HARRY KIRSBAUM Staff Writer

KRISTA HUSA Staff Photographer

t is Friday night and the dozen or so congre-
gants have taken their places in the small,
yet dramatic, chapel at Beth Isaac
Synagogue in Trenton. Tonight's visiting
student rabbi, who comes in once a month, always
draws the big crowd. The other Shabbats attract
only the diehards for a service conducted by one
of their own.
Rabbinical student Jonathan Siger, 30, has
made the four-hour trip here from Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
He is in the fourth year of a five-year rabbinical
program at the college, a training ground for the
Reform movement.
Siger, who did improvisational comedy at
the Second City nightclub in Chicago
from 1991-93, bases his sermon
fop to bottom:
loosely on the weekly Torah por-
tion, but his improvisation skills
anathan Siger, student
rabbi, reads torah with Jack
come into play whenever he is
one-ofTrenton, a congregation
questioned on a point. The
member since 1966.
questions are frequent and
never wait until his sermon is
aac members Helen Davis,
finished.
17 Jones, Mae .Axelrood
"I've only been heckled
and Sylvia Pick.
once," Siger said. "But that
erlos, left, and Neal
was at another shul."
ng
greet each other
This shul has a style all its
the congregation's
own, shaped by its location in a
anuka party.
small downriver community with a
limited, diverse Jewish population and
by its desire to be something special.
Beth Isaac embodies Judaism at its most basic
— its history shows that faith cares little about big
numbers, and that Jews will find each other no
matter where they might be living.
Built in 1963, Beth Isaac is not a mega-syna-
gogue boasting a large membership base and the
great wealth so common to suburban Detroit. It
doesn't try to be.
"We knew we weren't going to be a
[Congregation] Shaarey Zedek," said Marilynn
Jones of Ypsilanti, one of Beth Isaac's founding
members. "But it was big enough for our needs."
Thrust into the national spotlight by an act of
hate in 1967, the congregation does not fear harm
from outsiders, but rather is more threatened by
the passage of time. The number of members is
dwindling as young congregants head elsewhere to
begin their adult lives.
"They've all moved wherever their future took
them," said Harriet "Sylvia" Pick of Trenton,
another founding member. "Just like our future

WILL To SURVIVE on page 10

