Lighting a new path: McHenry Jewish congregation observes 1st Hanukkah in new home shared with church

Since returning as an adult to the synagogue he grew up in, Brian Horn’s job during the McHenry County Jewish Congregation’s annual Hanukkah party is making the latkes.

On Sunday, Horn was outside with a hotplate, frying the potato pancakes that are a staple of the Jewish winter celebration. He wears the same coat every time because by the end of the day, it will be splattered with cooking oil.

The congregation needs more people like Horn – young people who grew up in McHenry County, moved away for college and early careers who have returned with children, said Ellen Morton. She is a past president of the synagogue’s board.

“We would love to have people join us. It is not hard to become a member,” she said.

“The problem is kids grow up and they move away. We need more who are the right age” and having children to come back to the fold, said Gale Harris, current president of the board.

This year was the first that synagogue members have held the Hanukkah party in their new location – the building they now share with the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation at 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry.

A year ago, members of the Jewish community in McHenry County were debating their next steps. The congregation had formed in 1979, but its membership had dwindled to about 20 families and a handful of children in religious education at their aging building outside Crystal Lake.

After a Northwest Herald story about their plight, both the Universalist parishioners and St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock reached out to Rabbi Maralee Gordon about sharing facilities. The Universalist’s seemed like the right fit, Gordon said.

“I am in their rotation to fill in” when the usual minister is out, she said. The two congregations also shared space back in the early 1980s, when both were new.

The Jewish congregation started holding services at the new location in August, but completing the move into the space took a little longer. While they found a buyer for their building, the sale didn’t close until Dec. 18. As they prepared to bring their religious education classes to the Universalist congregation’s building – a former restaurant - there was flooding in the basement rooms.

In the meantime, the Jewish congregants cleared out the old building, selling what they could. What couldn’t be thrown away was buried at the Jewish cemetery.

“We had 45 years of stuff” to go through, Morton said.

Since deciding to share space with the Universalists, they have lost a few more families, Gordon said

“There are some who associated the building with the congregation,” Gordon said.

Morton said the congregation “has landed in a really good place.” The two faiths have a lot of similarities, including their work on social causes and social awareness, she said.

“We are aligned particularly well,” Morton said.

Still, it is a time of transition for the small Jewish congregation, Morton said, but a choice that had to be made as their former building became an expense they could no longer bear.

“We are in the right place with nice people. We had to scale back our obligations to a building and focus on the community. The community is not a building,” Morton said.