East Meadow Jewish Center is a Conservative Jewish synagogue located in East Meadow, New York.Early historyGround-breaking ceremonies for the synagogue took place on February 27, 1956. EMJC began with 115 founding members. Harry W. Goldin was a co-founder, President, and Chairman of the synagogue's board of trustees, and Sidney Feld was a founder and President as well.Dr. Israel Nobel was Rabbi of the synagogue in its early days (and subsequently Rabbi Emeritus), and Rabbi Irvin Beigel served at EMJC for four years in the 1980s. Paul Carus was a cantor at the synagogue in its early years, as was David Tauber. In the early 1960s, Melvin May was its Assistant Executive Director.In the late 1980s, synagogue members protested against Soviet human rights violations.Recent historyRonald L. Androphy has been the Rabbi of the synagogue since September 1983. After an alleged racial assault in East Meadow in 1989 in which a white East Meadow man was charged with beating two black teenagers with a golf club, the rabbi joined other local clerics, who said they were motivated by their conscience and felt an obligation to lead the community, in speaking out against the violence.Androphy focused on promoting greater understanding among religious groups. The synagogue's rabbi stressed the significance of the positive relationship the synagogue had with the local Methodist community. After David Levinton, a 12-year-old Jewish boy who had been a member of the EMJC, died, the local Methodist church's congregation honored the child. It voted to replace a tree that had fallen down on the church property, and dedicate the new tree to Levinton and to another non-Methodist boy in the community who had also died. In doing so, it voted down proposals to dedicate the tree to Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, or Harry Truman.
