where “we’ve put some boots on the ground”, Mill Hill East (which held its first Shabbat morning service in February), could be ready to join the US in three months.
Further north in Hatfield, “things are developing — I know the numbers are going well”.
But he has his eye on other locations, too. “I’d like to make some investment in Colindale where there has been an enormous amount of building development in the last few years. We’re looking to put some investment back in Hackney as well.”
In one of its fastest growing areas in recent years, Borehamwood and Elstree, the US plans a second satellite in the east of the district to add to its outpost in the south.
Following regional synagogues in Sheffield and Birmingham which came into the US fold during the tenure of his predecessor, Stephen Pack, he says: “We’re hoping in the next few weeks another northern community will join.”
He ran for the US role, he says, in the belief that his professional and communal experience would enable him to “add something, while perhaps not revolutionary but a bit more than evolutionary as well, helping the organisation to make some big changes.”
The US is a better organisation now than it was six years ago in being “much more local community-centric”. The former chairman of a US shul, Mill Hill, he knows the “stresses and strains” of running a local congregation. “I think I am the first president for some time who has previously been a chairman of a shul.”
He likes the definition of the US as “the Jewish civil service”. It is “fundamentally a very good organisation, which is not given credit for the breadth of services it provides and provides well.
The US is absolutely vital for the sustainability of British Jewry as a whole’