December 2024 - December 2025​

Soon after Beth Am was founded in 1974, rebbe Dr. Louis Kaplan wrote about the “felt need of our members and friends for a synagogue with a special blend of prayer and study, tradition and innovation, combined with opportunities for direct involvement…We must be willing to accept the challenge of Judaism as an eternal quest, a spiritual and intellectual adventure for all of us. Even as we revere the treasures of history and thought bequeathed to us, our deepest concerns are for today and for the future.”

Today, we honor that commitment and embrace that challenge – through torah.

The word torah is multi-faceted. In addition to the Sefer Torah, the Torah scroll itself, torah can mean the corpus of Jewish sacred literature. It has also come to mean the specific torah values claimed by individual Jews and Jewish organizations. Beth Am’s “torah” is expressed through five pillars, core values that undergird and animate our work.

As we celebrate our history and our 50th Anniversary, we also celebrate these values. We make a statement about the kind of congregation we are today and the future we envision.