Niso Aharonian lives in Denver, which is a long way from where he was born and raised, Herzliya, Israel, and even further away from where his parents came from, which is Iran.
He loves it here, says Aharonian, a soft-spoken and articulate man of 31 who works as a locksmith and limo driver in Denver, to which he moved a decade ago with his wife.
In virtually every respect, he has found Colorado the perfect home for him and his family, which now includes a young daughter, but there was one thing missing for him — a means by which an observant Sephardic Jew like himself could practice his religion.
The observant part was easy. East Denver, where he lives, now has plenty of Orthodox shuls for observant Jews. In the first few years after Aharonian came to Denver, these congregations was where he worshipped.
The Sephardic part wasn’t so easy. There is Ohr Avner, a Sephardic congregation formed by the Bukharan community, but it’s located miles away, in Aurora, an impossible distance for an Orthodox Jew who cannot drive on Shabbos.
And the Sephardic part was important to Aharonian, he says, since that’s how he was raised in Israel, in the Levantine Jewish tradition that his parents brought to Israel from their native Iran, which they left after the Islamic revolution in 1979.
So Aharonian, who seems the sort of man who has no trouble taking the initiative about things he considers important, started his own synagogue.
In the process, he has brought to Denver not only an authentic Sephardic congregation — one in which Jews from the entire Middle East can be religiously and ritually comfortable — but a means of honoring a rabbi, Sephardic like Aharonian, whom Denver Jews came to love and whose life was cut tragically short by a raging wildfire in Israel’s Carmel Forest.
The congregation, Beit Uriel, is named after Rabbi Uriel Malka, an Israeli Jew who spent several years teaching at DAT and other educational venues in Denver. An exuberant and charismatic man, Rabbi Malka made a great many friends in the Denver area, all of whom were saddened when he died in Israel’s Carmel Forest fire in 2010.
Aharonian did not know Rabbi Malka very well — they prayed together only two times during the years that both were in Denver, he says — but he considers him a role model, both as an Orthodox Jew and a Sephardic Jew.
He knows that Rabbi Malka, after his stint at DAT, returned to Denver to lead High Holiday services because so many Sephardic Jews in Denver pleaded with him to do so.
“He left his family in Israel for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” Aharonian says. “He came here because he knew how much the community needed him.”
Denver Sephardim found Rabbi Malka’s style of worship familiar and comforting.
The example set by the outgoing rabbi, Aharonian says, helped him decide that a Sephardic congregation was needed here.
“He was an inspiration,” he says simply.
Beit Uriel was established four weeks before Rosh Hashanah of 2012 by Niso and his older brother Avraham Aharonian.
“We decided to do it together, to have a Sephardic community,” Aharonian says.
It wasn’t easy getting it started.
“We’ve been through a lot, to be completely honest, until we got to this place.”
Aharonian’s reference to “this place” is the building on East Alameda that houses Rabbi Aharon Sirota’s Tehilat Hashem, a synagogue mainly composed of Russian Jews, and that used to be the home for Rabbi Mordecai Twerski’s TRI. Beit Uriel currently occupies the building’s basement but expects to soon move upstairs, after renovations are complete, to share the ground floor with Rabbi Sirota’s congregation.
Beit Uriel’s first services were for the High Holidays in 2012, when Rabbi Yisroel Engel invited the group to worship at Bais Menachem, his Chabad shul on Holly St.
“He was totally up for it,” Aharonian says of Rabbi Engel. “He said, ‘My building is your building. If you want to do High Holiday services in my building you’re welcome to do so.’ So that’s where we started. We did Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with Rabbi Engel.
“The first year we got over 100 people to come and enjoy the High Holidays. Rabbi Engel was shocked. He said, ‘You cannot stop now. You must keep going.’ He gave us the motivation to keep it going.”
Soon, however, the group had to move on. They linked up with the manager of a building in the Crestmoor area who arranged a reduced-rent room in one of his buildings. For five months, this was the scene of Beit Uriel’s weekly services, which the brothers promoted to Jews in the Crestmoor and Lowry areas.
“We got a minyan there,” Aharonian says. “There was no rabbi but we still established a minyan and full service every Shabbat.”
But management changed at Crestmoor and the new manager canceled the agreement.
“We had two weeks to find a place. G-d was amazing. We came to Rabbi Sirota and told him what happened. He opened his heart, he opened his house for the Sephardic community to grow.”
Soon after, Beit Uriel got its first Torah scroll, on loan from the Torah Community Project.
When asked why he, his brother and other supporters of Beit Uriel have gone to so much effort to create a new Sephardic congregation, Aharonian says it’s all about familiarity.
“I used to go to different shuls,” he says of his first few years in Denver, “and enjoyed the environment with Rabbi Engel and DAT and everybody else, but to be completely honest it wasn’t the way that I was raised.”
He longed for the unique style of prayer and music — “the way we sing, the way we pray” — that he had grown up with while attending Sephardic shuls in Israel.
“It’s something that I missed a lot. I’ve been in America now for 10 years and always felt that I wanted to be in the shul that I grew up in. Not that the other shuls here are not good enough, but as a personal feeling I missed what we had back home.”
Aharonian also wanted to attend a shul where the priestly blessing, the Birkat Kohanim, is recited with all of the kohanim in the congregation on Saturday morning.
“Being a Sephardic Jew, Birkat Kohanim is required. Nobody else does it in Denver, except for the Bukharan shul. They are Sephardic but it’s too far away.”
Aharonian stresses that he’s not passing judgment on Ashkenazic styles of worship, which he says are no less holy or halachic than what goes on at Beit Uriel
Sephardic services are just more comfortable for him.
“I have a better time,” he says, theorizing that it might be the different ways that Ashkenazim and Sephardim pronounce Hebrew.
“That was something that I didn’t connect to and I can tell you that most of the Sephardim don’t connect to the way they [Ashkenazi Jews] pronounce words. Again, it’s not something they’re doing wrong, it’s just a whole different approach.”
In Beit Uriel’s Shacharit, Musaf, Mincha and Ma’ariv services, many of which are led by Aharonian, participatory worship is encouraged — yet another Sephardic tradition.
“We want everybody to feel part of it,” he says. “Even reading the Torah, everybody takes a different part. Which is great. People enjoy coming because they feel that they can donate from their experience.”
Services and ritual are designed on what might be called a global Sephardic model, which is to say acceptable and familiar to most Sephardic Jews, regardless of their country of origin. Individual styles and rituals unique to specific Sephardic communities — such as Iranians, Moroccans, Yemenites and Israelis — can be, and often are, incorporated into the congregation’s services.
“We’re open minded. If somebody has a song that they would like to share with us, everybody goes with it,” Aharonian adds. “And we have maybe eight different types of siddurs, so everybody can pick and choose their own siddur and feel that they belong.”
The less-than-rigid ideology at Beit Uriel is another element of the synagogue that is reminiscent of its namesake, Rabbi Malka
“Everybody is welcome and that was the main thing with Rabbi Uriel Malka. He didn’t judge anybody. Everybody who came to him, who wanted to help him and be a part of what he did, was welcome.”
Still less than two years old, Beit Uriel has an impressive list of goals to achieve.
It has yet to achieve a daily minyan, so this fundamental objective is high on the list.
While Beit Uriel has already brought in several rabbis for special events, it aspires to having its own rabbinical leader
“That’s something that we are obviously missing here — a rabbi,” Aharonian says. “We don’t have one, at the moment, but we’re working on it very hard.
“The ultimate goal, of course, is a building of our own and maybe in the next couple of years to have a school and programs for the kids.”
To get there, Aharonian realizes, Beit Uriel will have to attract people, specifically Sephardic Jews in East Denver.
“On average,” he says, “about 30 families are on board with us every Shabbat. It might even be 40 or 50 men, and the women come as well. When we have a big kiddush or rosh chodesh or something we can easily get 70 to 80 people.”
While Beit Uriel is “one hundred percent Orthodox,” as Aharonian says — with a mechitzah and an orientation that is “strictly by the Halachah” — non-Orthodox Jews are welcome to attend services, as some already do, as are Ashkenazim, who might find that they like the exotic flavor of Sephardic worship.
“Everybody is welcome,” Aharonian says.
Not surprisingly, Israelis who live in Denver, as well Sephardic Jews from other regions, are a prime target audience for the young congregation.
Aharonian estimates that as many as 1,000 Jews of Israeli or Sephardic origin live in the general area of Beit Uriel, but he has no illusions about the difficulty of drawing them to the shul.
“The problem is that a big percentage of those thousand people are not religious, don’t practice, don’t keep Shabbat, and don’t care about it, which I don’t judge. They can live their lives, but that’s what makes it more difficult for us.
“Also, a lot of Israelis that we invite live in Lakewood or Arvada or Fort Collins or Colorado Springs. They would like to come but they can’t, unless we come up with a place for them to stay and eat [during Shabbat]. And we would love to, but it’s not really possible at the moment.”
Aharonian is discouraged by none of this.
A Facebook page called ‘Beit Uriel’ is attracting attention and word-of-mouth outreach is gaining momentum.
“Every day,” he says, “we have new members join.”
Although Judaism has always been a part of his life, Aharonian says that it was only a few years ago, when he became a ba’al teshuvah, that he began to take his religion seriously.
That, as much as anything, motivated him to found an observant congregation that followed Sephardic traditions.
“I always had the spark, even in Israel,” he says.
“I was raised traditionally. My mom kept Shabbat for many years. But when I had my first daughter I started to think, ‘How would you like her to grow up?’ She was part of my inspiration as well.
“I would go to different shuls with her and I thought, I want her to feel what I felt. After I talked to my lovely wife, who is a great supporter, we decided to take the step and try to establish a minyan.”
Aharonian says he has no regrets at all that he has chosen a fully religious lifestyle.
“I regret that I didn’t start when I was born,” he says with a smile.
When asked why, he replies without hesitation.
“Quality time with the family. Stop the world for 24 hours on Shabbat and forget about the cell phone. Only spirituality. And the fact that I can say thank you to Hashem for everything that He gave me, and gave us. The best feeling for me is to be able to say ‘Thank you, Hashem.’”
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
