It was just past noon on a Saturday, on the first day of the year 5764—the Jewish Year—and the basement of the Jewish Theological Seminary on West 122nd Street and Broadway was a squall of young Upper West Siders who’d been praying with Biblical intensity for more than four hours. Nearly 250 of them were crammed into the room, swaying, clapping, spilling into the aisles. As they burst into spontaneous harmonies in Hebrew, the effect was somewhere between a 1960’s be-in and a Camp Ramah sing-along. A clean-cut young man with a Neil Diamond face closed his eyes and snaked his head in time with the music. Another, sporting an Israelites-in-the-desert look, extended his hands in supplication. Soon there would be dancing.

Kehilat Hadar, or Community of Praise, is an informal congregation of young, spiritual and often Ivy League Jews which has bloomed into a phenomenon in the last two and a half years. Services are rigorously traditional, but allow women to pray as equals with men. Its Shavuot retreat, which features an all-night study session at a camp in the Berkshires, sold out in three days last year. It has no paid staff, no permanent home and has never done a jot of recruitment, but has managed to tap into a generation that the gurus of "Jewish continuity" have spent millions trying to woo.

"We just wanted to put together a place that would be exciting for us to pray in," said Elie Kaunfer, 30, a bespectacled white-collar fraud investigator turned rabbinic student who was one of Hadar’s three founders. "What we wanted was basically a place that was fully egalitarian and at the same time uses traditional liturgy and a spirited service. The focus wasn’t, ‘Let’s attract young people.’"

But attract them it has. Hadar began with an e-mail in April 2001 by Mr. Kaunfer and two pals announcing the creation of a new Shabbat morning service in a friend’s West 110th Street apartment. They invited a handful of acquaintances; 60 people showed up.

"That was pretty surprising and actually somewhat moving for us, because it showed us that we weren’t alone, that there were lots of people that were looking for something new, even on the Upper West Side," said Mr. Kaunfer.

Today between 150 and 200 people attend Hadar’s Saturday-morning services, which outgrew the 110th Street apartment and now float between various church basements and community centers. Its weekly e-mail alerts go to more than 1,900 people.

"It’s pretty exciting—for Jewish," said Aliza Mazor, an employee of Bikkurim, an agency that provides seed grants to Jewish start-ups like Hadar. "People see it and they’re inspired, and then they go and create their own, based on this whole notion of community-driven learning."

"I just love Hadar," said Rachel Siegel, a 23-year-old grad student in occupational therapy and public health. "I love that there’s a lot of ruach [soul] to it, and I love that it’s a community of people that are around the same age as me."

There’s nothing particularly sexy about Hadar. It doesn’t offer much in the way of a pick-up scene, and you won’t find Madonna paging through a prayer book.

"I think people keep coming back for the service, whether it’s a Shabbat morning service or a Purim party," said Debbie Kaufman, 27, a petite woman with bright red nails, who is one of the five gabbai’im, or leaders, of Hadar. "The constant theme that runs through Hadar is a respect for the authenticity of the tradition, while trying as hard as we possibly can to make it fun, spiritual, engaging, participatory and alive, not just token."

"It gives us a sense of newness, of rebellion even, that we’re doing something slightly different from what we grew up with, and I think that everybody at Hadar is doing something slightly different from what they grew up with," said Nora Simpson, 23, a jaunty New Orleans native with only a smattering of Hebrew and little religious training. "I would say what kept me coming was the service. Because the passion of the service and the fervor, even though I couldn’t join in with the prayers because they were just so foreign to me, that fervor was something that I wanted to be able to take part in."

This column ran on page 2 in the 10/13/2003 edition of The New York Observer.

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