Updated Aug 2, 2008 at 2:08 AM
By all appearances, Beth Israel Synagogue looks the same. The red-brick building is in good shape, the grounds neatly trimmed.
But only the ghosts of a vanished congregation remain. The 90-year-old synagogue in Quincy Point that once was home to the area's largest Jewish community is closed, with an uncertain future ahead. Longtime Beth Israel president Harold Krasnoff of Hull confirmed this week that he and a handful of remaining members no longer hold services there. They are still discussing what to do with the Grafton Street property and its sacred objects.
“Nothing has been confirmed or arranged yet,” Krasnoff said. “We will maintain the synagogue until we arrive at a decision as to what to do.”
Beth Israel was built in 1918. Its closure leaves Quincy with a single synagogue, Temple Beth El. The city once had four. Beth Israel's fate has become a familiar one. The national Orthodox Union, a network of some 700 synagogues, says three or four Orthodox congregations close in the U.S. every year.
The South Shore's oldest synagogue, Congregation Beth Jacob in Plymouth, is large and active. Beth Jacob will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. Beth Israel's remnant congregation has a range of potential choices. They could sell the property to a private developer, another religious group or other organization, or even the city, depending on who's interested.
Krasnoff declined to say what he and other members would prefer to do. Quincy Point's councilor, Ward 1 Councilor Dan Raymondi, said it's premature for the city to consider acquiring the synagogue for a historic site or other uses until the congregation decides what it wants to do. Krasnoff and other members must also decide where to send Beth Israel's Torah scrolls and the sanctuary's tall, elaborately carved wooden Ark, in which the scrolls are kept.
Brandeis University professor and Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna has said the “Old Country” style Ark is distinctive enough to possibly draw an offer from an American Jewish museum, if not another synagogue.
Krasnoff and lifelong member Leslie Francer of Quincy said closing Beth Israel was an unavoidable choice, sad though it was. “There were not enough people to support it,” Krasnoff said – in the end, sometimes only two or three. Once the religious and cultural center for hundreds of Orthodox Jews, the synagogue had been struggling to make a minyan – the minimum 10 men for a proper Orthodox service – even before its beloved, longtime Rabbi Jacob Mann returned to his native Israel in 2003. (He died there in 2005.)
Beth Israel opened during World War I, when thousands of immigrants flocked to Quincy to work at the Fore River shipyard. The synagogue was still new when Francer, who's 87, was born. “My mother took me to the synagogue when I was a baby,” he said. “I was sorry to hear we had to close.
Plaques are held at Maimonides School, 34 Philbrick St., Brookline MA. http://www.maimonides.org
