Liberal Judaism’s series of Open House Shabbats continues this Saturday (10 September) at Bedfordshire Progressive Synagogue (BPS).

This special service will both celebrate Liberal Judaism’s 120^th anniversary and ONE SHABBAT – the annual weekend for small Jewish communities and Jews living remotely.

BPS Chair David Young said: “We are a small and friendly community. It therefore seemed ideal to mark LJ’s 120 years together with the Jewish Small Community Network’s ONE SHABBAT.

“We will read Ki Tetze, which contains the most mitzvot of any parasha in the Torah. One of those mitzvot provides our connected theme reading of ‘home’. Liberal Judaism is the ‘home’ of our community, therefore we are celebrating the founding of that home this Shabbat.”

The service is open to all to attend in person or watch via Zoom. For address details or the Zoom link, please email info@bedsps.org.uk.

The Open House Shabbat initiative will see each Liberal Judaism congregation hold at least one Shabbat during the year, for which they will open their doors – whether in-person, online or both – to the rest of the Liberal Jewish world and beyond.

More about Bedfordshire Progressive Synagogue:

Fifty-six years ago the Beds-Herts Progressive Jewish Congregation was formed.

There were a large number of people present at a public meeting, which demonstrated how long overdue a Liberal congregation was in the area.Of the large membership just one of the founder members Pam Clifford , a regular Friday night attendee on zoom remains with us.

One student Rabbi conducting services and teaching at that time was Geoffrey-Ben-Nathan, who has maintained a strong relationship with BPS since 1972, taking the communal seders, and is now our President.

Services were split between St Albans and Luton until 1982, then when we became more Luton based, our name became Chiltern Progressive Synagogue . The formation of Elstree community by then had reduced our numbers.

Nowadays our services are mostly around Bedford, hence our name Bedfordshire Progressive Synagogue, although we have members covering a large area such as Cambridge, Buckinghamshire, Devon and Glasgow.

Although we don’t have our own building, using members homes and hired halls works well for us, and all the festivals and life cycle events are celebrated.

We are fortunate enough to be custodians of two torah scrolls. One is a Czech scroll from Brno, saved from the Nazis during the war, and the other originally from Iraq came to us via the Westminster Synagogue collection of rescued scrolls.

For over 30 years we have been very fortunate to have David Young running our services and providing Bar/Bat mitzvah tuition, as well as adult study sessions and cheder when required. Other key members help with services and run the zoom ones on Friday evenings.

Chadashot is our quarterly magazine ably edited by Michael Cook.

BPS plays an active part in the wider community such as Interfaith events, and last year were involved in the planting of three oak trees across the county to mark the 80-year anniversary of the Association of Jewish Refugees.