Nov 27, 2017 6 min read

Jack Bergstein is a semi-retired attorney and native of Monessen. When he was young, he remembers the Jewish High Holidays were abundant with traditional foods, family and friends and, unlike today, the synagogue was filled to its capacity and beyond with some 150 families.

Today, there about 20 Jewish families attending services once a month at the only temple remaining in the Mon Valley, Temple Beth Am, located on Watkins Street in Monessen. The future is uncertain.

A widower whose three children now live in different areas of the country, he admits it’s sad. “There’s been a Jewish presence in the Valley from the late 1800s. When I was young, during High Holidays, all 30 rows were filled with people, and chairs had to be set up in the vestibule.”

Kneseth Israel was the temple in Monessen when Bergstein was young. It was incorporated in 1906 and the building was located on Schoonmaker Avenue. In 1952, ground was broken for a new building on Watkins Street in Monessen, which opened in 1953. That building is still in use today. In 1967, the Rodef Shalom congregation in Charleroi merged with Kneseth, forming a new congregation. The Kneseth synagogue was renamed Temple Beth Am, or “house for all.” The synagogue serves families in Charleroi, Belle Vernon, Monessen, Monongahela and Donora.

Walking through Temple Beth Am today, there are four classrooms filled with desks, but no students. The last young person graduated about 10 years ago. The photos on the bulletin board are reminders of the rich congregational life that existed. Now, according to Bergstein, there aren’t any Jewish students in the Monessen School District.

“Family members died, moved to Pittsburgh, moved to be with children. Very few children stayed here,” Bergstein explains. “The population has dwindled by two-thirds in this Valley. When it was just the Monessen synagogue in the 1950s and ’60s, it had 150 families; now when you combine them all – it’s just 20 families in the whole Valley.”

A similar scenario has played out in other small towns in and around Western Pennsylvania. Noah Levine is senior vice president with the Jewish Community Legacy Project. His group assists congregations with long-range planning. They are a resource for small congregations located outside of metropolitan areas that have an aging population and dwindling leadership and desire to ensure their legacy, he says.

“It’s a socioeconomic reality of small-town America,” Levine says. “The Jewish demographic phenomenon really parallels the demographic phenomenon of the area. In small-town America, you grow up, you have children, children go to college, want to get jobs and want to better their life and meet people – and just don’t find it in the small communities, so they go to the big cities. In all the major urban areas, there are so many people who grew up in small towns.”

“The realism is this area is not growing,” Bergstein says.

The population of Monessen has fallen from 20,257 people in 1940 to 7,720 people at the last census in 2010, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Since the 1980s, Temple Beth Am has brought in a student rabbi from either Cincinnati or New York from the Hebrew Union College. Then it became every other week, and as resources dwindled, once a month. The temple is open when the student rabbi is there to hold study sessions or services or classes. Currently, the student rabbi is Josh Girschner from Hebrew College in New York City.

During the monthly services, there is a dinner on Friday evenings and a class on Saturday mornings. Bergstein credits his cousin, Phyllis Ackerman, for being the glue that holds it all together.

“That’s really not true,” she counters. “There’s very few of us left. We have services once a month and everyone contributes to the dinner.”

Ackerman serves as president of the congregation. She calls fellow member Loren Vivio her right hand. “Whatever I can’t do and she can, she does,” Ackerman says. Among others involved are Marvin Batten, who serves at treasurer, Mark Shire as secretary of the board and member David Zilka, who provides help in numerous areas, Ackerman says.

She can’t imagine the temple closing. Temple Beth Am has a special place in her heart. “There’s something about that synagogue that holds me, and I do my best,” she says.

Phyllis and her husband, Sidney, were the second couple to be married at the new Kneseth Israel building in 1957. “My life was in that building – I was married there, went to Sunday school there, confirmed there. My children were bar mitzvahed there.”

The Ackermans operated a furniture business in Monessen for 45 years. “There were a lot of stores in Monessen – Eisenberg’s, Cowan’s – most owned by Jewish people. When the mills left, everyone left. There was nothing to keep our children here. They went to college and didn’t come back.”

“We want to be able to maintain our cemetery,” Ackerman says. The congregation has contracted with the United Jewish Federation in Pittsburgh, which has a committee that manages the care of Jewish cemeteries, Bergstein says.

With the help of the Jewish Community Legacy Project and Levine, the congregation has done some pre-planning for what will occur when the members are no longer able to continue to maintain the synagogue. “We’ve made an inventory of all of the items in the building. And the next step, when we get to that is, what do we do with it all?”

The inventory includes the memorial tablets, which list all of the family names from three different synagogues: Donora, Charleroi and Monessen.

“We’ve talked about giving scholarships, donating items to a local historical society, but no definite plans are drawn up,” Bergstein says.

Of the eight to 10 Jewish congregations Levine’s group has worked with in the area, Steubenville and Uniontown have closed their synagogues, and New Castle’s synagogue is set to close in December, he says. Others are still functioning, including Temple Beth Am in Monessen.

“The history of Jewish communities in small-town America is a very important chapter of American Jewish history,” Levine says, “and we are just happy to be able to help those congregations preserve their legacy.”

And congregations do find unique ways to preserve their legacy. According to Levine, in 2016, Latrobe’s synagogue was sold following its closure to the Latrobe Historical Society, and legacy endowment funds set their footprint by providing funds for Jewish activities, interfaith activities and activities in the local community.

“When the time comes that we can no longer financially keep it up, we will have to make a decision. I guess we hope someday to sell that building, but it will break my heart,” Ackerman says.

“It’s still a functioning organization, but it’s small,” Bergstein says. “I don’t dwell on the negative – the positive is we have done it as long as we could.”