In a letter this month to members of Congregation Beit Tikvah, the executive board wrote: “To paraphrase [comedian] Henny Youngman, ‘Take our congregation, please.’”
Beit Tikvah is set to close its doors in 2026, 40 years after the synagogue first started.
“We’re small now,” said Maria Markham Thompson, the synagogue’s religious chair. “We have fewer than 20 active members, and those of us who are still here are getting up in age, and we just don’t have the resources to really operate the way we would like to as a full congregation.”
The congregation was founded in 1985, and, according to its website, was the first Reconstructionist synagogue in Baltimore and one of the first in the city to welcome interfaith couples, LGBTQ+ individuals and Reconstructionist Jews who lived outside of northwest Baltimore.
“I’m thankful to all the people who came to Beit Tikvah over the years and were part of our family because we’ve had many, many successful b’nai mitzvahs … and provided a home for people who felt disenfranchised from the Jewish community … often because we were trying to be open to everybody,” Miriam Winder-Kelly, treasurer and one of the congregation’s founding members, said in a Baltimore Jewish Times interview. “Once people felt welcome in the Jewish community, they used us as a stepping stone to go elsewhere.”
Winder-Kelly said if the congregation is unable to find someone to take over and take care of the congregation, it will dissolve. A tentative “final service” is set for Saturday, May 16. After that, she said, members may continue in people’s homes as a chavurah.
“At one point we were almost up to 100 families, but that was a while ago, and when we still had a Sunday school,” said Winder-Kelly.
Winder-Kelly explained that numbers dwindled when the congregation’s religious school shut down. Then,” she said, “when COVID hit, people stopped coming.”
“We tried to … jumpstart the congregation and we were not successful. The people who were the core [congregants] kept coming back, [but] we were not able to really attract new people,” Winder-Kelly added. “You need a certain percentage, you need a cohort of younger people and the two people who were coming to our congregation who are younger now have young children, and they’re looking for Sunday school, and we no longer have that. So if you’re looking for Sunday school, we’re not a good fit.”
Markham Thompson said Beit Tikvah also tried drawing a larger crowd for Rosh Hashanah and the accompanying holidays.
“We have our website. We put notices for services up. … We actually did some additional advertising for High Holidays last year, but it’s just not bringing in enough new people,” she said. “It’s the people energy that you really need to build a congregation or … I guess ‘rebuild’ is the appropriate word for us.”
Originally, the congregation held services at Morgan State University’s chapel. Today, they are located at the Roland Park Community Center, previously owned by First Christian Church.
“I can point to places and say, ‘and this is where we had the naming for our daughter, and we did blah, blah in this room for her bat mitzvah,’” Markham Thompson added. “Even when I was sitting shiva for my husband, all of those things have happened, we’ve had all that life cycle in my family at Beit Tikvah. So this is a very big thing to have happen.”
Markham Thompson explained that one thing that makes Beit Tikvah special to her is its commitment to lay-led services.
“I remember when we were hiring our first full-time rabbi and saying, ‘This is something that is important to us. We are going to retain one Shabbat each month that is going to be lay-led,” she said. “We want[ed] to develop our skills as Jews in worship, and we want to have the energy, flavor, flavorings that come with having different people leading services.”
Bill Marker, president of Beit Tikvah, shared similar sentiments about the congregation, which he called “a warm and welcoming place that offered [congregant] participation,” he said. “[Lay led services] may have been fairly unusual 20 years ago. Even on high holidays, it wasn’t that the rabbi just gave a sermon and you sat there, but there could be some interaction.”
“We haven’t shut the doors yet,” Markham Thompson added. “I’m an optimist. You never know what could happen. We’re not done yet.”
