As news from Israel rolls in, Jews are flocking back to shul
by Elisa Bray, Jewish Chronicle:
Rabbis have described attendance doubling at their Friday night services as British Jews gravitated to their local synagogues to seek solace from the community following the Hamas terror attacks in Israel.
Alyth (North Western Reform Synagogue) in Temple Fortune, north London, would typically have between 250 and 300 attending on a Friday night, that figure doubled to more than 500 people in the room and watching online.
Anxiety about security had made it impossible to predict how many people would be attending in person said the shul’s head member of engagement, Sam Heller.
“We had no idea. It was either going to be no one or everyone. So we had people sitting in the foyer, and we had people standing up at the back, and we had kindergarten chairs. We ran out of chairs, we ran out of books, we ran out of shul sheets. There were people everywhere,” Heller said.
The service was “exactly what everybody needed”, she added.
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