Friday Night Services in Alabama

Written by Zack Reiter and David Klein

J.tel takes a quick picture before Shabbat at Temple Beth Or

On Friday night we went to Temple Beth Or in Montgomery, Alabama for Friday night services. We were at a Reform synagogue that used mostly classical melodies. We were surprised to hear an adult choir perform the songs because we could not see them. They were in a choir loft hidden behind the bimah.

This Temple has the tradition of replacing the Rabbis sermon with Torah reading once a month. This happened while we were there. They Rabbi read each sentence of the weekly Torah portion in hebrew and directly followed it in english. When it was time to take the Torah out, there was a manican like structure set up for the Torah to hold it's parts. We thought it was pretty neat.



Everyone was very friendly and inviting and would always come up to you and say Shabbat Shalom. We noticed a few slight differences in the prayer book compared with the one we know at North Shore Synagogue. In our temple the text is italicized when the congregation should say the text outlide while their prayer book just has an indented line. The prayers that they used in their services are the same even though the melodies might be slightly different.



We felt like we were part of the community and we were welcomed. All of the people acted like we've been with them for all of our lives. This reminded us that id doesn't matter whether we are in New York or in Alambama since we are still part of the Jewish community of the world.