Finchley Reform: A Simple Way to Make a Difference
Finchley Reform Synagogue will open up as an emergency shelter for homeless people this winter. Adrian Sieff and Holly Kal-Weiss explain more...
At night, the streets of winter are cold and insecure. In the UK, the average age a person living on the streets dies is 48.
For the past nine years, a group of Barnet churches have been opening their doors to provide shelter for people who would otherwise be sleeping rough.
This year Finchley Reform Synagogue will be joining them. Every Thursday night for three months from January to March we will be opening our synagogue to up to 15 people who have no home and no bed, providing them with a hot meal, a warm place to sleep, breakfast – and hospitality.
Yom Kippur is a rather cerebral affair. It is a day of thoughts, of words, of prayer: a day of judgement (lehitpallel, to pray, means to judge oneself). We have acknowledged how fragile and fleeting is our life. We have read God’s rhetorical challenge to us: is not the fast demanded of us to feed the hungry and to provide the poor with shelter? (Isaiah 58)
Immediately after Yom Kippur finishes we turn from words to deeds. Our first act is to start building a sukkah, our temporary shelter, open to the elements. The intellectual becomes visceral.
But if this was all we did, our atonement would enact our transitory life without enacting tzedakah. So we invite usphpizin, guests, to share our food and shelter. It is as if Sukkot forces us to turn concrete our promises and our vows, helping us to be the people we want to be. Perhaps this is why the gates of mercy do not close until the end of the festival.
We met 'J' last winter. He left his job and his flat in London and went to Brighton to look after his dying father. When his father died, 'J' returned to Barnet, jobless and homeless. He was fortunate that he found the Homeless Action in Barnet Day Centre. HAB referred him to the winter shelter, so he could sleep at night warm and unafraid.
The shelter is not Finchley’s first foray into working with homeless people. In the mid 1990s, the synagogue ran a weekly lunch club for homeless people. Janet Berenson, who set up the project with Marion Cohen, recalls: "The first day we had 12 guests. As word spread, the number grew until we regularly had 120 people. One guest walked seven miles."
It was the success of the Finchley lunches that provided the impetus and inspiration for the establishment of the Homeless Action in Barnet Day Centre that now refers people to the winter shelter. And so the spiral reconnects us, as this winter we will have the opportunity to invite 15 guests into our synagogue, to share food, warmth and shelter; to touch, and perhaps save, lives we might otherwise never have encountered, and to have our lives touched and enriched by them. Other synagogues in the borough are also joining in: Finchley Progressive and New North London will both be running a shelter. Who knows what future this initiative will spawn?
To find out more about the winter shelter please contact Adrian or Holly at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Find out more about Finchley Reform Synagogue
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