Havurah Shalom's History Committee is chaired by Marian Rhys. The History Committee works to preserve historical documents and artifacts so the Havurah community can share its collective memory and experience.

Learn more:

- A Brief History of Havurah Shalom

- Oral History of Havurah Shalom's Founding

- Shabbat School History

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A Brief History of Havurah Shalom

By Elden Rosenthal and Rabbi Joey Wolf (edited and revised by Marian Rhys)

Havurah Shalom’s beginnings were humble. A group of families with young children began meeting informally in parks to picnic and celebrate Jewish holidays. The participants were diverse in their Jewishness, but united in their desire to create a Jewish community for themselves and their children. Although most of them belonged to either Beth Israel or Neveh Shalom, they were dissatisfied with their experiences there, wanting something more participatory, vibrant and egalitarian. A recurrent theme in those early get-togethers was an effort to recreate the feeling of community and the celebratory spirit of the Jewish summer camp experiences that many of the group had enjoyed in their youth.

In the fall of 1978 the nascent group took the step of organizing their own, limited, High Holiday services. The get-together took place at the Neighborhood House, in what had been old South Portland, a neighborhood where Jews and Italians had settled before World War II. (The Neighborhood House, in fact, had been a settlement house during the neighborhood’s heyday.) The services were led by members of the group. Families attended with their children, sitting and praying from blankets spread on the floor.

Following the success of the High Holiday services, it was agreed by the 20-30 families who had been meeting to form a congregation, charge modest dues, and hold more regular get-togethers. In February of 1979 formal Articles of Incorporation and bylaws were prepared, and Havurah Shalom was officially born. There was no staff, no rabbi, not even a regular meeting place. But the families who had decided to launch the new congregation—the first new congregation in Portland since World War I—were excited. They were excited by the prospect of learning, praying, and singing together. And they were committed to being their own teachers, prayer leaders, and song leaders—a participatory model that remains a core value of Havurah today.

In the summer of 1979 Temple Beth Israel’s young assistant rabbi, Alan Berg, left Beth Israel and served Havurah part-time. It was a leap of faith for Rabbi Berg and for the members of Havurah. Dues were raised to pay a salary—actually a “salary of sorts;” it was truly a minimum-wage arrangement. But Rabbi Berg was eager to engage with Havurah, was excited to share the spiritual leadership with his new congregants, and was motivated to teach and create a Judaism in tune with the times. Across the country the Havurah movement was growing, a phenomenon that centered around music, spiritual growth, and learning, with a bottom-up governance structure and inclusivity as a core value.

Rabbi Berg invited his friend Aryeh Hirshfield to join with him in creating a new kind of High Holiday experience for Havurah. New music was composed, and congregants were involved in every aspect of the services. The entire Portland Jewish community was invited to attend in the auditorium of the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. No one was asked to purchase a ticket, and no one was turned away at the door. This experience was electric, galvanizing Havurah members and confirming their belief that they were creating something new and important.

Over the next few years Havurah met at the chapel of the West Hills Unitarian Fellowship, and then at the MJCC. Rabbi Yonah Geller of Congregation Shaarie Torah loaned Havurah a Torah to use at services, and members constructed an ark. That Torah was returned in 1981 when a member’s family donated a Torah. Rabbi Berg left Havurah in the fall of 1979, returning to Beth Israel, and lay members assumed rabbinical duties.

As the congregation continued to grow, however, it became clear that a full-time rabbi was needed, and Havurah joined the Reform Movement, primarily to take advantage of its rabbi placement service. In 1981, Rabbi Roy Furman became Havurah’s first full-time rabbi. Roy cultivated an extraordinarily imaginative spiritual gathering, and in its music, its embodied and idiosyncratic prayer, the community grew. The Tikkum Olam committee, originally acting primarily as a charitable organization, began to take on more politically oriented-causes; the nuclear freeze movement and sponsoring immigrant families were among its early projects.

Not long after the congregation’s founding, an innovative religious school, staffed entirely by volunteer Havurah parents, was created. The school met on Saturday afternoons and ended with Havdalah. And in late 1985 a Havurah cemetery was established. A guiding principle, again, was that the entire Jewish community was welcome to use the cemetery.

Most of Havurah’s founding members were young to middle-aged white professional-class adults with school-aged children, but as the congregation grew, many newcomers were single or just beginning their careers. Older adults, however, were noticeably missing. There was an attempt to remedy this lack of longitudinal inheritance by appointing ‘adopted grandparents,’ whereby a young family would seek to establish a friendship with an elderly person who had no family nearby, but this experiment was short-lived. Outsiders and Havurah newcomers sometimes asked “Where are your old people?”  “There are none,” was the reply early on. “I guess we will just have to grow our own.” Thirty-some-odd years later, that prophesy was fulfilled, as the Boomers aged.

While the membership and programming of Havurah steadily grew, the congregation retained its original character. Everyone was welcome, including non-Jews who were drawn to Judaism.  Intermarried couples and LGBQT individuals and couples became active members and leaders.  Music, prayer and teaching authentic Torah that spoke to the contemporary context remained a primary responsibility of the membership.

Those early years were based upon the idea that if Havurah members wanted something new, we had to create it themselves. And so adult education classes were developed, social events were planned, and holiday parties were held. It was a point of pride that our rabbi did not lead all the services; Havurahniks shared that aspect of congregational life, and that tradition continues to this day.

As the congregation grew, services, including High Holiday services, were moved to the Mittleman Jewish Community Center—sometimes in the lobby there and sometimes in the Portland Jewish Academy chapel. And with the hiring of Rabbi Roy, office space was rented, and an official telephone number acquired, in a Hillsdale pediatrician’s office.  Annual congregational meetings were held at the Multnomah Art Center.

Prayer books were borrowed from Beth Israel for a while, and families were encouraged to purchase their own machzors and bring them to High Holiday services.  Early on, members put together their own Friday night prayerbook, borrowing from the traditional order of prayer but including poetry, kavannot, and Hasidic parables. It wasn’t until much later that Havurah adopted the current Reconstructionist Siddur. For High Holidays, congregation Neveh Shalom kindly donated their discontinued machzorim to Havurah.

There was some controversy within Portland’s wider Jewish community about Havurah’s association with MJCC, as the more established congregations felt that a congregation should have its own building.  Truthfully, it took a while for Havurah’s membership to realize that with its burgeoning numbers, its resistance to inhabiting a building got in the way of its flourishing program.  Still, MJCC and the academy continued to be the site of Havurah’s services until 1994, when High Holiday services were moved to the Portland Art Museum. Yet even this space was too limited to accommodate all who wanted to attend: members had to request tickets (at no charge), in order to be sure of admittance. This arrangement lasted until 1996, when the services were moved to the current location at the Tiffany Center.

During these early years, the Steering Committee delegated all leadership tasks and encouraged respect for a broadly diverse range of spoken interests, from ensuring that we brought in the best scholars-in-residence in the Jewish world, to organizing a seder at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.  Steering also established a Finance Committee to deal with monetary issues, and a Membership Committee to encourage new members to meet long-standing ones, along with a Chevre Kedisha to care for the dead and the bereaved.

When Rabbi Roy left in June 1985, the search for a new rabbi was begun. This process was longer and more controversial, as at this stage, Havurah really began to chart a path that would somehow merge its zest for the experimental with ancient traditional rhythms.  In 1987, Joey Wolf was hired, becoming Havurah’s first long-term rabbi. Joey had been searching for a more meaningful direction in rabbinical work, and was working with a congregation in Texas, when another rabbi told him about the opening at Havurah. He came to Portland and felt immediately at home. Although Joey was ordained through the Conservative Movement, his traditional training didn’t get in the way of his recognizing that Havurah was vibrant and spiritually honest in a way that, at that point, few other U.S. congregations were.  Eventually, he helped Havurah to see itself as more suited to the Reconstructionist movement, given the way it embraced all members and charged them with audacious Jewish leadership. Havurah’s Steering Committee approved the change in December 1990 and the bylaw change was officially adopted in April 1991.

With Joey’s arrival, the membership soon doubled and the Shabbat School became an entryway to many young families.  He convinced the Shabbat School Committee to hire an educator, and Deborah Eisenbach-Budner returned to Portland to take that position.  Holiday celebrations continued to be opportunities for spontaneous and creative celebrations.  And social action, especially around the effort to defeat the notorious Measure 9, which sought to prevent gay people from teaching in the public schools in Oregon, became a hallmark.  Activists took up the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and nascent hopes for a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. 

As of 1992, it became clear that Havurah needed its own building. As with every other change, this one met with heated opposition and seemingly endless discussions, but some of the more visionary members persisted, a capital campaign was launched in 1995, and the search began. Several Christian church buildings were considered, but all turned out to be either unsuitable or unavailable. One effort in 1994, to share space with the local Quaker meeting, was seriously considered—an arrangement similar to Havurah’s initial use of the West Hills Unitarian Church, except that building ownership would be shared, not just space rented within the building. Eventually, however, this plan proved to be unworkable, and the current building was decided upon. It had been a warehouse used to store reels of film, and needed a great deal of work. But the building was purchased and renovated, utilizing much volunteer labor. It formally opened for “business” on August 16, 1998, starting with a procession carrying the Torah from the Neighborhood House through the streets of Portland to the new building.  What made the campaign for a building so remarkable, especially in the minds of Jewish fundraising gurus around the country, is that almost all of Havurah’s membership gave generously.  So much was that the case that it never placed an overwhelming demand upon its rabbi, or diverted energy from its rich program.

Havurah has continued to grow and change in the twenty-first century. In 2009, a year-long process was launched, to evaluate how to move forward and meet the needs of our growing community. Monthly Kabbalat Shabbat dinners and services were begun in 2010, a member census was conducted in 2013, and in 2014, when Rabbi Joey announced that he would be retiring in 2017, a Rabbi Search Committee was formed.

In 2016, Havurah changed its governance structure to the current ‘cluster’ model, expressing the five core functions of Avodah (Religious Life), Hadracha (Governance), Kehilla (Community), Limud (Learning), and Tikkum Olam (Social Action). Makom (Place) was added in 2017, splitting off from Hadracha. Rabbi Benjamin Barnett came on board in August 2017, representing a new generation of Havurahniks. New machzors, more suited to Havurah’s Reconstructionist status, were purchased in 2021.

Under Rabbi Benjamin’s leadership and partly triggered by the isolation imposed by the pandemic, Havurah has continued to grow, reaching a membership of over 500 families by the end of 2022. The majority of new members have been either families with school-aged children or aging Boomers moving to Portland to be near their grandchildren. We are now in need of more physical space and more staff to support this growing and vibrant community.

As Havurah considers launching its second major capital campaign, it faces new challenges but also new opportunities, striving to retain our foundational values as we welcome a more diverse membership and continue to provide spiritual leadership in Portland’s Jewish community.

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Oral History of Havurah Shalom's Founding

Listen to oral histories from some of Havurah’s founding or long-term members. These are excerpts from longer interviews posted on the website of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, which include non-Havurah-related biographical information not included in the excerpts.

• Carol Chestler (37 minutes - audio)
• Lou Jaffe (22 minutes - audio)
• Lesley Isenstein (24 minutes - audio)
• Carol Coar (17 minutes - audio)

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Shabbat School History

Learn about the history of our Shabbat School program here.

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