Brooklyn, USA - A few minutes into a Saturday service last month, two teenagers in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats crept into Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom in Borough Park, Brooklyn. They were not pleased with the proceedings.
Rabbi Karen Bookman Kaplan was leading the two dozen congregants in a prayer: "God of light and sun, we thank you for the morning and the day to come."
The cantor, Jill Hausman, sang, "Of you, who are my soul's delight."
The two young men had seen enough. They ducked out and headed toward their own, much larger synagogue two blocks away.
"I was really surprised to see such things going on," said one of them, David Waldman, 17, a member of a Hasidic sect called the Bobov. "The real Jewish law says there should not be any women as rabbis or cantors."
He had often wondered about the temple as he walked past, had heard stories about it. Now he knew. "This place should not be known as a Jewish shul," he said. "It's a fake."
It is strange sometimes to be the last Reform Jewish congregation left in Borough Park, home to one of the city's largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews, including ultra-Orthodox sects known as Hasidim.
Inside the temple, life actually seems fairly ordinary. Children go to religious education twice a week. The congregation's newsletter carries an item from the Sisterhood announcing the donation of a new vacuum cleaner.
In the sanctuary, a comfortably worn-in space of red pews and dropped ceilings, the Torah is fetched from its wooden ark on Saturday mornings. Rabbi Kaplan, in the open-ended style that characterizes many Reform services, leads discussions on what the writers of the holy books might have intended. Prayers are offered for the sick and the dead.
Outside, though, in Progressive Temple's corner of Borough Park, which is almost completely Hasidic, some temple members said they felt like outcasts.
"When I say 'Good Shabbos,' some of them say it back to me," Rabbi Kaplan said. "Some of them."
When members hop into their cars after services to head home, said Stan Hollander, a vice president of the temple who had his bar mitzvah there in 1953, "we are looked at somewhat askance." Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath.
For much of the last century, Borough Park belonged to the motherland of liberal-leaning American Judaism that spanned central and southern Brooklyn. But as Jews fled for the suburbs, they were replaced by, among other immigrant groups, fast-growing Hasidic populations. A 2002 study done for UJA-Federation of New York found that only about 2 percent of Borough Park's 75,000 Jews identified themselves as Reform, while nearly three-quarters said they were Orthodox.
Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom, housed in a modest gray former Presbyterian church on 46th Street, was born of the merger of two dwindling congregations. The one that had been at the site since the mid-1950's, Borough Park Progressive Synagogue, no longer had a full-time rabbi. The other temple was Beth Ahavath Shalom of Bensonhurst, whose larger but still shrinking congregation was forced to sell off its stately building on Benson Avenue, three miles south of Progressive Temple.
Rabbi Kaplan, who was the leader of the Bensonhurst temple but whose contract, which expires next month, is not being renewed, said that when her temple's board decided on the move, "My first reaction was 'Borough Park question mark exclamation point.' "
Though the marriage was to some extent one of convenience - "We had a building, and they had a congregation," Mr. Hollander said - the blended family seems to get along.
"We kind of liked the people that were here," the Bensonhurst temple's former president, Brian Wilkow, said before a recent temple board meeting, to which Mr. Hollander of Borough Park quickly added, "And now they're stuck with us."
But not everyone from Bensonhurst made the move. For some older congregants, said Roz Kirschenbaum, a trustee of the merged temple, "The idea of taking two buses was too much."
Madeline Kaye, one of the temple's presidents, said, only half-jokingly, "There were people worried that the ultra-Orthodox were going to stone us in the street."
No stones have been cast, but congregation members said they had been greeted coolly by the neighborhood's Hasidim, who - with their combination of strict conformity to Jewish rites and conservative dress - purposely set themselves apart.
"Culture shock," was how one Bensonhurst transferee, Shara Cohen, described the feeling of walking down the street.
Sherry Burns, a member of the board, said that neighborhood children had called temple members "Shabbos goyim," the phrase for the non-Jews that Orthodox Jews sometimes use to do tasks forbidden on the Sabbath.
A spokesman for the Bobover Hasidim, Yitzchok Fleischer, said that as far as he was concerned, Progressive Temple was "not even an entity."
On the other hand, the children in the neighborhood have at least shown an interest in the place, Rabbi Kaplan said. "Kids are dying to know what's going on," she said. "Especially in the warm weather, they're crowding around the door. It's the only thing in the neighborhood that's a little bit different."
Progressive Temple could use a lot more young members. Though the temple claims a membership of 139 families, two recent Saturday morning services each drew about 25 people, nearly all of whom appeared to be over 60 years old.
Marcia Wilkow, a past president, said that the temple would try to recruit members from the unaffiliated Jews who are being priced out of neighborhoods like Park Slope and heading south.
A mainstream Orthodox rabbi in the neighborhood, Gershon Tannenbaum, director of the 800-congregation Rabbinical Alliance of America, said that while Progressive Temple was "very welcome here," he doubted it could survive much longer.
Mr. Hollander said that despite the demographics, the congregation had no plans to move the temple to more fertile ground. "We just merged," he said. "The mortgage is paid. Consider the expenses of finding a building or building a new building.
"Besides," he said, "we were here first."