Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 15, 2026

American Jewry Needs a Rabbinic Leadership That Can Move It

Maintaining standards, and bending them, in small-town West Virginia.

Upon becoming the student rabbi at a Reform congregation in Williamson, West Virginia, Gary Zola discovered that congregants expected him to visit them at their places of business on Shabbat morning. He recounts the experience, and his initial shock at the expectation that he was to go to such length for members of his flock who neither observed the Sabbath nor attended synagogue:

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