Ethel Zelenske, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors and the immediate past president of Bolton Street Synagogue, said her parents met in a displaced persons camp in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she was raised.

Zelenske said growing up, the synagogue was the focal point of her life.

“I was at the synagogue five days a week,” she said.

Zelenske attended law school in Philadelphia and moved to Baltimore to work with Legal Aid, but soon after, her father passed away. When she returned to Nebraska for the funeral, she attended the synagogue’s minyan.

“They did a morning minyan every day,” she said. “I wanted to go every day to say Kaddish for him for just a week, and one day I went, and it still hurts, like in 1979 … the men wouldn’t count me because I was a woman.”

At the time, the Conservative movement’s governing body had already approved counting women for a minyan, but the older men at the synagogue refused to count Zelenske.

“I was furious,” she told Baltimore Jewish Times.

After that, Zelenske said she left her Jewish identity behind for almost a decade.

“I tried to go, like on Yom Kippur,” she recalled. “I would go to … Hopkins, [which] would have someplace you could drop in. I think I remember going to Goucher one year for Yom Kippur just so I could do Yizkor.”

It wasn’t until the late 1980s when one of her friends told her about a new synagogue in the area that she was attending. It happened to be Bolton Street Synagogue.

“It took me a long time to get more involved in Bolton Street,” Zelenske said. “I sort of gradually got more involved and met more people.”

Despite first joining in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until 2014 that Zelenske decided to join the board.

“The synagogue had a trip to Israel under our prior rabbi in 2014, and I went on that trip and right after that I got on the board,” she explained. “That trip … I met the people in our group and connected with the rabbi, so that was really the hook that got me.”

While taking a year off from serving on the board, she was asked to serve as president.

“Being president wasn’t for me,” stated Zelenske.

However, a friend said yes to the position, so to be supportive, Zelenske said she would be her vice president.

A year in, the synagogue began its search for the congregation’s next president. This was around the time Bolton Street’s current rabbi, Rabbi Andy Gordon, had started. He asked Zelenske to serve as president.

“Most of us say if [Rabbi Gordon] asks something of you, it’s hard to say no. So, I jumped into it,” she added.

In 2023, Zelenske became president of Bolton Street Synagogue.

Zelenske is in her final year serving as immediate past president. The Mount Washington resident is continuing her volunteer work and is on the Religious Culture Committee and the Initiative on Equity, Inclusion, and Community Committee at Bolton Street.

When asked her greatest accomplishment as president, Zelenske said it was getting a longer-term contract for the rabbi.

“He’s so essential to the synagogue,” she said.

Zelenske added she credits Bolton Street for reconnecting her with her Judaism after she stepped away from Jewish life because she was not counted in a minyan years ago.

mresnicow@midatlanticmedia.com