Connect

The synagogue is a place where we come together to experience community. Our tradition offers us a myriad of opportunities to do so, whether it be through study, sharing a meal or engaging in social justice activities.

Our people’s deepest desires and longings are made manifest through the voice of prayer. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.” When we come together as a community to offer prayer, we create a complete vision of the world and our place within it.

Shabbat services at University Synagogue are joyful, exuberant and heart-opening. We join together through song and study of Torah, simultaneously exploring ancient traditions and creating new paths.

Click here to meet our clergy.

Information about our Holocaust Torah Scroll. 

We are proud to be the loving home of the Memorial Scrolls Trust Sefer Torah MST#419 from Kolin for the past 42 years to preserve the precious legacy of the lost Jews of Bohemia & Moravia.Click here to learn about the legacy of the Czech Torah Scrolls through to the Memorial Scrolls Trust.  Unlike in Germany and the other countries the Nazis conquered, most of the synagogues in the heart of Bohemia and Moravia were not destroyed, and their Torah Scrolls and Judaica were sent to the Jewish Museum in Prague. Everything was carefully labeled and recorded and for many years it was believed that the cataloguing was done under duress by Jews who were afterwards deported to their deaths in concentration camps, and that the Nazis intended to create an exhibition of artifacts of the extinct Jewish race once they had won the war.

The Scrolls were identified by the town from which they had been received and, in many cases, the date of writing, though the latter was often inaccurate. They were eventually stored in the synagogue in the Prague suburb of Michle, where they lay, to all intents and purposes forgotten, for many years. The Scrolls were sorted, examined and cataloged, and a Memorial Scrolls Trust began to distribute them on loan to congregations and academic institutions around the world. Most of the Scrolls needed restoration work and this was a problem.​​​​​; the sofer, David Brand, worked on the Scrolls, for nearly thirty years. The Scrolls have been distributed across the world in response to requests from new and developing congregations and other institutions. In this way they have been given new life. They have also had the effect of stimulating contact between recipient congregations across the globe, and, in many cases, have been the starting point for research into the vanished congregations from which they came.​​​​​​​