ENLGEWOOD, N.J. — Friday, Ahavath Torah is closing its 130th year with a remarkable symmetry.

In 1895, eight Jewish families in Englewood came together to build a shul. They pooled $80 to purchase a Torah, only to discover that the scroll they wanted cost $130.

They bought it anyway.

That $130 Torah became the first building block of what would become the foundational institution of Bergen County’s Orthodox Jewish community.

Today, as Ahavath Torah prepares to enter its 131st Rosh Hashanah, more than 800 families will gather in the shul on Broad Avenue. The community surrounding it has grown into one of the country’s most vibrant centers of Orthodox Jewish life, stretching from Englewood into the neighboring towns and communities of Bergen County and beyond.

The founders could not have imagined any of it.

They were simply trying to put together a minyan.

There was no Orthodox Jewish community in Bergen County when those eight families gathered in the summer of 1895. There was no network of shuls, no Moriah, no Frisch, no eruv, no established infrastructure for Orthodox Jewish life.

There was love for the Torah.

And there was a Torah.

A year later, in 1896, the community held what historical records identify as Englewood’s first documented Jewish religious service, a Rosh Hashanah gathering led by Rabbi Benjamin Sher. Ahavath Torah became the first shul in Bergen County and the starting point for organized Orthodox Jewish life in the county.

From that beginning, the story is less about the growth of a shul than the growth of a Jewish world.

The eight families initially prayed in one another’s homes. Eventually, they rented space, then built a tiny shul on Humphrey Street. They outgrew it. They moved again. They acquired an old church building on Englewood Avenue and remained there until 1958.

With each move, the community around the shul expanded.

Kosher meat became locally available when a butcher joined the Ahavath Torah community, eliminating the need for Jewish families in northern New Jersey to travel to New York for kosher meat. More families arrived. Jewish education took root. The shul became a place not simply to daven but to build Jewish life.

By 1958, Ahavath Torah had grown to roughly 300 families and purchased the Broad Avenue estate of Baroness Cassel Van Dorn for $55,000. The property remains the shul’s home. The move itself became a communal procession, with Sifrei Torah carried through Englewood to the new building.

Then came Rabbi Isaac Swift.

Rabbi Swift understood that a Jewish community could not be sustained by a shul alone. It needed schools. It needed infrastructure. It needed institutions that would allow families to build their lives around Torah.

Moriah began inside Ahavath Torah in 1964 with 12 kindergarten students. Rabbi Swift was also a founder of Frisch. The shul played an important role in the creation of the Englewood eruv, which became operational during Sukkot in 1979.

The pattern was becoming clear.

Ahavath Torah helped create institutions.

Those institutions made Orthodox life easier.

That made Bergen County more attractive to Jewish families.

And those families helped create new institutions and strengthen Jewish communities throughout the region.

What began in one Englewood living room was becoming something much larger than Englewood.

It was becoming our Jewish community.

Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, who became rabbi in 1984, inherited that legacy and expanded it dramatically over his 33 years at the helm. Under Rabbi Goldin, Ahavath Torah grew from roughly 350 families to nearly 800. He also helped nurture the shul’s defining character: a community that could hold together people with different backgrounds, traditions and practices.

That included the growing Sephardic community, which eventually established the Benaroya Sephardic Center within Ahavath Torah. Rather than leaving as its numbers grew, the Sephardic community developed its own center while remaining part of the larger shul.

It was another expression of an idea that had become central to Ahavath Torah: Jewish unity did not require Jewish uniformity.

Today, Rabbi Chaim Poupko carries that legacy forward.

Rabbi Poupko became the rabbi in 2017, but his relationship with Ahavath Torah began much earlier. He spent 14 years at the shul as a rabbinic intern, assistant rabbi and associate rabbi before assuming its leadership.

He therefore inherited something more complicated than a large and successful shul.

He inherited the foundational stone of Bergen County's Orthodox Jewish community.

Rabbi Poupko’s role is not simply to preserve an institution that has existed for 130 years. It is to carry forward the work of generations who understood that a shul can be much more than a place to pray. It can be the place from which schools emerge, families settle, communities take shape and Jewish life becomes possible for the people who come after.

And perhaps the clearest measure of what those generations built is not found inside any particular shul at all.

It is found in the chessed that surrounds it.

Look across Bergen County today and there is an extraordinary network of people who have made caring for one another part of daily life. Bergen Hatzalah responds when someone needs medical assistance. Bikkur Cholim of Bergen County makes sure kosher food is available to Jewish patients in local hospitals. BC Lev Echad supports our Chayalim and those protecting Medinat Yisrael. Bergen County Shomrim and Chaverim of Bergen County provide assistance when people have car trouble, are stranded, frightened or in trouble. Project Ezra helps those who need financial support and coaching. Tomchei Shabbos of Bergen County helps families put Shabbos meals on their tables. Countless yeshivos, shuls and communal organizations educate children, care for the vulnerable, provide meals, support families and quietly solve problems that most people never see.

None of these institutions is Ahavath Torah.

But they are part of the community and the network of organizations that first minyan in Englewood, the Torah they bought and the shul they built all made possible.

That is the deeper legacy of those eight families.

They were not merely establishing a place to daven. They were establishing the beginnings of a communal infrastructure in which Jews could live not only alongside one another but responsible for one another.

A shul creates a minyan.

A community creates a culture.

And a culture of chessed creates something larger still: the expectation that when a neighbor needs help, someone will come.

That expectation is now woven into Bergen County’s Jewish life.

It is visible in an ambulance, pickup truck or community patrol car racing down a street. It is visible in kosher food arriving at a hospital for a Jewish patient. It is visible in a car pulled over on the side of the road, another Jewish driver stopping to help. It is visible in a Shabbos package delivered quietly, a child supported, a family assisted and a crisis handled without fanfare.

It is easy to look at that network and see dozens of separate organizations.

The longer view reveals something else.

A community.

Our community.

Bergen County has grown into one of the largest and most vibrant centers of Orthodox Jewish life in North America. There are shuls and schools, Torah learning and kosher infrastructure, eruvim and mikvaos, communal organizations and a dense network of Jewish families.

But none of that was inevitable.

In 1895, none of it existed.

The founders did not have a blueprint for what Bergen County would become. They did not know that the shul they were creating would help establish the foundation for Orthodox Jewish life throughout the county, or that the Jewish world they began in Englewood would spread into neighboring towns and eventually much farther.

They had eight families.

They had $80.

They found a Torah that cost $130.

And they decided to buy it anyway.

There is no surviving evidence establishing that the founders chose the name Ahavath Torah, “Love of Torah,” specifically because of that first Sefer Torah. A fact-based historical record does not allow us to make that claim.

But the symbolism is difficult to miss.

There was love for the Torah.

And there was a Torah.

The first organized Orthodox Jewish community in Bergen County began with a group of families who put everything they had toward acquiring a Torah. They then built a shul around it. And over the next 130 years, that shul has helped, and continues to, build the community around it.

This Rosh Hashanah, Ahavath Torah will enter its 131st Rosh Hashanah.

The building is larger. The community is vastly larger. The Jewish world that grew around the shul now extends across Bergen County and far beyond the boundaries of the original eight families.

But at its foundation is still the same idea:

Start with Torah.

Bring people together.

Build something that lasts.

And when someone needs help, show up.

The founders thought they were buying a Torah for a minyan.

They were in fact, laying the first stone of our community.