Now, say officers of the venerable Conservative synagogue, that road is leading out into the sunshine of a revitalized congregation.

What’s happened to the synagogue in the last few years is “the miracle of the North Side,” says Pinky Zaid, a member for 35 years who has seen many ups and downs.

A half century ago, Shaare Tikvah, located in the Hollywood Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, “was one of the great synagogues in Chicago,” according to Irwin Berkley, one of its current three- member presidium (the others are Irving Federman and Paul Levine).

“There were a tremendous number of members,” Berkley says. “At services, they filled the auditorium and the sanctuary and the balcony and it was literally standing-room-only.”

Then, he says, the neighborhood began to change. Older congregants died or moved away; their children fled to the suburbs.

About five years ago, Berkley says, “we were in some really serious trouble”: a rabbi and a group of congregants left to form their own congregation, and there was some doubt about Shaare Tikvah’s survival.

But in the last three years, the synagogue not only survived, it has flourished. Two people made the difference, Berkley says: a new spiritual leader, Rabbi Dennis Katz, and educational director, Yona Gelfand.

Katz made a point of reaching out to members and potential members of all ages, demographic areas and professions, says Berkley. The synagogue began offering egalitarian services and a plethora of workshops, classes and holiday events. Personal phone calls became a part of the outreach effort.

Today if members—especially senior citizens—have difficulty getting to services, other members will give them door-to-door transport service.

In addition, Gelfand “reinvigorated” the lagging Hebrew school, Berkley says. A year ago, the school had six students and one part-time teacher. Today there are 60 children and four teachers.

“Well be seeing a number of bar and bat mitzvahs over the next couple of years, which we did not see before,” he says.

The synagogue today has about 250 member families and the number is rising, with an interesting demographic: There is a large group of seniors 75 and up, a smaller group of “Depression babies” in their 60s, and a large number of Baby Boomers 55 and under, Berkley says. Most recently, families with younger children have been joining.

Berkley says about a third of the members are from the synagogue’s traditional demographic area of Hollywood Park, Peterson Park and West Rogers Park, with another third coming from Lincolnwood and the rest from a mix of other areas.

Despite the range in ages and locales, Shaare Tikvah is now “a very tight, good feeling synagogue,” Berkley says. “There aren’t any cliques, no sense of ‘do I belong?’ If you’re at our synagogue, you belong. Nobody cares who drives a better car or has a nicer home.

“It’s egalitarian not only in terms of the service, but because nobody’s looking at what the other fellow has. We have single moms, widows. All we care about is how much Judaism one can experience.”

Zaid, the current program chairman, agrees. “It’s a very, very friendly synagogue,” he says. “At services, we invite all new members to go up (to the bimah). We give an aliyah sometimes to 30 people at the same time.”

At a recent event featuring the Israeli Scouts Friendship Caravan, “we had a full house, and the Scouts themselves said they had never felt so good about a place,” Zaid says. “Everybody just really feels good about what’s happening here.”