Having received approval from its membership, B’nai El Congregation is set to move onto the grounds of Congregation Shaare Emeth in Creve Coeur and take on a new mission in life.

“It’s a collaborative effort which is pretty much a groundbreaking synagogue model where B’nai El would share the campus of Shaare Emeth,” said Amye Carrigan, president of B’nai El. “We’re thrilled to have Shaare Emeth as a strong collaborator.”

Under the new plan, B’nai El will shift its focus to providing programming for adults age 50 and older. B’nai El congregants will assume membership in Shaare Emeth while Shaare Emeth members can participate in B’nai El offerings. Carrigan said B’nai El will retain its identity and neither side considers the arrangement to be a merger.

“The memberships would be united and B’nai El would maintain their own legal entity as well as maintain their own financial control,” she said.

Greg Yawitz, first-vice president of Shaare Emeth, which has about 1,700 families, released an email statement from the congregation committing itself to working with the “new B’nai El” which it described as an “innovative Collaborative based at Shaare Emeth” dedicated to helping adults in the target age group create opportunities for learning, engagement and growth.

“The Shaare Emeth Board of Directors has enthusiastically welcomed the opportunity to partner [with] B’nai El in this re-branding of their congregational mission to ensure a lasting legacy for their congregational heritage…” it said.

The message, which noted that Shaare Emeth would help pre serve the memorabilia of the smaller congregation, said that no details were available on many aspects of the arrangement because of the “self-directed” nature of the new endeavor.

“I know that they will find a comfortable, warm and intimate congregational family within our community,” said a statement attributed to Shaare Emeth’s Rabbi James Bennett included in Yawitz’s email. “I look forward to sharing their joys and sorrows and helping to make this difficult transition a bit easier.”

He expressed excitement at the prospect of Shaare Emeth’s playing a role in new B’nai El.

“We can now dream and create together, using our shared resources to help provide opportunities for deeper and more meaningful Jewish lives for all who wish to join this enterprise,” wrote Bennett.

Carrigan said she could not release any details of the vote in her organization but that the proposal did receive approval from the full membership.

On the other side of the table, the deal was agreed to by a vote of Shaare Emeth’s board.

B’nai El, which has about 135 families, has found itself navigating changes and challenges of late. The most recent full-time rabbi Daniel Plotkin left in 2011. Last year, the congregation lost longtime tenant Saul Mirowitz Day School-Reform Jewish Academy and eventually put up its synagogue campus and building up for sale.

Rabbi Scott Saulson was hired on a part-time interim basis to serve the congregation because of his experience with older adults and helping congregations going through transitions.

“We were at the same point as so many congregations across the country and even locally,” said Carrigan. “With less people affiliating and so many other factors including the building, we just needed to develop a new model because the traditional congregation for most small congregations just isn’t viable anymore.”

Similar sentiments have affected the area’s synagogue scene in recent years. Two local Conservative institutions, Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel and Shaare Zedek Synagogue, voted to join together late last year. Meanwhile, Reform synagogue Kol Am shut down entirely in 2011.

Saulson praised this new effort saying that his congregation was embracing the older generation’s “persistent quest for justice, love, joy, healing, and meaningful companionship.”

“B’nai El and Shaare Emeth are giving new meaning to ‘show me’ in ‘The Show-Me State,’” he wrote in an email to the Light. “We are blazing yet another path in the contemporary and urgent effort to reinvent Jewish engagement in an age of demographic and financial stress.”

Carrigan said that the move will help deliver programming to an underserved segment of the Jewish population, something she said will benefit the whole community.

“It’s not that they don’t want to have things available to help them live Jewishly,” she said. “There just hasn’t been anything out there.”

Carrigan, who noted there was no timeline yet worked out on the new arrangement, said that the unique nature of the collaboration meant there were still a number of specifics to be decided through an ongoing effort.

“That’s the groundbreaking part of this. It is a true collaboration in many senses in that some things will be combined and some things won’t,” she said. “At this point, there are still so many details we have to determine. It will be a process that unfolds.”

B’nai El was founded in 1852. Shaare Emeth was created after breaking away from B’nai El in the late 19th Century.