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Soon-to-open Greenfield coffee shop will be a Jewish space for all | The Homepage
By Managing Editor Juliet Martinez
If you’re a Greenfielder who wishes for a neighborhood coffee shop to open on Murray Avenue, you’re in luck. If you’re interested in Jewish learning and community building, even better.
Two Greenfielders are fixing up the former bank branch at 4300 Murray Ave. to create Shoresh, a nonprofit coffee shop that is also a low-barrier space for Jewish study and prayer. It will offer coffee and pastries by day and classes in the evenings.
No barriers to entry
Shoresh is the brainchild of Rabbi Mark Goodman. The longtime Jewish educator said he loves coffee, building community, and Greenfield.
“I noticed we didn’t have a coffee shop in Greenfield, so we thought we could address that by combining all of my interests,” he said on Sept. 4. He and co-founder Frances Lasday were in the thick of renovations and permitting, shooting for an early 2027 opening for the café.
Shoresh means “root” or “source” in Hebrew. In some traditional Jewish literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, the word is used to refer to the divine, Mr. Goodman said.
“They’re talking about God, but we abstracted it out to being rooted, connected, grounded,” Mr. Goodman said.
The idea was rattling around in his head for about 10 years, he said. About a year ago, a friend gave him the seed money to get it started. In August, the co-founders raised another $100,000 through an online campaign. An Aug. 12 kickoff event featured mini classes and a performance by the klezmer band Veverke.
Mr. Goodman said he wants to create a space for Jewish life that is easy to access and in near-constant use. Modern synagogues are expensive to maintain and empty for much of the week, but the Jewish community has traditionally had multiple points of entry. These points of entry could be small-group gatherings for prayer or study. But those kinds of settings are harder to come by now.
“One of the challenges for the Jewish community in the United States is having high barriers to entry for worship,” he said. “You have to be familiar with Hebrew, know the tunes, know the prayers. For folks who don’t know those things or are recently coming into it, the barriers to entry are too high.”
Fellow educator Ms. Lasday said she builds community wherever she goes, including co-leading a minyan or prayer group. She and Mr. Goodman said on Sept. 4 that they met when they collaborated on a grant application. They did not get it.
“I like to say that I wanted $100,000 but got something better. I got Frances,” Mr. Goodman said.
“I wish you’d gotten the money,” Ms. Lasday replied with a laugh.
She is excited about bringing a coffee shop to Greenfield.
“We want this to be a meeting space for the entire neighborhood,” she said. “We are a Jewish organization, but we want it to be open to the whole neighborhood and the whole community.”
Judaism prioritizes and values learning and engaging in lots of different ways, Ms. Lasday explained. So Shoresh aims to be a lot of different things, a place where people can experience different ways of learning.
“The funny thing is, being in Pittsburgh, we know that for at least 5-10 years people will refer to it as ‘the coffee shop where the bank used to be.’” Mr. Goodman said.
The coffee shop is still under construction, but the classes have already begun. The offerings are eclectic by design.
Right now, Mr. Goodman is teaching a “Roots of Kabbalah” course that covers major concepts in Judaism’s mystical tradition. A class on the women of the Talmud called “Miriams, Mourners, Sapphics and Witches” will start Oct. 7. Another class, “Biblical Reverberations in Film” started in September with one section for teens and another for adults. Another class teaches about the Torah, the Talmud and Martin Luther King, Jr. There is even a Torah yoga class. The possibilities are almost endless.
“We are hoping people know that we are open to hearing their ideas and want to try different things,” Ms. Lasday said. “We want to be very open and experimental with the ways that we engage with Jewish learning and Jewish life.”
An opportunity to know neighbors
Fellow Greenfielder Mike Holohan recently joined Shoresh’s board of directors. A Presbyterian pastor, Mr. Holohan joked that being on the board of a Jewish learning center might be the most interesting thing about him.
But he has some experience building a faith community from scratch. He started and led Commonwealth, a church in Oakland, for seven or eight years. An LGBTQ+ affirming church, it brings together students, neighbors and people experiencing homelessness. It is under the leadership of another pastor now that Mr. Holohan works at Shadyside Presbyterian Church.
He and Mr. Goodman met five years ago through the Anti-Racist Interfaith Leaders, a group that Mr. Holohan co-leads with Gavin Walton, pastor of Grace Memorial Presbyterian Church in the Hill District. The group formed after the murder of George Floyd with the goal of helping congregations do long-term anti-racism work. Mr. Goodman is still active in the group.
Mr. Holohan said he is looking forward to the coffee shop opening. He recalled how parents used to gather at the Staghorn Garden Café on Greenfield Avenue after dropping off or before picking up their kids from school. The café closed in 2020.
“It really became a space for connection,” he said, adding that his family takes annual Labor Day trips with several families who formed friendships at the café. “It really created some really strong bonds.”
Greenfield has a robust Jewish community. But he said he is hearing interest in the Jewish part of Shoresh from his non-Jewish neighbors.
“I’m talking about Shoresh with the people that I know,” he said. “Most of them are not Jews, but a lot of them are religious or curious or interested in interfaith understanding and have asked, like, ‘Oh, can anybody go to the classes that are going to be offered at Shoresh?’”
It’s important for people to know that Shoresh is about Jewish learning, but not only for Jewish people, he said.
“Anytime you have an opportunity to understand your neighbors better, I think that’s good,” he said.
Learn more at shoreshpgh.org.
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