An offhand comment changed the lives
of Rob and Rachel Sidlow. Studying medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center six years ago, renting an apartment in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx, they were weighing where to live when their training was finished.

“Why don’t you spend a Shabbat in Mount Vernon?” a friend asked Rachel.

The couple knew “almost nothing” about the city in southern Westchester, Rob says.

The friend — herself a Mount Vernon resident, and a member of the Fleetwood Synagogue — described a small Jewish community that wanted to grow. Perfect! They went for a Shabbat.

As the end of the Sidlows’ medical studies approached, they visited about ten other Jewish communities.

“We weren’t in a hurry. We spent Shabbat in each of the places,” Rob says. “In the back of our minds we were thinking of Mount Vernon.”

Three years ago the family moved there.

Both in their late 30s, the Sidlows joined the Fleetwood Synagogue and its outreach effort to other young families.

In some communities they had visited, including a few that also had projects to entice new Jewish residents, “there wasn’t a sense that we were needed,” Rob says—in Mount Vernon, they were. They had mentioned to Rabbi Gedalya Berger of the Fleetwood Synagogue that the house they bought lay outside the eruv, meaning they could not carry anything to the synagogue or take their young children there in a carriage on Shabbat. “They day we moved in,” Rob says, “Rabbi Berger pulled up,” accompanied by workers who extended the eruv boundaries to include the Sidlow house.

The Sidlows have become active members of the congregation.

“I never used to come to [daily] minyan before,” Rob says. “I felt comfortable coming to the minyan here.”

They have hosted people interested in Mount Vernon’s Jewish community.

And next month, three years after he joined the Fleetwood Synagogue, Rob will be inaugurated as its president.


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Rami Strosberg says he and his wife Debbie recently spent “a regular Shabbos” as part of Mount Vernon’s Fleetwood Synagogue.

They attended mincha-Kabbalat Shabbat services in the downstairs study hall, were invited to a congregant family’s apartment for the Friday night meal and to another for an Oneg Shabbat reception. Saturday, shacharit in the sanctuary; lunch at another family; mincha, seudah shlishit and a communal havdalah back at shul.

The young couple — he’s 25, she’s 24 — was treated like any other members of the synagogue, Rami says. But they’re not members yet.

Residents of Riverdale for a year, they spent Shabbat in Mount Vernon with old friends who are members of Fleetwood Synagogue and urged the Strosbergs to consider moving there.

The couple fit the typical profile of people the synagogue is trying to attract. They’re looking to buy, after years of renting. Not New Yorkers, they’re looking to duplicate a once-familiar heimish atmosphere.

“We both grew up in small Jewish communities in the Capital District,” near Albany, says Rami, a teacher at the Ramaz day school in Manhattan, rabbinical student at Yeshiva University and musician with the Neshoma Orchestra. “We miss the feeling of being missed.”

The synagogue’s Web site (www.fleetwoodsynagogue.org) stresses the community’s “friendly atmosphere with a small-town feel.”

If they move to Mount Vernon, Rami and Debbie — she’s a graduate student in social work at Hunter College — will probably join the synagogue’s four-year-old kollel program, which offers modest stipends to a few young couples who help strengthen synagogue life.

“You can find,” the synagogue’s Web site states, “housing of all types … from stately colonials to co-ops to rental apartments. The commute to Manhattan is a quick 25-minute ride from Fleetwood’s own Metro-North Railroad station to Grand Central Terminal.”

Rabbi Gedalya Berger, the congregation’s spiritual leader, mentions that Riverdale and New Rochelle, are minutes away. The congregation, which has tried to bring people to Mount Vernon’s Jewish community for several years, started to find more interest a few years ago, when it started to include information about apartment rentals in its pitch to prospective members, he says.

Since then, the rabbi says, about a dozen young couples have moved in . They help make the daily minyans, and have brought children who are part of the synagogue’s expanding youth programming, he says.

New residents — including, probably, the Strosbergs — are keeping it young, he says.

“We have already begun looking around for housing,” Rami says.

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The Meyers of Riverdale became the Meyers of Mount Vernon a dozen years ago for a simple reason. “We outgrew our house” – four daughters, says Jonathan Meyer, an administrator at Mount Sinai Hospital.

They settled on — and settled in — Mount Vernon also for a simple reason, Meyer says. “The Mount Vernon community was very welcoming.” A friend from the community, part of the Fleetwood Synagogue campaign to attract new members, had mentioned the community a few years earlier; Meyer and his wife, Beverly Segal, went there for a Shabbat and other synagogue events.

Since moving there, Meyer has served as president of the congregation, and as a member of several synagogue committees, including the membership committee.

He sees more young faces in shul. “For the most part,” Meyer says, “younger people replaced older people” who had died or moved away. “You see the strollers in shul. You hear kids running around.” There’s more business for the candy man who passes out sweets to the children during morning services. “We now have two candy men.”

Old-timers in the synagogue, among whom Meyer, at 54, numbers himself, are delighted with the new blood, he says. “The younger people are more knowledgeable than the older people. The younger people bring a higher level of learning.”

“We see ourselves as a viable option,” he says. When his family first considered moving to Mount Vernon, he told his mother, who lived in Florida. Her reaction: “Why would he want to move there? That was the reputation.” Now he hears other reactions when he tells people where he lives. “Now the reputation is, ‘That’s the next place where Jews are moving.’”