Synagogue

Philadelphia police arrested three youths yesterday and were seeking a fourth in an attack by vandals Saturday night on a Northeast Philadelphia synagogue. Seven windows in the back of Beth Emeth B'nai-Yitzhok, a Conservative synagogue at Bustleton Avenue and Unruh Street, were smashed by a group of teens shortly after a service celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Detective Al Cittino and Officer Ray Faggese, assigned to the Northeast Detective Division, arrested the three teenagers - ages 13, 14 and 15 - after receiving information from area residents.

A synagogue in Wynnewood has received a zoning variance on parking provisions to allow it to build a new wing of classrooms for students of its nursery school and Hebrew classes. In approving the variance for Temple Beth Hillel on Thursday, the Lower Merion Zoning Hearing Board said the expansion was aimed not at increasing enrollment, but merely at improving facilities. Therefore, the board said, it will allow the construction without the expansion of parking accommodations that would usually be required.

After overcoming one last hurdle, Kesher Israel congregation of West Chester is ready to begin constructing its $1.2 million sanctuary on 14 acres on Route 100, across from Caswallen Drive in West Goshen. Once Bill Petrauskas of the Philadelphia architecture firm of Shapiro Petrauskas Gelber showed plans for the proposed synagogue drive, which was moved to be directly across Route 100 from Caswallen, the supervisors approved the road alignment. The rest of the plan was approved previously.

In some theater productions, the set can be so visually compelling that it detracts from the play. The production of Cantorial at Cheltenham Center for the Arts carries this a step further: It makes not only the set, but the building of the set as interesting as anything else on stage. Ira Levin's play is set in a New York apartment that used to be a synagogue. The young couple who have moved in, a Jewish woman and her Christian fiance, are perplexed when they hear the voice of a cantor singing.

A group of Orthodox Jews will be able to keep a pathway leading to their Cherry Hill synagogue as part of an agreement with a local builder who wants to develop the land surrounding the trail. D'Anastasio Corp. had planned to build 17 homes on the west side of Cooper Landing Road between Chapel Avenue and the Church Road Circle. The firm's owner, Dante D'Anastasio, learned in a Monday Planning Board meeting that the nearby Congregation Sons of Israel was concerned about the walkway's future, and he agreed to build a new path.

Area Jews who would like to learn more about their faith are invited to enroll in Temple Beth Sholom's Adult Enrichment Program, which will run next week through early May and will include 21 courses, from basic prayers and protocol to conducting services, as well as offerings in art and books. "We try to make it as broad-based as we can, to include as many people . . . as we can," said Joel Spector, co-chairman of the Adult Enrichment Program. The courses can appeal to "synagogue-goers as well as nonsynagogue- goers," said Jackie Goldstein, publicist for the program, which is held at Temple Beth Sholom, a Conservative synagogue at Kresson and Cropwell Roads in Cherry Hill.

It began 50 years ago with a small group of women, friends who enjoyed sharing ideas over coffee at the old Hot Shoppes restaurant in Upper Darby. They decided that the town needed a synagogue, and they began raising money at card parties and rummage sales. They built their membership by going through the phone book and contacting those with common Jewish names. This is how Temple Israel was born. It was a robust congregation, with a synagogue that can accommodate 500 in its sanctuary.

TRIPOLI, Libya - A Libyan Jewish man who returned from exile in Italy to join the revolution against Moammar Gadhafi was blocked Monday from trying to restore Tripoli's main synagogue. David Gerbi said he went to clean garbage from the Dar al-Bishi synagogue Monday, a day after he broke through the entrance with a sledgehammer to great fanfare. But a messenger at the scene warned him that armed men were coming from all over Libya and would target him if he did not leave the area. Gerbi said he was told that a mass anti-Jewish demonstration was planned for Friday in the capital's central square.

Lehiyot is the Hebrew word for "becoming," and tonight, when the members of M'kor Shalom hold their annual Lehiyot Sabbat service, that word will have special significance. Efforts to make the synagogue accessible to the handicapped and welcoming to those with disabilities were recognized by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, an organization of Reform synagogues. After a national rabbinical committee reviewed the Cherry Hill synagogue's Lehiyot application, M'kor Shalom in March became one of seven Reform congregations in North America - and the only one in New Jersey - to receive recognition.

A proposed merger of two large Jewish congregations in the Cherry Hill area has likely fallen apart, congregation officials said yesterday. The joining of the Congregation Beth Jacob-Beth Israel of Cherry Hill and M'Kor Shalom of Mount Laurel ran into trouble this week when the M'Kor Shalom executive board voted against the plan. In May, Beth Jacob-Beth Israel reluctantly agreed to the idea as a way to meet burdensome mortgage payments on the group's new Evesham Road synagogue.

THREE DECADES after the last Jewish congregation in West Philly left for the Main Line, a new one is growing in a neighborhood that once held a vibrant Jewish community of synagogues, shops and, of course, bakeries. Congregation Kol Tzedek's creation story goes back to the mid-2000s, when rabbi-in-training Lauren Grabelle Herrmann began talking up the idea of starting a congregation in the neighborhood. "When I mentioned it, my neighbor on Farragut Street said, 'I have the menorah from the last synagogue in West Philadelphia.' " (That would be Congregation Beth Hamedrosh-Beth Jacob, which was a holdout into the '80s at 60th and Larchwood)

WARSAW, Poland - A Jewish history museum in Warsaw has unveiled a reconstructed synagogue roof with an elaborately painted ceiling modeled on a 17th-century structure, presenting the first object that will go on permanent display in the highly awaited museum. The wooden roof and ceiling will be a key attraction in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is due to open next year in the heart of the city's former Jewish quarter. Reporters in Warsaw were invited to view it Tuesday.

NEW YORK - Ed Koch couldn't have chosen a more appropriate final farewell to New York City. An organist played "New York, New York," the iconic ballad made famous by Frank Sinatra, in a Manhattan synagogue Monday as the former mayor's oak coffin was carried past thousands of mourners, concluding a funeral that recalled the quintessential New Yorker's famous one-liners and amusing antics in the public eye. Koch died Friday of congestive heart...

A pyramid of reflected laser beams is hardly what Frank Lloyd Wright had in mind when he referred to the Elkins Park synagogue he designed as an incandescent vision of Mount Sinai. But the historic Beth Sholom Congregation building is being re-created as hundreds of thousands - if not a million - points of light, all in an effort to preserve it. The 1959 structure of aluminum, glass, and steel is part of a global initiative to create high-definition 3D digital models of important historic sites.

The Friday-evening service at Adath Emanu-El will mark a fresh start for Rabbi Benjamin David and the Mount Laurel synagogue. David, who will be formally installed as the spiritual leader of the congregation, asked one of the speakers - the rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Cherry Hill - to read, appropriately, from the Torah's Genesis and relate it to new beginnings. The presence of this speaker will be unusually opportune: Rabbi Jerome David is the father of Benjamin David, and he can celebrate his son's homecoming at the 8 p.m. service.

PARIS - France is boosting security at Jewish and other religious sites after blanks were fired at a synagogue west of Paris amid renewed concerns about anti-Semitism around the country. President Francois Hollande sought Sunday to allay tensions between Jews and Muslims aggravated by violent incidents in recent months. Hollande singled out hateful extremists for criticism and urged respect for all religions in a country that is officially secular. He said that authorities "in the coming days, in the coming hours" will increase security at religious sites so they won't be subject to the kind of attack that targeted a synagogue in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil on Saturday night.

Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick took fire from his election foe Wednesday for his insistence that she - along with reporters and live recordings - be banned while he speaks at two candidate events in Bucks County. Andrew Grubin, spokesman for Democrat Kathy Boockvar, called it "silly" and "disappointing" that Fitzpatrick had placed such conditions on his attending the events, one Oct. 14 sponsored by the Ohev Shalom synagogue men's club and one Oct. 24 arranged by the Bucks County Coalition of Senior Communities.

Myles H. Tanenbaum, 82, of Gladwyne, a tax lawyer, developer of major shopping centers, philanthropist, and owner of a championship football team, died Friday, Aug. 31, of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the Quadrangle in Haverford. In 1970, Mr. Tanenbaum left the law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis Cohen and became a partner in Kravco, a new real estate development enterprise. He was Kravco's vice president and chairman of the executive committee for 13 years and then served on the board until 1988.

On a balmy May day on the roof deck of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ringo Roseman spoke with passion and verve about how Nathan Irish and Elisa Reape are happiest when making each other happy. Clad in a black tuxedo, he pronounced them husband and wife with the ease of a seasoned professional, and got roaring applause from the 80 or so family and friends watching the ceremony. Not bad for a first-timer. Roseman, 31, is not a priest or rabbi (he's a bar manager), but he did fill out a short form on the Universal Life Church Monastery website awarding him the designation of minister and allowing him to legally perform the ceremony in Philadelphia.

If Market Street is where Philadelphians went to satisfy their mercantile needs, Broad Street is where they addressed their spiritual ones. This was especially true on the northern half, above City Hall. As Philadelphia's middle class migrated northward in the early decades of the 20th century, nearly every faith planted a stone-clad flagship on that famously long, straight street. We know too well how the story has gone in recent years. Many of Broad Street's great religious citadels were torn down, and replaced by fast-food joints, fallow lots, and various other indignities.