Conservative Synagogue Celebrates 25th Anniversary, Renamed Gesher | The Bridge Shul

On a spring evening in 1998, a small group of year-round Jewish residents met in a vacant East Hampton storefront for their first Shabbat service as the Conservative Synagogue of the Hamptons.

Some wanted the intimacy and depth of living room-style prayer and learning. Others were looking for intellectual and spiritual challenge. All sought community.

And through this synagogue, they have found just that.

Today, 25 years later, the congregation is based in Bridgehampton and has tripled in size, fluctuating between 50 and 60 members at any given time. They are a diverse group, from the Jewishly connected and observant, to culturally Jewish or secular, or raised in other faiths. Some have an extensive religious education; others are new to Jewish learning. There are those who love synagogue, others who used to like synagogue, and some who never went.

They are single, partnered and married. They are parents and caregivers. They are straight, queer and questioning. They are passionate, curious, believing and doubting, celebrating, grieving, seeking and yearning. They are hopeful and scared, courageous and challenging.

Now, they are known as Gesher | The Bridge Shul and it is the only congregation of its kind on the East End. Not only because they are led by a pair of unconventional rabbis — one is female, the other is queer and non-binary — but because they simply do not have a building.

And that doesn’t seem to matter, according to Rabbi Jan Uhrbach.

“Our focus really is on who’s in the room. A synagogue actually means ‘community.’ It doesn’t refer to the building,” she said. “It’s a gathering of people. In Hebrew, the word that would be used, ‘synagogue,’ comes from the Greek, but the Hebrew word, you would speak about ‘kehilla,’ which is a community, and the focus is really the people and that’s what we’re able to do.”

The synagogue is commemorating its anniversary with not only a name change, but also with programming throughout the summer, including Shabbat services and dinner with musician Galeet Dardashti on August 3; Shabbat dinner and a weekend of learning with scholars in residence, poet Merle Feld and Rabbi Ed Feld, on August 18 and 19; and an open house on August 27.

But this Saturday, Princeton scholar, CNN commentator and Sag Harbor resident Julian Zelizer will speak about his recent book on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the role of religion in the public square.

“Heschel was the first thinker that I read who utterly captivated me and I realized, ‘This is what I believe,’” Uhrbach said. “It was the way that he talked about God and the way that he talked about why the human being is here, what we’re meant to be doing and needing to be responsive to something beyond ourselves, and so I ended up in rabbinical school.”

In 1996, just as Uhrbach made partner at the New York law firm of Satterlee Stephens Burke & Burke LLP, she started questioning her values and what gives life meaning — feeling a gap between what meant most to her and how she was spending her time, she said. Similarly, the founding members of Gesher | The Bridge Shul were also looking within, searching for a middle ground between reform and orthodox Judaism.

And so, both struck out on their own paths — ending up where no one quite expected.

“It’s often how the best things happen,” she said. “You set off on a journey with a particular destination and you find that you actually were heading someplace else, where you really needed to be and you didn’t know. And I think that’s what happened here — and, in some ways, that’s what happened to me, so I understood that journey well.”

In the fall of 1998, during her first year of rabbinical school, Uhrbach was visiting her friends on the East End when they suggested that they visit this new congregation, which was by then hosting services at the Old Whalers’ Church in Sag Harbor. When they arrived, it was clear that the person who was supposed to be leading was a no-show.

“The group turned to me and said, ‘Well, you’re a rabbinical student. Will you lead?’ And I did,” Uhrbach recalled. “We say in Yiddish, ‘Bashert’ — it was something meant to be — and I’ve been here ever since.”

In 2013 — the same year the synagogue moved to Bridgehampton — Michael Boino, then in their second year at the Jewish Theological Seminary, joined the congregation as the Ken Kolker rabbinic intern. Together, Uhrbach and Boino have attracted a broad range of people to the synagogue, she said, and she hopes for a day when their leadership is no longer a statement. Amy Eilberg became first female rabbi in conservative Judaism in 1985 — just 35 years ago — and in 2011 and 2014, the first openly lesbian and gay rabbis, respectively, were ordained.

“There’s this theme in Judaism about the wisdom of the outsider — what those who are not necessarily in the mainstream normative cultures see, or don’t see. And that, of course, has also been part of Jewish history,” Uhrbach said. “I think that having leadership that comes from communities who have been marginalized, like women in a patriarchal tradition and a patriarchal country, and a queer rabbi who is also from a marginalized community in that sense, each of us brings the Torah of the outsider in our own unique way.”

One of the Torahs that the rabbis use has a unique story of its own.

It starts with a former congregation member, Leora Barish, who asked if the synagogue needed a scroll. Rabbi Uhrbach leapt at the opportunity, she said, and never expected Barish to present the Torah that she did.

The scroll belonged to her father, Rabbi Louis Barish, she explained, who at the time was in his 90s and lived in Arizona. He hadn’t used the Torah in years — “It was buried in a closet in the local synagogue somewhere, where they weren’t using it,” Uhrbach said — and it needed new life.

And, so, Leora Barish had the scroll shipped to New York, restored and loaned it to the congregation — and her father visited them to tell its story.

At the end of World War II, in 1946, Barish — a Jewish Army chaplain — was sent to Stuttgart, Germany, to work in the office of Jewish Affairs, where he helped those still confined in displaced persons camps, living in desperate conditions. They were liberated, but not free.

“Shortly after he got there, a German man came to the office — now, this is right after the end of the war, you can imagine that’s a little scary — and said, ‘I need to see the rabbi,’” Uhrbach said. “Rabbi Barish met with him and he said, ‘I need you to come with me,’ and he wouldn’t say why.”

The man took Barish to an overgrown cemetery and explained that before the Jewish community was deported from there, someone must have warned them because, the night before, a small group buried something — and he had been waiting for a rabbi to come so they could dig it up.

“The man had stowed a shovel in the bushes nearby and the two of them dug up a small coffin,” Uhrbach said, “and in that coffin was this Torah scroll.”

This Torah would travel with Barish for 20 years, all over Germany, Korea and Vietnam, though according the softer, or scribe who repaired it, the scroll is perhaps 250, even 300 years old. It was made by a Spanish or Iranian softer, who used a distinctive Sephardic script, and ink made from walnut tree gall and acacia gum — a recipe that long predates anyone still alive.

“I feel its history whenever I read from it and, in a very few places, there are very, very faint markings were Rabbi Barish marked the end of the reading,” Uhrbach said. “You’re not supposed to write in the scroll, so normally I would be horrified at that, but every single time I see one of those markings, I’m just so moved and I feel its history and his history, and I feel what Rabbi Barish represented — as one who serves, who answers the call for his country, for his people.

“So I feel both the history of the scroll and its pain,” she continued, “and also its having been brought back to life and everything that Rabbi Barish did.”

As the Gesher | The Bridge Shul enters its next chapter, Uhrbach carries that history with her, both of the Torah scroll and the congregation itself — its core values and the foundation that they’ve built — and hopes that those yearning for something deeper will find them.

“It’s not gimmicky, we don’t have themed Shabbats to entice people,” she said. “The theme is life. The theme is what it means to be a human being. The theme is, what are we most grateful for and what do we most struggle with, how do we age and how do we raise children and how do we make sense of a world that is in transition and distress? That’s where we sit — and that’s very rare.”