Beth Shalom Synagogue

I'm standing in front of the oldest Torah observant shul in Long Island. We're continuing our journey to shul in front of every single shul in the world. Today, we're at Beth Shalom in Lawrence, New York. Let's go check it out. >> That's correct. We were founded in 1928. So, we are just a few years away from our 100-year anniversary. This sanctuary is [music] one of the most iconic sanctuaries in the Five Towns. Besides it being one of the largest, but it just has this look. You can look around and you sort of see the stained glass windows on the sides, [music] the wood paneling, the big Aron. It's really really it's a vision. >> Wow. >> a combination of some of very, very old swarms. Of course, there's some of the newer ones, you know, with the covers from October 7th commemoration of [music] those who fell. I don't have the stories of all of them, but some of them are very, very old safer Torahs. This one happens to be from my grandfather who survived [music] the war. And after he came here, he had a safer Torah written for in memory of his parents and my grandmother's parents. But when he became [music] too old to take care of the safer Torah, so he gave it to me. We brought it down to Atlanta and then I took it with me to Montreal. And now it is here with us. >> Wow. >> So, you know, we always love a good artifact. Here they have a a ton of libraries. One of the libraries that we're in in the shul, I see a Michtav M'Eliyahu safer of Rav Dessler. This was actually printed in London about 70 years ago. London. This is the original safer that Rav Dessler published, which is pretty amazing. >> Back in the day, one of the probably the first Hatzalah office in the Five Towns was housed here in Beth Shalom. You can just see how old this is. And certainly now they look like they're beautiful building. They don't have anything to do with this anymore. [laughter] But this was the center of the Orthodox community >> know this. >> After, which is right next door, was gifted their land [music] by Beth Shalom who owned this entire property. And they gifted the land to HAFTR to [music] be able to build their school. That was the original partnership between Beth Shalom and HAFTR. So, this room is our basement madrish, the Joel Schiff basement madrish. And also recently redone. Now it's set up for for Yom Tov, so we took out all the tables, but usually there's beautiful tables and comfortable seating, and uh now it's really just packed [music] with chairs for uh for Yom Tov. >> If you do live in the Five Towns and you pass by Beth Sholom every day and you never walked in, walk in. Look around. It's one of the keystones, I would say, of this community. Come see it. It's beautiful. >> Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.