About two months after they agreed to the building’s demise, hundreds of congregants shuffled into the front entrance of the Temple Society of Concord for Rosh Hashanah.

The elderly took their walkers to the wooden pews leading up to the bima. Children headed to a back door for the children’s service. Rabbi Daniel Fellman stood on the bima and looked out at hundreds of members that came to the historic temple on the corner of Madison Street and University Avenue.

It was one of the last times the room would be filled.

“On this day we are called to look ahead, to embrace the new and keep it as we preserve the old,” Fellman told the congregation. “This day we see the two: old and new.”

The Temple Society of Concord, 108 years old, will likely be converted into luxury student apartments in less than a year. The congregation accepted the developer’s offer to buy the synagogue for $9 million.

Now, the temple is littered with questions. Columns line the main entryway leading to Temple Concord. Will they be preserved? The pews are more outdated than most modern temples. Would they be destroyed? The congregation had gathered here for more than a century. Where will they be next year?

The congregation accepted the developer’s offer to buy the synagogue for $9 million. Courtesy of Samuel Gruber

Stagnant membership, a rising deficit and sinking participation have ultimately led to these questions. New members are replacing older members at lower rates of participation. Endowment campaigns bring back little returns. The temple’s deficit has grown to nearly $400,000 for two decades. Each new board of trustees confronts the fragile balance of filling the needs of a congregation or meeting the financial demands of maintaining the building.

It’s a balance that places of worship across the country have confronted. As “no religion” is the fastest growing religious denomination in the country, places of worship across the country have become strapped for cash. “Spiritual but not religious” makes up 27% of American adults and 18% now identify as neither spiritual nor religious, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. Both are increases from 2012.

Abandoned and converted religious centers are scattered throughout Syracuse, some blocks from Temple Concord. Some congregants travel an hour to attend services at Temple Concord, now the last remaining Reform Jewish temple in the Greater Syracuse area.

For the past few months, Fellman has embraced this turning point. The building no longer fits the demands of the congregation. He tries to remind the congregation of the “long view” — that the temple is 108 years old, but the congregation is 180 years old.

He asked the congregation that morning to envision a new building, one that would fit the values of the temple better. One with greater accessibility, better parking and a thriving religious school.

“Today, we can be revolutionaries, too,” he told the congregants. “We stand on the cusp of unexplored possibilities.”

***

Ken Steiger walked through Temple Concord’s front doors 10 minutes before the service started. He sat near the front, right next to the bima. Four months into his presidency on the temple’s board of trustees, much of the uncertainty surrounding the synagogue’s future fell on his shoulders.

He passed two signs bookending the front doors. “Why are YOU a member of Temple Concord?” one read. “What is YOUR wish for Temple Concord in 5780?” said the other. Sticky notes with children’s handwriting covered each sign in reply. “More good feelings about our future,” one note read. “To find a new home that meets our needs,” read another.

Steiger has attempted to preserve what he calls the “why” — why members are drawn to the temple, what shapes its identity and how it stays relevant in central New York. For decades, trustee presidents were in charge of balancing Temple Concord’s values with often-conflicting business decisions.

The pews were filled on Rosh Hashanah because they were free of charge to the public. Their religious school is one of their largest costs, but is still running because education is a core value. Both cost money, but both provide something trustees believe the congregation needs.

These are “spiritual decisions,” said Jeanette Myshrall, a current trustee who formerly served as president and treasurer. These decisions often go against the traditional approach to running a business, she said. With each spiritual decision came endowment campaigns and volunteer hours.

“In a business where you’re looking to make a profit, it’s all about the profit,” she said. “Here, it’s all about the people.”

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Time and again trustees toyed with the idea of selling the building until the offer of $9 million came to them, which is over $5 million more than the property’s worth, according to county property records. They almost launched a daycare center to open a stream of revenue. It never opened. They thought of renting out parking spaces to students living off-campus. The profit would be minimal.

If the deal goes through, they will have more money to spend on programs rather than maintenance. Without the sale, Steiger estimated that the congregation would go out of business in three years. Myshrall estimated about five years.

At a Friday Shabbat service in early October, Meryl and Jeff Lefkowicz strolled out of the Benjamin Bernstein Memorial Chapel, a side room down the hall from the main chapel. They were two of the 40 congregants who came regularly on Friday nights.

Their daughters held their bat mitzvahs there more than three decades ago. Meryl Lefkowicz likes the fact that she prays where others have for the past century. Jeff Lefkowicz, the treasurer and one of the trustees, said the decision to sell the temple is “gut-wrenching.”

The temple voted overwhelmingly for the sale, though. Their reserves were shrinking, and so was their endowment.

“The financial reality is this is what could save the congregation down the road,” Lefkowicz said.

***

Samuel Gruber, a preservationist and part-time instructor of art history at SU, has been a member of Temple Concord for 25 years. But lately he’s mulled over how much longer he’ll stay.

He helped survey 80 religious institutions around Syracuse in 2014. Many have maintenance problems and are on the cusp of closing in the next decade, he said.

This is a trend familiar to Syracuse and other Rust Belt cities, Gruber said. South Presbyterian Church, on South Salina Street, closed in 2006. St. John the Evangelist closed in 2010. First Presbyterian Church United on West Genesee Street soon followed. Several have cited declining membership and financial burdens.

Many more places of worship may fold in the next decade, he said.

“The future is not good for most of the religious properties in the city of Syracuse,” Gruber said.

Temple membership has increased slightly from 280 to 350 families in in the last decade though it’s far from the 800 families that were enrolled 40 years ago, Syracuse.com reported. Now, the board of trustees is attempting to take a business decision and make it spiritual — sell their temple and enhance their identity, not dissolve it.

“You can go through change or you can get stuck in change,” Steiger said. “You get stuck in change when you don’t deal with the human side of change, which is all about dealing with the loss.

“Resistance is normal when dealing with that loss.”

Published on November 6, 2019 at 10:11 pm

Contact Gabe: gkstern@syr.edu | @gabestern326