Synagogue, S.R.O.

Jerry Lewis has taken to its pulpit to deliver a sermon on what it means to him to be a Jew. Walter Matthau has charmed his fellow congregants with a rendition of Sholom Aleichem stories. Love Story Author Erich Segal read a poem on forgiveness for Yom Kippur. The site of all this star-powered piety? One of Hollywood's newest in-spots, the Synagogue for the Performing Arts.

Organized last May by Jerome Cutler, a Hollywood talent agent and part-time rabbi, the 400-seat house of worship has been virtually S.R.O. for its monthly services ever since. "They attend with enthusiasm on a monthly basis," says Cutler. "I want to keep it that way." Almost all the synagogue's members are connected with show business. Members--besides Matthau, Lewis and Segal--include Marty Allen, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., Monty Hall, Jan Murray and Joan Rivers. Others are unemployed actors or struggling writers.

Sabbath Songs. It is the company of other stars, though, that gives comfort to many of the show-business names who gather at the synagogue. No one is singled out by pesky fund raisers, autograph hunters or gawkers, a devotional hazard at other Los Angeles area synagogues. When he belonged to another temple, Comic Jack Carter recalls, "People kept staring and whispering, 'Isn't that Joey Bishop?' Now I'm with my own peers, and I dig the fellowship."

The congregation uses the sanctuary of a former Westwood synagogue that is now a school for the deaf. The services are part traditional, part free-form. Hebrew prayers, for example, have been augmented with passages of poetry from W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings and others. Israeli Folk Singer Michael Burstein often opens Friday evening worship with Sabbath songs--"audience warm-up before air time," as one member puts it. TV Producer Allan Blye (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour) serves as cantor, a role he used to perform professionally in Toronto. The synagogue "staff'--including Rabbi Cutler--are all unpaid volunteers.

Jerry Cutler was born into a family of rabbis. While training as an Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, though, he used to slip up to the Catskill resorts on weekends, where he did a stand-up comic shtik using the name Jerry Herring. His fellow students at the yeshiva took a dim view of his enchantment with show business. On his return to classes from the Catskills, they would mutter in Yiddish: "Der bum iz du [The bum is here]." All the same, Cutler was ordained at 24 and served a Conservative congregation in Stamford, Conn., before becoming a reviewer for a film trade paper. He soon switched to hawking talent, managing comics like Slappy White and Stanley Myron Handelman.

Jerry's father, Rabbi Abraham Cutler, journeyed to California in November to catch his son's rabbinical turn. Surveying the packed house, the elder Cutler told the congregants:"My son must be doing something right. I haven't seen so many people at Sabbath services in years. How full my heart is to see my son once again in a pulpit."

For the time being, at least, Cutler does not intend to stand in the pulpit more than once a month or give up his career as a talent agent to return to the rabbinate full time. "Friday night I represent God," says Cutler. "The rest of the week it's Slappy White."

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