Hudson Jewish Community Forum

(Jersey City, June 20, 2008). 

 article by The Jersey Journal, published on Sunday, June 15, 2008

Congregation Mt. Sinai, on Sherman Avenue in the Jersey City Heights, celebrates its 102nd year today with a concert and dinner, according to the Jewish Standard.

The oldest functioning Orthodox congregation in the city, it has been looking for descendants of the founding members and alumni of the Talmud Torah to be honored during the celebration, the paper said.

According to a release on HudsonJewish.org, the synagogue is looking for the following families, descendants of the founding members: Blaustein, Brauer, Bresnick, Chasick, Chenkin, Chester, Gewant, Gutmann, Fellerman, Fishman, Geiger, Hauptman, Halprin, Helfand, Hordes, Kahnowitz, Kanor, Landy, Marcus, Miller, Novick, Passman, Pesin, Pepper, Pomerantz, Samuelson, Schlossberg, Slurzberg, Sinakin, Sklower, Shneweiss, Sunshine, Urdang, Winograd, Yasmer, Zall and Zeller.

But "the list is by no means complete," said Jane Goldberg, Mount Sinai co-president.

E-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call (201) 434-6629.

First published in the Jewish Standard, May 23, 2008.

 Can you imagine? Hundreds of people sat in those seats, the men here and the women upstairs," said Ann Blaustein, the de facto historian of Cong. Mount Sinai in Jersey City as she looked at 30 rows of empty seats from the bimah in the synagogue’s second-floor sanctuary. 

The sentence that is supposed to follow, "and look at it now," doesn’t come. Instead, she sighs and goes over to check a window ledge that has been damaged severely by a water leak.

Published in the 75th Anniversary edition of the Jewish Standard, Feb 1, 2008.

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Hudson County, Past and Present 

To thousands of Jewish Baby Boomers whose roots are in Hudson County and are now scattered far and wide, it may come as a surprise that the urban region they left in the 1960s and ‘70s is experiencing a Jewish revival.  Although the kosher butchers and bakers are long gone from Jersey City’s Greenville and Heights neighborhoods, the Talmud Torahs of Bayonne, Union City and Jersey City closed years ago, and the vast majority of the post-war generation left for the suburbs upon reaching adulthood, Hudson County Jewish life persists in a dozen synagogues – which a new generation of Jewish “immigrants” is already discovering.

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Saving Synagogues, Building Communities. 

First Published in Palisade Magaine, March/April 2008, pp. 41-46. 

Little Nicole was mesmerized. In front of her, a burly rabbi clad in a bright purple hat was using finger puppets to tell an ancient biblical story. Dressed in costume for the Jewish Festival of Purim, Nicole, 2-and-a-half, sat in a circle with six other intently listening children.