Best-Kept Secrets: Check Out the Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood and The Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine
Inside of Beth Judah Temple
Avalon’s Morey Edelman was fairly new to the area when he helped to introduce the region’s first big-box store, The Home Depot, to Cape May Court House in 1999.
Though he and his wife Ruth spent some time in Stone Harbor, Morey became better acquainted with Seven Mile Beach while setting up shop in his role as The Home Depot’s merchant buyer. Preparations for the local Home Depot’s grand opening brought Morey down from the family’s Bridgewater home every week for a stretch of six to eight weeks.
Morey found the region so appealing that he and Ruth decided to buy a home in Avalon. The Michigan natives purchased a duplex there in 2000. Later they built a house and eventually moved from their Bridgewater home of 25 years, making Avalon their full-time home in 2009.
Now in their retirement, Morey and Ruth, a former social worker for Jewish Family Services, dedicate considerable time to maintaining and growing a sacred structure close to their hearts. The couple enthusiastically serve the needs of the historically significant Beth Judah Temple, the only fully operating synagogue in Cape May County, which sits on the corner of Spencer and Pacific Avenues in Wildwood. Morey serves as president of the Beth Judah Board of Trustees; Ruth serves as co-chair of the Temple’s Kehilla, the Hebrew word for “congregation.”
“Beth Judah is a best-kept secret,” Morey muses. “People don’t know about it.”
Even the Edelmans were not aware of Wildwood’s Beth Judah Temple during their early days in Avalon. While venturing off the island during a bike ride to Woodbine one day, Ruth discovered a gravestone marked with a Star of David in an offshore cemetery. That Star of David, and Ruth’s inquiring mind, led her and Morey to The Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage in Woodbine and its historically linked Beth Judah Temple.
The Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine, an instructional site for Stockton University, sits side by side and in union with the region’s original synagogue, the Woodbine Brotherhood Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark dating back to the 1890s. This handsome red brick building’s original congregants were Russian Jews who immigrated to Woodbine from Eastern Europe courtesy of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German industrialist, banker, railroad tycoon and philanthropist. In helping the Jewish immigrants to escape persecution under Czarist programs and settle in the United States, de Hirsch set up agricultural programs for them in Woodbine. When the town’s soil did not cooperate with the farming plan, Woodbine soon became a manufacturing town.
The settlers lived in Woodbine during the wintertime and worked their way to Wildwood during the summer season in search of better business opportunities. Their industriousness, and that of others from Philadelphia, led to the formation of Beth Judah Temple.
After meetings at the Hotel Dayton, and the first gathering for worship at Max Baker’s Wildwood home in 1911, a congregation intent upon building a synagogue was formed in 1915. As the plaque above the antique shovel hanging in the vestibule outside of Beth Judah Temple’s lovely sanctuary reveals, ground was broken for the synagogue on March 3, 1929. The Wildwood synagogue was officially dedicated merely months later on Sept. 22.
“Beth Judah officially opened just one month before the stock market crashed,” Morey notes of the catastrophe contributing to the Great Depression’s economic hardship in the 1930s.
If the synagogue’s solidly built red and orange brick exterior, its entryway enhanced by the beauty of multi-blue-colored stained glass windows tucked into intricate brickwork and its original sanctuary are any indication, Beth Judah’s founders spared no expense in its formation.
A smartly constructed, massive white Torah ark sits front and center on a raised stage-like area in the sanctuary. The Torah ark houses the Torah that is the five books of Moses behind a lush dark green velvet curtain. These five books, written in Hebrew, include Bereishit (Genesis), Shemot (Exodus), Vayikra (Leviticus), Bamidbar (Numbers), and Devarim (Deuteronomy). The Ten Commandments, scripted in gold Hebrew lettering and flanked on each side by a golden Lion of Judah, appear prominently at the top and center of the Torah ark. An oversized podium for readings of the Torah by the rabbi during services sits in the forefront.
Six stunning stained-glass windows featuring Art Deco designs and significant Judaic symbols line the Temple’s side walls. Rows of well-crafted, dark reddish-hued wooden pews, with a Star of David engraved at the end of every pew, line each side of the synagogue’s middle aisle. Seats within the pews are black-cushioned individual chairs with arms. Exquisite Art Deco-style chandeliers, deftly decorated with Stars of David, hang overhead.
Still, there’s much more to Beth Judah Temple than its striking decor.
The people who brought this house of the Lord to life in the early 20th century, and others who occupied its 275 seats over the years, are present in traditional remembrances of them and those dear to them throughout Beth Judah Temple’s sanctuary and vestibule.
A back wall below the choir loft is filled with attractive white memorial plaques in various shapes marked with congregants’ and loved ones’ names and dates of deaths. Beautiful brass wall mountings filled with small plaques bearing other names and dates of deaths grace sanctuary front walls. Every plaque, white and brass, sits with a small white light bulb next to it. These plaques are all in place “to honor Yahrzeit, the anniversary of a person’s death,” Morey explains. The white lights are turned and lit on the Hebrew date that a beloved person dies.
People sometimes stop by to find their relatives’ names on the synagogue’s memorial plaques, Ruth says. “Some of Beth Judah’s membership traces its heritage to the original Russian Jews in Woodbine,” she adds. That is why, among other reasons, Ruth is deeply committed to the task of having Beth Judah Temple designated as a historical landmark.
As Ruth works to preserve the Temple’s past and meet present congregational needs, Morey has an eye on its future. “We have an excellent board of trustees that share the values and the commitment to maintain and grow the Beth Judah Temple community,” says its president.
Scholar, musician, author, and columnist Ron Isaacs has served as rabbi at Beth Judah Temple since 2015. He is also the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Sholom in Bridgewater, having served there from 1975 through 2015. Dubbed “the teaching rabbi,” Rabbi Isaacs combines his talents and incorporates his guitar skills into lessons during services.
Services, in person at Beth Judah and live stream via the Temple’s Facebook page, facebook.com/BethJudahTempleWildwood, are conducted twice a month, every other week, on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings from April into December. Zoom services are conducted on alternate weeks during those months as well as year-round.
On Friday, July 21, there will be a 7pm outdoor service at the Lou Booth Amphitheater, 2nd and Ocean Avenues, on the beach in North Wildwood.
Visitors, including many U.S. Coast Guard recruits attending services over the years, are always welcome at Beth Judah Temple. Those who wish to worship at the Temple during the High Holy Days or High Holidays must register in advance, at no cost, for security reasons.
Beth Judah’s members also conduct programs of educational or cultural interest that are open to all. Plans are underway for a summer season presentation sometime in August that will explore and highlight how Jewish music influenced Broadway music.
Past Temple programs of interest included “A Taste of Israel at 75,” which celebrated Israel’s 75th anniversary as a state in May of this year. In April, community members and visitors celebrated the right to freedom of religion as they commemorated the Israelites’ Exodus from enslavement in Egypt in a “Freedom Seder.” And, back before COVID-19 lockdowns, in April of 2017, Temple members presented The Defiant Requiem Foundation’s concert-drama “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin.” “Defiant Requiem” tells the incredible story of fearless Jewish musicians who risked it all to bring beauty to suffering souls by performing Verdi’s “Requiem” while they were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt [Terezin] Concentration Camp.
“This place is the center of Jewish community in Cape May County,” Ruth says of Beth Judah Temple, complete with its spotless, sizable social hall and Kosher kitchen.
“We love this place,” Morey adds, “and we want to see it grow.”
