A Century on Mountain Avenue: Congregation Knesseth Israel Joins Temple Sholom

Founded in a private home in 1920, Bound Brook's “Mighty, Little Synagogue” carried its Torahs — and a century of history — six miles up the road to Bridgewater in June.

Staff · September 16, 2026

On Sunday, June 14, 2026, the members of Congregation Knesseth Israel carried their Torah scrolls out of the sanctuary at 229 Mountain Avenue for the last time. The procession ended six miles away, at the ark of Temple Sholom in Bridgewater, where the two congregations are now one. After 106 years, Bound Brook's synagogue — "our Mighty, Little Synagogue," as its members called it — has closed its doors.

It's the end of one of the longest continuous institutional runs in the borough, and the story of how it started is very Bound Brook.

From a living room to Mountain Avenue

The congregation held its first minyan in October 1920, in a private home. The following year it took the name Jacob H. Schiff Congregation, honoring the Jewish philanthropist who had died shortly before, and began a familiar small-town search for a roof: services in the Ivy Hook and Ladder firehouse from 1921 to 1922, then — in a gesture worth remembering — space lent by a local Congregational church from 1923 to 1924. By 1925 the congregation had property of its own on Mountain Avenue, and it never left.

The milestones came steadily after that. A first joint Bas Mitzvah ceremony in 1939. A first full-time rabbi, Aaron Sillman, hired in 1943. In 1953 the congregation took the names Bound Brook Jewish Center and Knesseth Israel, and in 1955 it dedicated the building that stands today. Originally Orthodox, the congregation joined the Conservative movement in 1966, and in its later years let go of formal affiliation altogether, settling into a fully egalitarian identity — women and men sharing the bimah, the leadership, and the Torah reading equally.

In 1981 the building grew one more time, adding a chapel and a youth lounge. That chapel would become the most remarkable room in the borough that most residents never saw.

The Chapel of the Survivors

In December 1983, Wilmark Studios of Pearl River, New York installed a set of stained glass windows designed under studio president Mark Liebowitz, with themes chosen by Rabbi Aaron Decter. On the southern wall, three panels illustrate a teaching from Pirke Avot — that the world rests on three things: Torah, worship, and acts of loving-kindness. On the eastern wall, four windows walk through Jewish history right to left: yellow for the Exodus and Sinai, blue for the destruction of the Temple, red for the Holocaust, green for the founding of the State of Israel.

On April 26, 1987, the room was dedicated as the Chapel of the Survivors, a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

The congregation held a second, older memorial as well. In its social hall stood Czech Memorial Scroll #367 — a Torah written around 1875 in Louny, a Czech town whose Jewish community dated back to at least 1254. When the Nazis deported the Jews of Louny in 1942, the town's sacred objects were shipped to a warehouse in Prague, along with more than 1,500 other confiscated Torahs. In the 1960s, London's Westminster Synagogue secured the scrolls' release, and the Memorial Scrolls Trust began placing them on permanent loan with congregations around the world. The Louny Torah came to Bound Brook, where it was brought out and honored every Simchat Torah and Kol Nidre — a congregation that outlived the community that wrote its oldest scroll, carrying its memory forward.

What remains

The move came together over the past year. Rabbi Stephen Wylen retired after the High Holidays in 2025, and Cantor Eddie Roffman, who has served since 2009, continued to lead the congregation in song through the spring. In June, the congregation brought its Torahs — and its members — to Temple Sholom, joining two communities into one.

The paper trail of the first sixty-five years, from board minutes to membership directories, is preserved in the Rutgers University archives. Six miles up the road, a century of Bound Brook Jewish life continues under a different roof.

Sources: Congregation Knesseth Israel; Rutgers University Archives, Congregation Knesseth Israel Records, 1921–1985.