The New Gen X Judaism

Tamara Charm had a watershed experience when she chanted the Torah portion at Yom Kippur services last year at Drisha, the women's Torah learning academy, for a congregation of both women and men.

"It was incredible to daven in a way which conformed to traditional halacha but felt like the women's section was participating as well as the men's," said Charm, 29. "It was very spiritual."

Wanting more, the business consultant and a few friends established the Darkhei Noam (Ways of Peace) minyan in April. Shabbat morning services, generally in a multipurpose room rented from an Upper West Side day school, are Modern Orthodox but egalitarian and now attract some 150 people.

Elie Kaunfer spent a long time shul-hopping between the Upper West Side's many offerings. The congregations serious about prayer were Orthodox and non-egalitarian. Those egalitarian did not pray the entire traditional service, and most congregants seemed to let the rabbi take responsibility for the worship.

Wanting to combine the best of both worlds, Kaunfer, 28, a corporate fraud investigator, and two friends started Kehillat Hadar (Community of Glory), where worship is totally lay-led. About 160 people meet on alternate Shabbat mornings and some holidays at an ever-changing series of locations, their own prayerbooks in hand. Many have strong Jewish educations--some are in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The result is an intense, fast-moving traditional service they share leading.

"There's no talking, no schmoozing, because people are really trying to have a spiritual moment," Kaunfer said of the minyan that began about a year ago and now has an e-mail list of more than 1,000 "members."

At the Park Slope Minyan, which began in September and employs the Carlebach approach to welcoming Shabbat, participants come from the gamut of synagogues in Brownstone Brooklyn - Orthodox to Reform. Reading from their own prayerbooks or from booklets photocopied out of the Reconstructionist siddur, "men wearing tzitzit out sit next to women" in a church basement singing Kabbalat Shabbat from their hearts, says organizer Meir Feldman, a student at the Reform rabbinical seminary.

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