Synagogue

Stanley I. Minch, the former longtime executive director of Chizuk Amuno Congregation in Pikesville, died of pancreatic cancer Friday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. He was 78 and lived in Cross Keys. A Baltimore native, Mr. Minch graduated from City College in the early 1940s and attended the Johns Hopkins University. His time at Hopkins was interrupted by a two-year stint in the Army, but he returned to earn a bachelor's degree in biology. In college, he met his wife, the former June Nancy Berman, who was Johns Hopkins' May Queen of 1947.

For years now, young Jewish families have been heading for the Owings Mills area, slowly but surely moving the nerve center of their community from older areas such as Randallstown. "The young ones move, the parents follow," said Rabbi Richard Margolis of Beth Israel Congregation.And now Rabbi Margolis' Randallstown synagogue, one of Baltimore's three large Conservative congregations, is bowing to the population shift too. Members decided to move it to Owings Mills early this summer.Citing a membership that had dropped by 25 percent during the past five years, officials voted in June to buy a new $2.7 million office building and plot of land on Crondall Lane just off Owings Mills Boulevard, a few minutes away from the Jewish Community Center's Owings Mills branch.

PARIS - French authorities have charged three people in connection with an attack in April on a Tunisian synagogue on the island of Djerba that killed 19 tourists, one of them French. The three had been among a group of eight detained this month in Lyon. On Tuesday, France's top terrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, charged one of the men, Walid Nawar, 22, with complicity to commit murder and attempted murder. Nawar is the brother of Nizar Nawar, who was killed in the attack when he apparently ignited a truck filled with propane outside the synagogue.

Benjamin Bak, founding rabbi of Baltimore's Shomrei Emunah synagogue and a widely respected spiritual leader of Orthodox Judaism, died of a heart attack Feb. 11 at St. Joseph Hospital. He was 72. Rabbi Bak was born in Lithuania, where he distinguished himself in his teens as a Torah scholar. He entered Yeshiva University in New York in 1940. A short time later, both of his parents and most of his other relatives in Lithuania were killed by the Nazis.In 1943, he married the former Muriel Alexander of New York, a teacher of Hebrew.

JERUSALEM -- Every couple of weeks at an Orthodox synagogue, poets and pundits duke it out with contests of words.As many as 60 people come here -- housewives, aspiring comedians, writers, yeshiva girls, nursery school teachers, even the synagogue's handyman, all crowded into the synagogue's basement. Their weapons are verse, rhyme and "ghazals," Persian couplets of love and mysticism. Wine flows, throats clear, voices rise.But don't expect a night of artful angst or fanciful metrics. The wordplay aims at humor.

A Revolutionary War-era house in Fells Point where the first known synagogue in Maryland met in 1830-1832 has yielded unexpectedly rich deposits of historical artifacts, according to two archaeologists involved in the dig.Privies in the house and on a side lot at Fleet and Bond streets became time capsules near the center of the thriving 18th-century seaport that merged with other towns to form Baltimore.Since May, excavators have uncovered no artifacts from the synagogue but have come across thousands of china cups and plates, wine bottles, pitchers, beer mugs, coins and other items from the late 1700s, the early to mid-1800s and the late 1800s.

The members of Congregation Kol Ami just wanted to follow tradition, they said. They wanted to bury their old prayer books as part of a dedication ceremony for the section of an Annapolis cemetery they recently bought.But cemetery managers said they couldn't do that unless they planned to spend about $1,000 to line the burial site with concrete."If there's no permanent outside container, a concrete box liner or vault, then the grave sinks. The earth will crush the casket and cause an unsightly appearance.

After nine years of planning and 23 years without a synagogue, Columbia's 200-family Beth Shalom congregation is ready for a home of its own.The $1.3 million, 10,000-square-foot synagogue, being built for the Conservative congregation on Freetown and Guilford roads in Simpsonville, is due to open next August, the first synagogue to be built in the county.And leaders of the county's estimated 8,500 Jews say they hope it will help provide a cultural anchor for the fast-growing Jewish community.

The new president of Temple Beth Shalom in Arnold, Jack Blum, says a small percentage of the county's Jews attend synagogue -- and he wants to change that."

The growing congregation of a Bolton Hill synagogue is planning a move to a site in North Baltimore where a little-noticed, unused Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. substation has stood for nearly 50 years. Members of the Bolton Street Synagogue unveiled plans this week to move to the 4-acre site in the 200 block of W. Cold Spring Lane. They hope to move as early as next year. The congregation, which has met in the 1300 block of Bolton St. since 1986, was greeted Monday night with a warm reception from about 80 residents of the surrounding Roland Park and Evergreen neighborhoods.