Last winter, a billboard was erected on the lawn of the Conservative temple in Northrup. “The Need Is Great,” it proclaimed. “The Time Is Now! Give Generously to Your Jewish Community!”

The word “Need”—heavily charged with a sense of trouble, sickness, and disaster—was what struck me. What could it mean to a community that was growing more prosperous and secure every year? Though I quickly learned that the “Need” was not for food for the hungry or homes for the homeless, but for a banquet hall equipped to handle lavish weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, the sign kept stopping me like a roadblock. It seemed to symbolize the confusion in Northrup between needs and desires, between the community problems cluttering the path beneath our feet and the campaigns that divert attention from them. In time, the words on the sign rearranged themselves in my mind to ask, “What does Northrup need?” What is the Jewish community there? Whom does it belong to? How much is “generously”?

In the last twelve years the population of Northrup has more than doubled. Its Jewish community has grown from a small, struggling minority into an affluent majority. Throughout the town, developments of substantial custom-built houses on landscaped tracts of land have created a new image of the Jews in Northrup. Formerly, the Jewish families in the town—with the exception of the few wealthy ones—lived in small bungalows on flat bare lots. Today, even those families that still live in the bungalows have enlarged and improved their homes to keep up with the fine new houses that surround them.

The structure of the Jewish community has changed as radically as its physical appearance. It began almost like a family circle—protective of its members, concerned with its separation from the general community, but equally concerned with the impression it made upon the non-Jewish majority. Temple activities mirrored those of the churches. Fashions in clothing and home decoration were influenced by the local customs that favored simplicity and abhorred ostentation. The Jewish community was shaped both by the New England town that surrounded it and by its own desire for unity. The Conservative temple called itself the Jewish Community Center, and its leaders could not imagine that a Jewish family might come to live in Northrup without belonging to it.

After ten years of continuous growth, the Jewish community of Northrup split up into three separate congregations. The Conservative temple was no longer able to cope with dissenting opinions about services, kashrut, or the education of the children, and Reform and Orthodox congregations were organized. At present each has a building, a rabbi, and a school, and each struggles to raise the money needed to support them. The Conservative temple, however, still calls itself the Jewish Community Center, ignoring the fact that about four hundred families do not belong to it. The Reform temple particularly attracts the younger families who have grown impatient with the domination of the Conservative temple by the older, more prosperous Jewish families. The Orthodox synagogue, the smallest and weakest, is still the cheapest to join and has gained members from the newcomers who are unwilling or unable to pay the expensive fees of the other temples.

This fragmentation within the Jewish community has not brought the Jews of Northrup any closer to their non-Jewish neighbors. They group together in the new housing developments and are isolated from the older part of the town, though here, too, there is very little social mixing of Jew and non-Jew. The public schools, the library, and the cultural activities in the town have all been strengthened by individual Jewish effort, but in general the organized Jewish community has grown increasingly self-centered. In this, the congregations still resemble the churches whose different memberships form distinct social groups.

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The character of the former Jewish community was the result of several different attitudes. There were those members who felt their Jewishness very strongly and could live only within a Jewish milieu. There were others who took part in Jewish affairs only after they had tried unsuccessfully to find a place for themselves in the social life of Northrup. There were still others who, though ignorant of and indifferent to Jewish life, wanted their children to remain Jewish, which meant that they needed a community that would create a Jewish atmosphere and loyalty for them.

Some of the first members of the Conservative temple were motivated by their loyalty to the Jewish people “in history.” Others were concerned only with the members of their congregation. All came to share, however, the notion that the “community” was sacred. Anything done “for the community” was automatically being done “for a good cause,” and the assumption grew that what was good for the community was good for the individuals in it. The community was committed to “survival,” and to live outside it seemed evidence of an indifference to this strong, if ambiguous imperative. Though “survival” implied separation from the general community, the implication was buried under the more popular idea that it was the proper, American thing to belong to a religious group and to participate in the social life that surrounds places of worship. The temples did help their members to become typical suburbanites by offering them opportunities to join garden clubs and bridge clubs, sewing circles and book review luncheons, separate but equal to those run by the local churches.

Living within the Jewish community, however, was never easy. There were too many decisions to make and too few people with the ability to accept any authority. Should the policies of the community be determined by the rabbi, the principal of the Hebrew school, the members who donate the most money, or should everyone make his own decision? Each family ultimately made its own decision about the education of its children, the rituals it would observe, the holidays it would celebrate, and the amount of money and time it would donate to the Jewish community. It was a rare family which simply followed the pattern set by the generation before it.

There were many evidences of private anxiety and public quarreling, but the majority of the Jews in Northrup seemed to be sustained by the moving idea of a community, and by the feeling that the difficulties were its “growing pains.” There was, until recently, the expectation that a wise rabbi would some day unite the Jews of Northrup, that a modern school would educate all the children, and that a new style of Jewish living would evolve offering much more stability and satisfaction than had the alienation and anonymity of the city neighborhoods which had been left behind.

Though the dream of a community was always vague and idealized, the reality is very clear and often unsatisfactory, and some of the people who have watched the changes in Northrup over the past twelve years have come to be deeply disappointed. Today there is no longer a definable Jewish community in Northrup. There are many groups and their interests do not necessarily complement each other. What seems to be “a good cause” to one is of little interest to another. An increasing number of people are not at home in any of the temples, and are unable to believe that what is good for “the community” is necessarily good for the individual. Many who are still paying dues and making contributions wonder how long they can sustain an allegiance that has so little connection with their feelings. None of the temples has been able to reach more than a small fraction of its own members through services or education programs. The idea that qualification for membership in a temple might be a year’s study rather than a sum of money, brings laughter. All of the Hebrew schools are for temple members only, and most parents join for the sake of their children.

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The children study for membership in a religious community that exists primarily at their level. Adults may stay at home; the children, however, are marked down for every Saturday service they miss. They must learn prayers they seldom hear at home and rituals they may never see observed. Their Jewishness is expressed mainly as a form of public behavior. Holidays are celebrated as rallies and confirmations are social performances. The traditional Jewish education offered in different quantities at the three schools permits few opportunities for children to voice any doubts or questions, or to respond in a personal rather than a group fashion. If they do not find their place in the community celebrations, they are not likely to have other religious resources, despite the years they have spent studying Hebrew and the Bible. The Bar Mitzvah or Bas Mitzvah marks the end of childhood and of Jewish education.

The children who have attended Hebrew school in the fourteen years that I’ve been watching them—both as a parent and as a teacher—can be divided into four groups. One group—the majority—accepts the temple as a center of social life. Another, smaller group is disturbed to discover that “freedom” in Jewish life means “freedom to be Jewish,” not individual freedom. Some of them seek out only non-Jewish friends in opposition to the pressure to keep the adolescents apart from their non-Jewish peers. (A few years ago an unusual number of teen-age intermarriages and children born out of wedlock to Jewish girls alarmed the Jewish community, but there have been few such cases since.) A third group is made up of young people who get very angry at any imperfection discovered within organized Jewish life, and who demand of it much higher standards than they expect from other people. They ask why the temple does not take a stand on housing for Negroes in town. They are troubled by the temple’s “commercialism,” though the wish for facilities that will impress the young people pushes the temples into endless fund-raising efforts. The teen-agers who attract the most attention, however, are those who suddenly chose to follow the commandments their parents ignored. “I picked up kashrut at the USY Convention,” a fifteen-year-old boy said. He is one of the group who refuse to eat their mother’s cooking because it isn’t kosher. The boys may attend the morning minyan while their fathers sleep. They refuse to go to school on even the minor holidays. When their parents worry about them, they argue, “Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this what you sent us to Hebrew school for?”

To their parents, such acceptance seems as aggressive as their own rejection had been years before. Parents don’t know whether to be pleased or unhappy at the sudden interest in ritual. “It’s something to hold on to,” one boy said wistfully. “It’s a pretty crazy world and services give me a good feeling. . . .” Listening to him, his mother felt a sense of failure to discover that her son might need an experience that meant little to her. The rabbi and Hebrew teachers are proud of the children they have “saved” from their parents, while the parents suspect they are witnessing another passing phase of adolescence.

Though the decision to educate the children provided the strongest motivation for building and maintaining the temples in Northrup, parents have had little influence upon the nature of the education. Because they are ignorant and also unprepared to study with their children, they have left the school decisions to the professional educators, either older teachers who acquired their Jewish education in Eastern Europe or young Israelis, neither of whom are likely to be much interested in the social conflicts that their students are facing. There is little communication between parents and teachers and no occasions when they meet to discuss the goals or methods of the school. Those parents who are interested in education are given many opportunities to raise money for new classrooms or to bake cookies for holiday parties, but their opinion of the curriculum is of no interest to anyone. The Hebrew school is concerned with maintaining and preserving one or another tradition, not with the growth and development of young people in the particular community in which they live. The Hebrew schools, like the temples, each offer a brand of Judaism. Anyone who doesn’t like the brand is free to try another or to live outside the Jewish community. Thus rituals may be followed or ignored, but they cannot be altered or questioned, either by adults or by children.

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Though the number of unaffiliated families in Northrup is increasing, the majority pay dues to one of its temples, and Jewish virtue is measured by one’s ability to apply and accept financial pressure. The giving of money, even when it is influenced by social aspirations and the wish for public approbation, is still deeply influenced by the traditional Jewish concern for ts’dakah. Giving is expected to redeem the giver from guilt, anxiety, and death itself, while at the same time it measures loyalty and devotion to the community. In Northrup, contributions to religious and secular Jewish organizations have become substitutes for prayer and study, in much the same way that prayer and study replaced the sacrifices of ancient times.

This development became especially noticeable during the fund-raising campaign of the Conservative temple. The enlargement of the building was urged not because the temple was bursting at the seams but because activity within it was all but coming to a standstill. Fewer and fewer people were attending services, and it was difficult to find ten members for a minyan. Most of the adult classes had disbanded and the ones that survived were so small that they met in private homes. The Sisterhood hired professional entertainers to lure the members to monthly meetings and the Brotherhood struggled to get a quorum to elect officers and vote for a budget. Each year it had grown more difficult to raise enough money for the Hebrew school, the only busy place in the temple.

The same kind of apathy was also taking its toll in the new Reform temple and in the small Orthodox congregation. Everyone had agreed that the Jews of Northrup were tired of too many meetings, too many speeches, and too many requests for funds. However, the rabbi and the leaders of the Conservative temple were able once again to get people excited with exhortations about “Jewish survival” and “the sake of the children.” Of course, the temple building program meant different things to different people. A few members of the congregation were interested in donating substantial amounts of money that would give them a feeling of accomplishment and create a useful memorial. The rabbi believed the building program would reawaken interest in the temple and provide for a show of loyalty and affection. The school principal was interested in the new classrooms that were planned. The youth leader was hoping for a hall where the teen-agers could dance. The women were interested in a new kitchen. Though the temple library had been closed and not missed for more than a year, a new library was also part of the building plan.

Those who questioned the necessity of the expansion were warned that it would be sinful to vote against a fund-raising campaign; contributing to a temple was a way of earning good deeds and must be encouraged. The rabbi assured the congregation that no one was under any obligation. A request for funds would be made and members asked to contribute according to their ability. The size of the addition would be determined by the amount of money raised.

However, the local leaders were soon being helped by a professional fund-raiser. He began by reminding them that Northrup was a typical American Jewish community. He had helped raise funds for two hundred temples in recent years and found it possible to use the same appeals wherever he went. The fund-raiser moved into the rabbi’s study with his mimeograph machine, secretaries, and stacks of printed literature. The temple, which had been so quiet since the dissenters left to build their own temple and school, suddenly came to life. Men were called to meet with the fund-raiser every night of the week. During the day, the hallways were full of women volunteers stuffing envelopes.

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Though the congregation had always been divided socially by age, money, and education, the lines of division were never explicit or clearly drawn. No one admitted to being rich or poor. The wealthiest family in the congregation was the first to insist that they were “ordinary middle-class people,” no different from their neighbors. The first demand that the fund-raiser made, however, was for information about the amounts of money available in the congregation. He met with a selected committee to assess the incomes of all the members on the basis of their age, occupation, the homes they owned, the cars they drove, the trips they took, and the clothes they wore. As a consolation for this new classification of the community, the names of almost the whole congregation were printed on stationery and brochures as “Building Fund Campaign Officers and Committees.” No one’s permission was asked: it was assumed that everyone would be pleased to see his name in print.

Dinner parties were planned and everyone was invited. The affluent were invited to the home of the wealthiest member of the temple. Others were invited with their peers to the temple basement. The procedure was the same in both places. A respected member of the congregation read a speech written for him by the fundraiser. A few people—prepared to be “pace-setters”—then made substantial pledges, after which the names of all the people in the room were called. If they did not pledge the first time, their names were called again and again. Each dinner was expected to net a certain amount of money. If it failed to do so, there was a disappointment speech ready to read and there was also someone in the audience prepared to prime the pump by offering to increase his donation if ten others increased theirs.

Some of the leaders were deeply troubled to find that the plan for a campaign without pressure had been forgotten. The fund-raiser assured them that his way was the only way; that there would be no funds for hospitals, schools, old-age homes, as well as churches and synagogues, without campaigns that applied pressure. He believed that the public had to be taught responsibility. He declared that his campaign was an educational program to teach the ordinary individual what his community expected of him and to prod him into accepting his share of responsibility.

Twenty-eight mailings were sent out in thirty-five days as “educational material.” These letters and brochures went to the entire congregation—to those who came to the dinner parties and made pledges and to those who chose to ignore the invitations to the “Loyalty Affairs.” The educational material offered an amalgam of Ecclesiastes, Nehemiah, Aesop, and the accumulated wisdom of the fund-raiser. Some typical excerpts follow:

Most of us live ordinary lives. Most of the things we do from day to day are ordinary things. Perhaps that is why many of us can truthfully say we are ordinary folks. . . . Yet nobility abides in every human heart. . . . And once, twice, perhaps a half-dozen times in our span of years, comes an opportunity to leave everything that is commonplace, everything that pertains to the mundane and ordinary and to reach the heights of greatness, goodness, and nobility. . . . Each can taste of nobility by boldly committing himself to the greatest gift of which he is capable.

From Nehemiah came: “The God of Heaven, He will prosper us; therefore we His servants will arise and build. . . .” From the Sayings of the Fathers came: “He who gives and wishes others to give . . . is a saint.”

The letters were illustrated with mimeographed fingers pointing to the words, “It’s up to you!” Another day brought a picture of a gavel being raised with the admonition:

You be the judge! You alone can decide. . . . Do not look at someone else’s gift—look into your heart and conscience and if you and your family and friends are proud of what you have given and it meets the amount they think you can justly afford—when you have offered it to God with some measure of devoted sacrifice—then you have truly given your earnest share.

The rabbi compared the rebuilding of his temple with the rededication of the temple of the Maccabees. The temple became a “monument to faith,” a symbol of Jewish strength and survival, and an answer to Eichmann, Hitler, and all the tyrants that had come before them. As the campaign ran its course, the members were asked first for a “fair-share pledge,” then for a “sacrificial pledge,” and finally for a “minimum pledge.” The decision to ask for a “minimum pledge” was justified—according to the fund-raiser and the leaders—by the idea that a temple belonged equally to those who had contributed hundreds and those who had contributed thousands. In fact, however, the “minimum pledge” was less, rather than more, democratic. The schoolteacher or the salesman earning ten thousand dollars or less a year was asked to give a greater proportion of his income than the businessman who could take advantage of the tax laws. This pledge was especially annoying to those who believed that contributions should be given voluntarily, without pressure. Complaints, however, were rarely made directly to the rabbi or to the volunteer and professional fund-raisers. Many people preferred to believe that “one could not fight the community” rather than to admit that there actually was no unified community to fight.

Though the Conservative temple was no longer the Jewish community in any sense, its volunteers came with their pledge cards as “community representatives.” If they were zealous, they echoed the rabbi’s pronouncement that a larger temple offered a better chance for “Jewish survival.” They spoke of the temple as a “second home” for its members and presented it as though it were a company living room. The kitchen, social halls, and meeting rooms were made to seem as useful as extra space in a home and were “sold” as conveniences. But somehow they had also become “sacred,” and to help build them was a good deed, a better investment than a new car, a fur coat, or a trip to Miami. If the volunteers were shy and embarrassed about troubling their neighbors, their apologies and awkwardness made it even harder to turn them away.

The campaign leaders were chosen for their ability to contribute and tended to be people who were conscious of their ability to survive and succeed in America. They had begun their lives in Russia, Poland, or the slums of New York and Boston. They seemed to need their names on plaques and doorways for reassurance, public proof of their prosperity and generosity. Most of the volunteers, however, were younger people without a success story behind them. They were looking for a sense of accomplishment that their personal or professional lives didn’t give them. “Everyone wants to leave something behind,” one said. “Why not a fine building?” Many volunteers were in the age group whose education had been interrupted first by the depression, then by war, and finally by marriage and family needs. There were lawyers who were running butcher and grocery stores, teachers who were selling furniture or insurance. An engineer who managed a restaurant was typical of many of the volunteers who were looking for something idealistic to do, a way to lose themselves in a community effort that also used up the nights and the week-ends. The fund-raising campaign offered such an opportunity as well as a chance to do something “Jewish” that didn’t demand education or faith.

Meanwhile immortality was for sale. A thousand dollars would earn a name on a brass plaque. One could be remembered by buying a parking lot, a doorway, a public-address system, an air-conditioner, or a chair. The women were encouraged to have their names inscribed on the kitchen tiles. The names of the pious could be inscribed on a Torah, a candelabra, or a kiddush cup. There were seventy-five different items on the list of available gifts, memorials, and dedications. The private longings for remembrance were to be stitched together like a patchwork quilt into a “surviving” community.

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Shortly before the campaign began at the temple, two churches in Northrup also enlarged their facilities. The temple members who admired the churches’ more restrained approach to fund-raising and who wished for a similarly quiet and low-pressured campaign,¹ were told by the fund-raisers that it was too early for “gentility.” For the benefit of those members who were repelled by such matters as an “over-the-top campaign” with newspaper publicity, lists of contributors, and a “Victory Dance” for those who made the first payments on time, the rabbi also reminded his congregation of its “difference” from the churches in the town. He argued that the churches could be far more relaxed in their attitudes toward education and fund-raising for the reason that Christianity is disseminated in the home, the school, over television, and in the streets of the town, while Judaism is still sustained primarily by the Hebrew schools and the professional Jewish leaders. Zeal and pressure thus were required to pull people against the forces of their American environment. The campaign leaders viewed the opposition to their methods as an indifference to “survival” and as an excuse for selfishness. As they put it, “people who don’t want to give, don’t like to be asked.”

However, serious and dedicated members of the congregation were among the critics, and they were speaking from deeper concerns than those attributed to them. They believed that the pressures being exerted would have a dangerous influence, leading not to any meaningful renewal of the temple but to further pressure, divisiveness, and distortion of values. In the vacuum created by ignorance and inexperience, and by the competition with Christianity without a real acceptance of Judaism, the impulse to build, to expand for the sake of building, had entered to overpower all other community interests.

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The new temple, though still not finished, is already being used and is already deeply in debt. It cannot afford members who do not pay their increased share of the expenses. Its fine new rooms are all for rent, at fees that may drive organizations such as Hadassah to look for other places to hold their meetings. The people who are proud of the “beautiful building” would perhaps still be shocked to know how many people call it “the monster” because they scorn its size and elegance and continue to fear that it will divide and devour the community rather than unify and strengthen it. Others are wondering whether this and the other temples will ever again have any real effect on the Jews in Northrup, whether they are no more than “monuments to faith”—buildings where memorial services can be held. Amid the anxieties, there still remains the question, “And what of the children?” Some have picked up the Bible and the Prayer Book where they were dropped a generation ago, as if the world were still the same, as if the children in Northrup were no different from the grandparents in Bialystok or Lemberg. But will they remember Rashi, or the fund-raising campaign? Will the word “need” for them be an appeal for help or a sign that the rug needs cleaning? Will the values they acquire in the protection and isolation of the Jewish community be any different or better than those learned at school or at home?

The questions are drowned by the rasp of the wood saws and grinding of unloading dump trucks. Who can answer them? The rabbi, unable to cope with the future, loses himself in an interest in archeology and mythology. The teachers are trying to keep from freezing in a half-finished school. The children are hoping that they never remove the piles of loam that make good hills for climbing. Hebrew school will be dull when the work is finished and the gashes in the earth are smoothed over and covered with grass. The professional fund-raiser has long ago left for another town, leaving to the amateurs the work of redeeming the pledges he extracted.² The congregation leaders plead with the members to pay their bill so that “we can bring to our congregation the real meaning of what the Temple should mean to every one of us.” This “meaning” is as mysterious and as elusive as ever. But the sign, “The Need Is Great,” has finally been taken away.

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¹ The Evangelical Baptists imposed a tithe upon themselves of 10 per cent of their weekly incomes, to be paid until their church was completed. The Congregational Church, the dominant one in Northrup with as many members as the Conservative temple, hired a professional fund-raiser. The members, however, insisted that giving be considered a strictly private matter, with no probing of the “ability to give.” Indeed, the minister eventually sent the fund-raiser away before the required amount of money was raised. Only three hundred of the five hundred members of the Congregational Church contributed, and many who could have given a thousand, it was said, gave only a hundred.

² Eventually, only twenty-five of the congregation of five hundred did not pledge.