If you attend services at Santa Rosa’s Congregation Beth Ami on any given Saturday, there’s a good chance you’ll spot Susanne Batzdorff, Evelyn Gurevitch and Edith Newman sitting in the pews.
Calling them synagogue regulars doesn’t do the trio justice. All three women are more than 100 years old and have long been pillars of the Beth Ami community, two of them for at least seven decades.
“It’s our second home,” said Newman, the baby of the bunch at 101.
Newman’s two longtime friends nod in agreement as they sit together in late January on the bright blue couch in her Santa Rosa living room, with an original Marc Chagall on the wall behind them.
“It’s part of my being,” Batzdorff, who is 103, said of the synagogue. “I go to services as regularly as possible.”
The three centenarians are deeply woven into the fabric of the Beth Ami community. Together, Newman and Gurevitch helped raise money for the building on Mayette Avenue that was dedicated in 1963, after the congregation met for years in a nearby church.
Batzdorff — a retired public librarian who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with her parents and brother — started the synagogue library and named it the Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library in honor of Evelyn Gurevitch’s mother-in-law, an avid reader. Batzdorff, a playwright, author and poet, also served as its head librarian for 20 years.
Their kids and grandkids went to religious school and celebrated bar and bat mitzvahs at the Conservative synagogue. All three women say Kaddish there for their late husbands.
“I live alone, so temple, for me, is people, and I need people,” said Newman, who, like Batzdorff, escaped Nazi Germany as a teen and made it to the U.S., settling in New Jersey with her parents.
Until recently when Newman hurt her left wrist in a fall, she still drove herself to Beth Ami for services. Gurevitch plans to resume driving herself to services and weekly exercise classes at Beth Ami once her car is back from the mechanic.
The exercise sessions are just one way that Gurevitch, 102, keeps active — something that she and the other two women say they consider essential to living a long and fulfilling life. Gurevitch also meets monthly with a group of fellow retirees, enjoys the symphony, plays sudoku and always has a jigsaw puzzle in the works. She’s currently taking part in a study on “super agers,” the term used to describe seniors with the mental or physical capacity of their far younger counterparts.
Gurevitch grew up in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighborhood that was once home to a large Jewish population, before moving to Santa Rosa in 1944 with her husband, Leo, to start a chicken farm. At the height of operations, she said, “we had 10,000 chickens.” Later, after both kids left home, she worked as an attendance clerk for city schools, a position she held for 25 years.
Newman and her husband, Herbert, also settled on a Santa Rosa chicken farm, and Newman later started a home decorating venture with friends. Both she and Gurevitch laugh heartily when asked whether they ever miss being in the bird business. The answer? A resounding no.
As the three women warmly and enthusiastically share their wide-ranging impressions — of chicken farming, child raising and community building — Judaism repeatedly emerges as a unifying thread. They talk about the thrill of witnessing Israel’s founding, the horror of today’s rising global antisemitism and how their Jewish identity shapes them.
“It’s really a lifestyle,” said Newman, sitting across from a wall adorned with artwork of learned Jewish figures. “I was always proud to be Jewish. It’s in me.”
At the center of that lifestyle is Beth Ami. But as much as the women gain from the synagogue, the synagogue gains from them.
“They inspire all the members to be better people and better leaders,” said Rabbi Ron Koas. “I am a better rabbi because of them.”
Koas said the women reflect both the history and spirit of Beth Ami, which dates back to the 1940s. Both Newman and Gurevitch are founding members. Batzdorff joined after she and her husband, Alfred, moved to Santa Rosa in 1982 to be near family members.
“We have lots of friends,” Gurevitch said. “We don’t see them for weeks on end. But boy, if we just call them and say ‘we need you,’ they’re there.”
Time has, of course, taken many longtime Beth Ami congregants, but the three women still have each other. Their bond spans decades, “through good and through bad,” Newman reflects — from the births of grandkids to milestone anniversaries to the deaths of spouses and other beloved family members. They knew each other’s parents and now share stories of great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.
If one of them doesn’t show up at synagogue, another will check in to see if she’s OK. When Gurevitch can’t attend services in person, she participates online, but she hasn’t succeeded in getting Newman to do the same, despite her best efforts.
“We can’t convince her to be on Zoom, or on FaceTime,” said Gurevitch, who video-chats weekly with another Beth Ami friend who now lives in El Cerrito.
Newman chuckles at her friend’s ribbing, and Batzdorff joins in. The trio’s easy laughter, the way they seamlessly fill in details of each other’s histories and the instinctive way they reach for each other’s hands all reflect how inextricably their lives are linked.