In 1970, when Cindy Payant was looking to convert to Judaism, she didn’t quite know where to go. Fortunately, as it turned out she didn’t have to go far.

“I came to my synagogue because it was at the end of my block,” recalled the former Catholic with a chuckle. “If I had been up the street from an Orthodox shul I probably would have wound up Orthodox.”

Instead, she wound up at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel – and began a new phase of her spiritual journey with the rabbi she would come to call an “excellent teacher.”

“I feel like I owe him so much because essentially without him I wouldn’t be Jewish,” Payant said. “It’s just such a huge part of my life.”

Payant, now 65 and living in University City, is one of many congregants who plan to be on hand at BSKI on Saturday to honor Benson Skoff, now the congregation’s rabbi emeritus, with a luncheon and tribute session after services. The event, which is open to the general public, is intended to mark Skoff’s half century of contributions to the St. Louis community.

Payant, who is in the midst of putting together a book for this weekend’s tribute, is hardly the only one who feels indebted to the congregation’s longtime spiritual leader.

“He’s been a wonderful rabbi for 50 years,” said Shirlene Baris, 73, of unincorporated St. Louis County. “He’s been very close to many, many families and he’s done many lifecycle events, not only for couples but for their children and grandchildren.”

Baris said that one of the things she admires most about Skoff is that, except for the High Holidays, the rabbi emeritus shuns the spotlight of the pulpit and chooses to sit with fellow worshippers instead.

“Every Saturday he’s there but he’s just another member of the congregation,” she said. “That impresses me.”

Baris said that some of Skoff’s most important achievements are a part of his interfaith efforts, which included an informal group of local clergy he put together and a weekly television show he produced and sometimes hosted called Confluence on Channel 4.

Baris’s husband Irl, 82, also has fond memories of Skoff. In one instance, during a confirmation class retreat several students decided to TP the rabbi’s room. Another member of the congregation cleaned the mess up before the rabbi arrived but Irl Baris didn’t feel it was necessary.

“I think he would have gotten a kick out of it,” Irl Baris said.

Not all the memories are happy ones. Irl Baris recalls well the importance of the rabbi’s leadership in the grim days after the 1977 shooting at the synagogue parking lot in which one man was gunned down by a white supremacist.

“It was a very difficult time,” Irl Baris said.

Rabbi Mordecai Miller, who took the reins at BSKI in 1991 after Skoff’s retirement, called his predecessor a scholar and “a treasured colleague” with whom he’d often enjoyed discussions on issues while driving en route to various rabbinic meetings.

“He obviously has devoted his life to this congregation,” Miller said. “I remember having Shabbas dinner with him when I was interviewing for the congregation. [His wife] Rosalind and he were just so hospitable and warm.”

For BSKI board president Rick Kodner, the most vivid memory of Skoff was listening to him during Havdalah after Yom Kippur.

“The synagogue was dark and it was like magic because he has such an outstanding voice,” he said. “No chazzan could ever hold a candle to him.”

Jewish learning was always the focus for Skoff. It still is. Without that, it’s impossible to do what Skoff identifies as the rabbi’s primary job, “making mensches.”

“The purpose of everything that you do is to cultivate people,” Skoff explained. “Our children aren’t born good or bad. They are born with potential. The purpose of the synagogue and a rabbi’s work is to cultivate the good part that you see in every human being.”

For Skoff, whose bachelors and masters degrees, as well as his doctorate, are all in the area of education, learning has always been central to rabbinic work. He still remembers growing up in Philadelphia, where his father, who used to wake him up at 6 a.m. for services, would often read Hebrew from the family’s many Judaic books. Later, while Skoff was still a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, he was named principal of his congregation’s religious school.

Even as he headed his own synagogue in Austin, Skoff taught Hebrew at the University of Texas. Worried that the classes would leave when he did, he made it a special point to extract a commitment from the incoming rabbi that he would carry them on. In fact, Skoff didn’t stop there.

“I even made him promise that when he leaves he made sure that the next head of the congregation would also be able to teach Hebrew,” he said.

To this day, the university still has a Hebrew program.

After stints at congregations in Minnesota and Michigan, Skoff finally found a home at Brith Sholom in 1959, the year before it merged with Kneseth Israel.

Meanwhile, his love of Jewish learning has spread to the family he and Rosalind, his wife of 58 years, raised here. Two of his five children are rabbis themselves. Both will speak at Saturday’s event and the rest will be in attendance along with many of his dozen grandchildren. He also has two great-grandchildren.

Rosalind passed away in 2004.

“The family that we built I give her the credit for,” he said. “I just helped her.”

Skoff has met his fair share of notable people during his time as a rabbi. While visiting Israel, he called Menachem Begin on the phone and found himself invited over for an impromptu one-hour chat at the future prime minister’s home.

In another instance, he got the chance to talk to Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” while hosting a television program in St. Louis. He confronted Teller with complaints from critics that his work had led only to increased potential for human carnage. Teller’s response was immediate – and on target.

“He said that the first time people ever used iron, it was for weapons of war,” Skoff recalled. “Afterwards, we learned how to use it for constructive things. I thought that was the right answer. I couldn’t argue with that.”

Skoff, who headed the St. Louis Rabbinical Association’s radio and television committee, said that sometimes even he was surprised with the power TV had to promote dialogue. Once, while hosting Confluence, he spoke with representatives from both sides of the Yugoslavian civil war.

“These people who were enemies and would not speak to one another came together for this program,” he said. “Afterwards, they stayed together for awhile and they were talking to each other. I was amazed.”

But Skoff’s primary work wasn’t in the studio. It was in the pulpit where it always came back to the difficult task of mentsh manufacture. When young couples would marry, Skoff would always make it a point to tell them the story of the scholar Akiva, who had yet to achieve greatness when he married his wife Rachel but through her encouragement he became one of the foremost thinkers of his generation and she became a better person in the process. In the same way, Skoff said that he tells newlyweds to look for the best in each other and nurture those qualities.

It’s not much different from Skoff’s philosophy towards the congregation he headed for more than three decades.

“They should see in each other the good things that God gave them,” he said. “That’s what a synagogue is for. That’s what a rabbi is for.”

Reservations are preferred for Saturday’s luncheon. For more information, call 314-725-6230.