The year 1984, immortalized by the title of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, was also, on a much happier note, the year in which Central Reform Congregation was officially founded by a small but determined group of St. Louis Jews. They wanted to change the standard model for synagogues to meet the needs of the rapidly changing local Jewish community. The congregation recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.

An article in the June 20, 1984, edition of the Jewish Light, “New Reform Temple Based on Set of Creative Concepts,” reports that a 1982 demographic study of the St. Louis Jewish community found that one-third was not affiliated with a temple or synagogue. The survey also found that the Jewish population here resides in a corridor from the city’s Central West End out to Chesterfield, almost equally divided on both sides of Lindbergh Boulevard. 

So the small group of Reform Jews set out to establish a new congregation, not only to attract these unaffiliated but also to create a temple based on a set of rather unique and highly creative conceptions, the Light article said.

Only 14 households were involved in establishing the guidelines and a dues structure for this new temple, the story said. At that stage, they had neither adopted formal by-laws nor applied for membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism). They also didn’t have a permanent synagogue building or a full-time rabbi.

The founding CRC group was most proud of the name they selected, calling it a “triple entendre.” The name referred to the location they planned to select, the fact that the temple would be central to their lives and that they would be a brand new congregation, not just an informal chavurah, with a full-time rabbi and, eventually, a synagogue building.

In the article, Roger Goldman, a professor of law at St. Louis University who headed the burgeoning temple’s trustees, stressed that it was not CRC’s intention to compete with existing temples, but rather an effort to offer another alternative in the area. 

“Prospective members are welcome, and indeed encouraged, to attend meetings or services, and if they opt to join, to take an active part in the congregation’s affairs,” he said. “What the Central Reform Congregation has to offer is a chance to form a new temple structure, to mold it exactly into what the members want – from the rabbi to the liturgy and the music.”

The congregation from the very beginning saw itself as egalitarian, not only in terms of male-female, but children-adults. Gender was not, and is not, taken into consideration when hiring rabbis. The founders did not want separate brotherhoods and sisterhoods.

The original trustees consisted of three men and two women: Goldman, Steven Skrainka, Richard Baron, Debby Wafer and Susan Spiegel. Goldman served as the initial chairman and first president of CRC. Rabbi Howard Kaplansky, who was then the regional director of the UAHC, worked with the trustees to help them in the establishment of the congregation. Kaplansky is now Rabbi Emeritus of United Hebrew Congregation.

The late Walter Ehrlich, in his history of the Jewish community of St. Louis, “Zion in the Valley, Volume II,” devotes considerable space to the founding and growth of Central Reform Congregation. He writes that before CRC built its own synagogue, it rented space in the First Unitarian Church, at Waterman Avenue and Kingshighway in the Central West End, for a religious school and for services.

It was only Jewish congregation to be located in the city since all had moved out into the county decades earlier.