About us · Congregation Shaare Tefilah

Our story

Congregation Shaare Tefilah Bene Moshe was established in December 1992, with Shabbat services held in private homes.

During the first years, several Rabbis served as our spiritual leaders. By the third year we were able to buy a home: the Rabbi lived upstairs and the congregation prayed in the basement.

As the congregation grew, we needed a permanent building. In 2001 we bought the house next door for the Rabbi, which let us begin planning a new synagogue. In the spring of 2006 the original house came down and construction began, and the new building was completed in time for the High Holidays in 2008.

Rabbi Moshe Douek has led the congregation since 2007, when there were about seventy families and one daily minyan. Families kept coming, many of them moving to Eatontown and Deal year-round, and today the shul is home to hundreds of families.

Our name means “gates of prayer.” Our doors are open to all who seek to worship, learn and serve the community.

The sanctuary: alabaster ring chandeliers before the round window over the ark

Our new shul

By 2024 five minyanim were filling the building every Shabbat, with a tent in the back garden for the overflow.

That year we broke ground on an expansion, using the same spades that opened the original building. In 2026 we celebrated our new shul, with special prayers in its honor on Shabbat Shuvah.

Gifts to the Building Extension Fund help pay for the building and everything in it.

Give to the building fund

The walnut sanctuary doors, donated in honor of Mourad Allaham and Albert Himy — The sanctuary doors

The long main hallway, with the memorial wall at the far end — The main hallway

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Learning

Every Wednesday night, more than a hundred men and boys come to learn with one of the ten Rabbis of the Eatontown Torah Center.

The Wednesday Night Learning Program began in October 2015 with a few Rabbis and nearly thirty men. Dinner is served at 8:15, the classes in Gemara and Halacha begin at 8:30, and everyone comes together again for Arbit at 9:20. For more information, email info@etorahcenter.com or call (848) 667-0330.

Rabbi Nathan Dabbah teaches Gemara on Monday nights from 8 to 9. On Shabbat afternoon there is the Rabbi’s class before Minha, and separate Torah programs for girls and boys.

The youth minyan

Every Shabbat morning from 8:45, boys and girls of all ages lead the prayers, read the Torah and join the Pizmonim corner, with prizes, raffles, parasha questions and a grand Kiddush afterward. The teen minyan follows at 9:15, with a hot Kiddush. Babysitting is available for mothers.

The Midrash: study tables in rows facing the ark, beneath a round window