Honoring Beth Am’s Clergy & Leadership

The Potts Effect

Beth Am might not exist were it not for Efrem and Debbie Potts. 

Efrem said the first service he attended at 2501 Eutaw Place was “in utero” in 1927 when it was Chizuk Amuno Congregation. The synagogue building remained his second home until his death at age 90 in 2017. 

The Potts family was deeply committed to Chizuk Amuno. His father Isaac served as vice-president (1947-1953) and as president (1953-1959), and his mother Leah was the Sisterhood president from 1932-1934. In the 1950s, as Chizuk Amuno began transitioning activities to its new home in Stevenson, Efrem remained an active member of the in-town Chizuk Amuno. He not only was devoted to the maintenance of the 1922 edifice, from the boiler in the basement to the pulley system in the dome that controls the sanctuary lighting, he was deeply committed to maintaining a Jewish house of worship in Baltimore City.

In 1974 when Chizuk Amuno determined it would no longer support the Eutaw Place building, Efrem spearheaded the effort to purchase the synagogue and create a new congregation. Efrem and Debbie’s living room was the site of a meeting of supporters who agreed to participate in the plans for a new shul.

 Beth Am began as a family affair. Dr. Louis Kaplan, Debbie’s father, agreed to serve as Rebbe, and her mother Etta suggested the name Beth Am, House of the People. Debbie assumed the role of administrative director, which entailed managing membership, assigning High Holy Day seats, and washing tallit. As Judy Miller, Beth Am president from 1977-1979, wrote in recognition of Debbie’s 18th year of service, “Debbie cleaned, shined, schlepped, organized, cooked, shopped, mailed, phoned, typed, created, dreamt, cajoled, pleaded, cried, and laughed. She drew on her amazing bank of knowledge about the people in the congregation and the way in which they could help Beth Am grow.” 

Efrem was president of Beth Am from 1974-1977 and continued to serve on the Board through 2017. He also kept his eyes on the books, overseeing finances for many years, chanted Torah, sang in the choir, and was Beth Am’s institutional memory. Most importantly, he was dedicated to the congregation and the new life and activity that filled the building that he loved. 

At the first general membership meeting on June 8, 1975, Efrem said, “I think it is not unfair to say that observing Beth Am take form and progress to its present state of development is akin to watching a dream unfold into reality. I find it particularly gratifying that the blending of tradition inherent in the half-century old synagogue and the innovation as new and fresh as Beth Am’s existence has struck such a responsive chord in the hearts and minds of so many.”

Beth Am continues to strike a responsive chord in the hearts and minds of its members, and we have Debbie and Efrem to thank for laying the groundwork. 

A plaque in the Potts-Kaplan Lobby, adjacent to the sanctuary, states our admiration for the family: “This building and congregation stand as testament to the wisdom, devotion, and untiring efforts of our dedicated founders, The Potts-Kaplan Family.”

Dr. Louis Kaplan became Beth Am’s first religious leader. Not a rabbi, he was Beth Am’s rebbe, its teacher–and his influence spread far beyond Eutaw Place. 

Dr. Kaplan was born in Lithuania in 1902 and emigrated to Brooklyn when he was six. He graduated from Columbia University and received his Ph.D. from Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in 1927.  From 1930-1970, He was President of Baltimore Hebrew College and Executive Director of Baltimore’s Board for Jewish Education. From 1970-1975, he was Chair of the University of Maryland Board of Regents, where he had served as a Board member since 1952. He was interim chancellor of University of Maryland from 1976-1977 and was named Executive Vice President of the Joseph Meyerhoff Fund in 1970. His board memberships included Dropsie College, The Annenberg Research Institute, B’nai B’rith Commission on Adult Education, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In addition, in 1946, he was awarded the King Christian X Liberation Medal in appreciation of his leadership in raising funds for the relief of Danish Jews who had escaped to Sweden.  

In 2001, Beth Am produced a publication in memory of Dr. Kaplan. Beth Am member Jack Fruchtman’s essay from that booklet, We Are What We Do, discusses Dr. Kaplan’s and his role at the “do-it-yourself” synagogue he helped to found and guide.

Baltimore’s Do-It-Yourself Synagogue

By Jack Fruchtman Jr., professor of Political Science, Towson University and long-time friend of Dr. Louis L. Kaplan

By the time Beth Am was founded in 1974, many of its members had already had the privilege of hearing Dr. Kaplan lead the Yom Kippur open forums after Chizuk Amuno relocated to Stevenson Road in the 1960s. There can be no debate: without Lou Kaplan there would have been no Beth Am. He envisioned it along the lines of a large chavurah, a free-spirited, independent synagogue without affiliation, without a brotherhood or sisterhood, without a building fund, where study was far more central than prayer. It wasn’t even to have a full-time rabbi or cantor. It was to be, in his own words  [from 1974]…a “do-it-yourself” synagogue where he himself would be our rebbe, our teacher. It was to be an experiment, in today’s jargon, of Jewish “lifelong learning.”

Even the original name, “Beth Am In-Town Synagogue,” was designed to amplify its differences from most of the shiny, new religious establishments that had once been located in Baltimore City, but had, by then, moved to the suburbs, following the Jewish community along the northwest corridor into Baltimore County. Lou Kaplan insisted on the synagogue’s urban roots, and most of the original congregants resided in Mt. Washington or Bolton Hill (with a few scattered in Pikesville or Owings Mills). His goal was to turn the synagogue into a family affair; his wife Etta actually coined the name for the synagogue (Beth Am, or house of the people); his daughter Debbie Potts ran the office as its director; and his son-in-law Efrem Potts, who would become its first president, oversaw the structural rehabilitation of the old building.

But Lou Kaplan’s “family” was not limited to his wife and children. It included all of us whom he inspired to join an exciting enterprise. After all, many of us simply would not have joined Beth Am had it not been for him. Disenchanted with what some of us thought were large, impersonal synagogues along Park Heights Avenue and in Pikesville, we sought something smaller and more manageable, something like a chavurah, where the rebbe was always accessible and inspiring and where we could learn.

To listen to a Kaplan sermon was to hear pearls of wisdom that unlocked the treasures of Torah, broadly speaking, because for him, all learning was Torah, not only Bible. When he taught, he used Hebrew Scripture as his foundation, but he taught us about life and responsibility. If we were to learn anything from Lou, it was that Judaism’s message was both universal and particular: that our duty was not limited to serving the Jewish community, but to doing our part to make the world a better place than when we entered it. This was his calling to us, and he lived by that very regime. He used to say that over the years, he probably did hundreds of favors for people. When anyone ever asked him, in return, what they could do for him, he said that his response was always the same: “Do someone else a favor when you are asked; that is enough for me.” This is, he used to say, an example of Torah.

It’s hard to say that Lou Kaplan actually “retired” from the pulpit since he had served for years as its unpaid rebbe. But when he finally stepped down and Beth Am hired its first rabbi, he returned to his usual seat on the right center aisle in row J. Anyone who came to sit with him got a lesson. He would turn to the Torah reading for the day and teach—for just that one person sitting with him. He would go over passages in as quiet a voice as he could marshal (difficult for a man with a booming basso profundo) and do what he had been doing for the fifty years that had already passed by that time. This was because Lou Kaplan was preeminently a teacher among teachers who wanted so desperately for all of us to learn as much as possible about who we are, where we came from, and by that account, where we were going. He made all of us in Beth Am, everyone he touched, better human beings, and of course better Jews.

Daniel Cotzin Burg is the Alexander Grass Rabbinic Chair of Beth Am Synagogue, where he has been senior rabbi since July of 2010. Prior to his position at Beth Am, he served at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago. Ordained by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles (now American Jewish University), he holds an M.A. in Rabbinic Studies and another in Jewish Education from there and a B.A. in Hebrew Studies and Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin.

His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun,The Chicago Sun-Times, eJewish Philanthropy, The Jewish Review of Books, The Forward, and the Baltimore Jewish Times. He initiated the “Baltimore Justice” column at Jmore, which he has penned since 2016. 

He is a contributing author of Keeping Faith in Rabbis: A Community Conversation about Rabbinical Education (Ed. Herring and Roscher) and Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Spring and Summer Holidays (Ed. Steinberg). He writes the monthly “Baltimore Justice” column for Jmore and blogs at www.theUrbanRabbi.org. Rav Daniel is a senior rabbinic fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and mentors rabbis through the national Clergy Leadership Incubator program (CLI). He previously served on the Maryland Task Force on Reconciliation and Equity. 

Rabbi Burg has helped to articulate a congregational mission and vision for Beth Am’s community engagement work and “In, For Of, Inc.” a 501(c)3 organization affiliated with Beth Am. He serves on the boards of the Elijah Cummings Youth Program, the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, and is a former board member of the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies (ICJS), the IFO, and Jews United for Justice. He has been a vocal supporter in Annapolis and Baltimore of marriage equality, police reform, environmental justice, legislation to curtail gun violence and other important social and societal issues affecting Beth Am’s city and state.