These days, members of Congregation Kol Shofar don’t fret much about rounding up a minyan.
But longtime congregants of the Conservative synagogue, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary on Sunday, remember a time when their fledgling community didn’t always get its 10th worshiper.
“They’d come into the all-purpose room, and set up chairs and set up the bimah and hope to have a service,” recalls Helen Bonapart of those beginnings at the old Jewish center in San Rafael. Participants would stand at the door, waiting and watching — and perhaps praying — for their needed numbers. “Sometimes, they’d get on the phone and call people.”
That’s hardly the case now at the Tiburon-based synagogue.
Kol Shofar has a membership of almost 600 families, runs a religious school for 450 youngsters and is starting to weigh plans for expanding its site, a former school that it has occupied since 1984.
“Every square foot of the place is being used,” says Ron Brown, the 57-year-old president and an eight-year member of the congregation.
“On the average Sunday morning, we have about 350 children in the building plus two or three adult education classes going on.” That kind of popularity has “created a severe space crunch.”
Ruth Yaffee, one of Kol Shofar’s founding members, recalls the early days when congregation meetings were more like a family gathering.
“It was a very small group to begin with, maybe a dozen families,” said the 89-year-old Yaffee, who will celebrate her 65th wedding anniversary with her 92-year-old husband, Harry, at the same party marking the congregation’s anniversary. The event will be held at the Sheraton Four Pointe Hotel in San Rafael.
Back in 1962, worshipers met at the original Jewish center in downtown San Rafael, she said. One or two knowledgeable members would volunteer to lead services.
“Since we didn’t have an official place, the congregation telephone was in our home and we had a post office box,” recalls Yaffee. “My husband was the very first secretary-treasurer.”
The San Rafael site was the first of many homes of what became a nomadic congregation. In fact, members don’t always agree on when — or where — the congregation moved during its early travels.
David White, the congregation’s first full-time rabbi who came on board in 1976, “used to call us the wandering Jews because we wandered from one place to another,” says Yaffee.
After the Jewish center was sold, the members took up temporary quarters in a Terra Linda church. From there, members moved to another Jewish center at the site of today’s Osher Marin Jewish Community Center.
Kol Shofar then rented an old school building and then another before purchasing the current land 18 years ago on Blackfield Drive.
Reflecting on the congregation’s humble beginnings, Yaffee considers its current size “absolutely amazing.”
Despite the growth, longtime congregants say Kol Shofar has retained the welcoming and participatory atmosphere that characterized its start.
“It was very haimish,” says Bonapart, a 69-year-old Mill Valley resident who is one of four generations of her family to belong to Kol Shofar. “It was just a group of people who wanted to have a Conservative service and to pray in a way that touched their hearts.”
Creating that kind of congregation involved some handiwork. Founding member Dr. Sam Margoliash, a dentist who was good with his hands, fashioned the Torah crown, doors to the ark and even sewed the curtains, recalls Bonapart.
Her parents, the late Philip and Sylvia Sennett, joined the congregation in 1969. Bonapart, formerly a member of Congregation Rodef Sholom, moved to Kol Shofar later on.
Members credit the congregation’s successive senior rabbis — White and, since 1992, Lavey Derby — for contributing to Kol Shofar’s astonishing growth spurt. They also say the participatory nature of services gets members involved and keeps them that way.
“It’s an ownership thing,” said Fred Cherniss, a past president who joined the synagogue about 25 years ago. “You feel this is actually your shul. You don’t come and get entertained.”
Derby said that from the very beginning, Kol Shofar had a “feel of extended family.
“It’s very noisy. At times, there are squabbles. Everybody expresses their opinion about everything and at the same time, there is deep, deep caring.”
Derby pointed to the unwritten custom at Kol Shofar of reaching out to guests and new members who venture into services. He also cited the longstanding tradition, dating to Rabbi White, of hosting a Sunday brunch for youngsters and adults attending classes and meetings.
“It’s like camp or a huge family,” said Derby. “We’ve got hundreds of kids and hundreds of adults in the building. There’s no place to move.”