RE: Being a JEW in Hickville

In Wal-Mart's Home, Synagogue Signals Growth

Spencer Tirey for The New York Times
Members of Etz Chaim established their synagogue in a former Assembly of God church in Arkansas. There are about 100 members.






By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: June 20, 2006
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Residents of Benton County, in the northwest corner of Arkansas, are proud citizens of the Bible Belt. At last count, they filled 39 Baptist, 27 United Methodist and 20 Assembly of God churches. For decades, a local hospital has begun meetings with a reading from the New Testament and the library has featured an elaborate Christmas display.

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Courtesy of the Winchester Family
Andrew Winchester, hatless at center, had the first bar mitzvah in the synagogue. Several branches of Judaism are represented at Etz Chaim.
Then the Wal-Mart Jews arrived.
Recruited from around the country as workers for Wal-Mart or one of its suppliers, hundreds of which have opened offices near the retailer's headquarters here, a growing number of Jewish families have become increasingly vocal proponents of religious neutrality in the county. They have asked school principals to rename Christmas vacation as winter break (many have) and lobbied the mayor's office to put a menorah on the town square (it did).
Wal-Mart has transformed small towns across America, but perhaps its greatest impact has been on Bentonville, where the migration of executives from cities like New York, Boston and Atlanta has turned this sedate rural community into a teeming mini-metropolis populated by Hindus, Muslims and Jews.
It is the Jews of Benton County, however, who have asserted themselves most. Two years ago, they opened the county's first synagogue and, ever since, its roughly 100 members have become eager spokesmen and women for a religion that remains a mystery to most people here.
When the synagogue celebrated its first bar mitzvah, the boy's father — Scott Winchester, whose company sells propane tanks to Wal-Mart — invited two local radio D.J.'s, who broadcast the event across the county, even though, by their own admission, they had only a vague idea of what a bar mitzvah was.
"Jesus was Jewish," one D.J. noted in a dispatch from the reception at a local hotel. The other remarked, "I love Seinfeld."
Shortly after he moved to the area, Tom Douglass, a member of the synagogue who works in Wal-Mart's logistics department, made a presentation about Hanukkah to his son's kindergarten class. The lesson, complete with an explanation of how to play with a spinning dreidel and compete for chocolate coins, imported from New York, proved so popular that the school's librarian taped it for future classes.
Then there is Ron Haberman, a doctor and synagogue member, who has introduced Jewish cuisine to the county. His new restaurant, Eat This, next door to a new 140,000-square-foot glass-enclosed Baptist church, serves knishes, matzo ball soup and latkes. To guide the uninitiated, the menu explains that it is pronounced "LOT-kuz."
Not everyone is ordering the knishes, but Christians throughout Benton County are slowly learning the complexities of Jewish life. Gary Compton, the superintendent of schools in Bentonville and a member of a Methodist church in town, has learned not to schedule PTA meetings the night before Jewish holidays, which begin at sundown, and has encouraged the high school choir to incorporate Jewish songs into a largely Christian lineup.
"We need to get better at some things," he said. "You just don't go from being noninclusive to being inclusive overnight."
Surrounded by Christian neighbors, Bible study groups, 100-foot-tall crucifixes and free copies of the book "The Truth About Mary Magdalene" left in the seating area of the Bentonville IHOP, the Jews of Benton County say they have become more observant in — and protective of — their faith than ever before.
Marcy Winchester, the mother of the synagogue's first bar mitzvah, said, "You have to try harder to be Jewish down here."
Which may explain why what began as a dozen families, almost all of them tied to Wal-Mart and almost all of them sharing only a passing familiarity with one another, managed to create a free-standing synagogue in just under a year. Tired of being asked which church they attended, they decided to build the answer.
For several years, many of them had attended a small synagogue attached to the University of Arkansas about 30 miles south of Bentonville. But the drive was long and the university temple, a converted fraternity house, never felt like home.
So in 2004, the families — most of them like-minded transplants from big cities largely in their 30's — decided it was time to create a permanent Jewish community in Benton County. They bought a former Hispanic Assembly of God church a few blocks from the first five-and-dime store operated by Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, and renamed it Congregation Etz Chaim, or Tree of Life.
A dozen families quickly turned into 20 families, then 40