Dallas, USA - When Jews went to synagogue at Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas on a recent morning, most of them didn't sit through the typical three-hour prayer service, conducted mostly in Hebrew.
Instead, they went for a bike ride, talked about Kabbalah or took a yoga class.
Congregation Shearith Israel is one of many synagogues around the country to adopt a new program called Synaplex Shabbat. Just as a cineplex theater shows multiple movies, the synagogues offer a variety of programs catering to individuals' diverse needs.
"It's about creating different points of access to meet people where they're at on the spiritual ladder," said Rabbi William Gershon, senior rabbi at the Conservative temple.
Synagogues across the country are looking to programs like Synaplex as a way to combat a disturbing trend that sees fewer and fewer Jews attending services on a regular basis. If Jews go to temple at all, they typically go only a few times a year, for the High Holidays. In a recent Gallup poll, Jews came in second-to-last in weekly worship attendance, ranking higher only than those claiming no religious affiliation.
Only 15 percent of Jews worship weekly or almost weekly, compared with 68 percent of people who identify with the Church of Christ, 67 percent of Mormons, and 65 percent of Pentecostals, according to the poll.
Ultimately, efforts like Synaplex are about sustaining Jewish life in America at a time when the Jewish population is shrinking. The number of American Jews has dwindled from 5.5 million in 1990 to 5.2 million, according to the latest National Jewish Population Survey. Fertility rates are below population-replacement levels, and the rate of intermarriage - which often produces children not raised in the faith - is at an all-time high of 47 percent.
Synaplex is one of a growing number of national programs trying to reverse those trends. The programs are all different, but they share a common goal: revitalizing the American synagogue.
Synaplex's approach focuses on "doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling" the number of people who attend synagogue on the Sabbath, by offering a menu of options for nontraditional forms of worship, such as yoga and bike rides.
"Synagogues have the potential to really change people's lives in a way that no other Jewish institution can," said Rabbi Hayim Herring, executive director of Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal (STAR), the Minneapolis-based philanthropic partnership that started Synaplex four years ago.
"A lot of synagogues are perceived as cold and unwelcoming," Rabbi Herring said. The challenge, he said, is not to get people to go to the traditional prayer services that they find boring and unappealing but to create new kinds of Jewish experiences that foster a sense of community.
Shearith Israel is one of more than 120 congregations in the United States and Canada experimenting with Synaplex as a way to attract more people and build community. It's a large congregation, serving nearly 1,400 families. Still, only about 150 "regulars" show up for Sabbath services on Saturday morning.
"The synagogue has got to reconfigure itself," Rabbi Gershon said.
He announced the Synaplex program in October on one of Judaism's holiest days of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
"Not everyone is ready to or wants to attend traditional Shabbat morning services," he said in his High Holy Day sermon. "The major innovation of Synaplex is that ... sometimes a service is not where you begin, but where you end up."
Then Rabbi Gershon made a pledge: "I promise you that if you belong, if you participate, you will become a believer, a believer in the synagogue and in the power and beauty of Jewish life."
About 450 people took part in Shearith Israel's first Synaplex Shabbat in November. The mood was light and lively.
"People were actually happy to be there," said Brad Meyers, a 26-year-old copywriter who attended a lecture on "Kosher Sex: What Judaism Teaches About Relationships and Intimacy."
More than 30 people took a "Tour de Torah" bike ride that included a break for Scripture study. Kids played "Jewpardy," and adults practiced yoga.
Meyers, whose father is executive vice president of Shearith Israel, admits he is one of those Jews who hardly ever go to synagogue. When he does, he typically wears a suit and sits through a service he barely understands.
For Synaplex, he wore jeans and a sweater - and came away having learned something.
"Synaplex is really cool," he said. "You're still being Jewish on a Saturday in a synagogue, but it's just not the old-school way to do it."
The new approach has been hard for some old-timers to accept. Meyers said he overheard people talking about "how disgraceful this was, how this wasn't what they wanted, and this wasn't what they were used to."
But even the cynics relented once they stepped into the sanctuary, Meyers said. "They would come back out and tell me, `Oh, my God, this is wonderful! Look at how many people are at services. It's more people than we've had in months.'"
Like other efforts to revive synagogue worship, Synaplex aims to do more than engage the committed. It also seeks to attract the unaffiliated. Meyers helped advance both goals: He brought his non-Jewish fiancee to temple.
He called the variety of programs "a really great way to try to get her into the fun of Judaism without scaring her in the way that a big, boring service would."
Shearith Israel was the first Dallas-area congregation to sign on to Synaplex, but others are following suit. Rabbi Jordan Parr of Adat Chaverim, a Reform congregation in Plano, Texas, said he was planning a Synaplex Shabbat for early this year.
"We basically want more Jews in the pews," Rabbi Parr said.
At a "sneak preview" late last year in Los Angeles, rabbis and staff from nearly 40 congregations gathered to learn about Synaplex.
Veterans such as Elliot Fein, director of education at Temple Beth David in Orange County, Calif., related a success story.
Fein said his temple typically drew 100 people on Friday nights. But 400 showed up for the first Synaplex event, which included a "South of the Border" social hour, with Mexican food and sangria, followed by a prayer service under the stars.
Still, some skeptics wonder whether all this isn't just "religion-lite."
"If yoga on Shabbat is responsive to people's needs, then I'm all for yoga on Shabbat," said Rabbi Eli Herscher of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles. But, he added, yoga has to be a means to get people to embrace a Jewish life; yoga can't be an end in itself.
"If that's where it stays, then at some point, someone's going to ask, `Why do I have to go to synagogue to do yoga?'"
Elana Centor, a consultant for STAR, the Synaplex creators, told those attending that they had to embrace marketing principles, such as branding and positioning. Using PowerPoint to display the logos of Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart, she asked what distinguished those retailers from one another. "They're basically selling similar things, just as synagogues are," she said, adding that synagogues must differentiate themselves from "the competition."
It's not enough for synagogues to create innovative programs if no one knows about them. In this fast-paced, high-tech world, where so many activities compete for individuals' time, synagogues need to lure potential "customers." In this regard, some synagogues have taken a page from the marketing book of another, highly successful religious institution: the Christian evangelical megachurch.
Synagogue 3000 is an organization that, like STAR, is trying to transform American Jewish congregations.
A nonprofit with offices in Los Angeles and New York, Synagogue 3000 seeks to develop innovative leadership in synagogues.
At the group's first meeting, in 2005, Jewish leaders heard from Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose-Driven Life" and founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
"Be a proponent of the new, not an opponent of the old," Warren told the group of about a dozen Jewish rabbis, cantors and artists.
Rabbi Edward Feinstein, senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif., and former rabbi at Shearith Israel in Dallas, was among the leaders who listened to the advice.
Rabbi Feinstein visited Saddleback several times, to see what he could learn.
He said that the first time he attended a service at the church, which draws more than 20,000 worshippers a weekend, he found it so engaging and exciting that "I gotta tell ya, if I wasn't Jewish, I'd have signed up."
Rabbi Feinstein started a new service based on what he saw at Saddleback. In contrast to his synagogue's traditional, formal worship, this "seeker service" involves the rabbi telling stories, a band, and worshippers clapping and singing.
"We tried to design it as the world's greatest first-time Jewish experience," Rabbi Feinstein said.
Perhaps the longest-running effort at synagogue transformation takes a different approach. Experiment in Congregational Education, or ECE, based at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, concentrates on creating "congregations of learning."
Synagogues tend to focus on religious education for children and not adults, said Isa Aron, who founded the organization in the early 1990s. Parents often drop their children off at religious school without entering the synagogue themselves, and they may leave the congregation altogether once their youngest child has a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. "People call it `pediatric Judaism,'" Dr. Aron said.
ECE wants to foster "self-renewing" congregations - synagogues that continually re-examine themselves and experiment with new ways of doing things.
Temple Emanu-El in Dallas was among the first synagogues to participate in the program. In the mid-1990s, ECE helped Temple Emanu-El become more reflective about its mission, said Rabbi David Stern, senior rabbi at the Reform temple.
Now, the synagogue has a "core values" statement that guides its work. And Temple Emanu-El is continuing to change.
"We're doing a lot of synagogue renewal now" related to social justice, worship, community and Israel, Rabbi Stern said. "ECE is what got us started."
He said Temple Emanu-El was considering participating in a new national effort to transform synagogues, called "Just Congregations." Started by the Union of Reform Judaism, the endeavor advocates involvement in social justice work.
All these efforts are complementary, Aron said. They're all about "trying to hook people in."
But "it has got to be deeper than that," she added. Changing the synagogue has to be about enriching Jews' lives.
"For Judaism to survive, Jews need to find it personally fulfilling," she said.
"After the Holocaust and after the creation of the state of Israel, Jews felt this collective identity," Aron said. "That era has really passed."
Today, with the individual, as opposed to the group, often taking center stage, "the synagogue needs to prove to people that it's going to make their lives more meaningful," she said.
"It's going to have to give them something they need - even if they don't realize they need it."