The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, falls on October 1 this year. It will be the first time in nearly a century that the Jewish residents of four small towns in Connecticut will not be able to go to their own synagogue -- a synagogue that served as both refuge and gateway for generations. The closing has spurred a flood of memories for PNS commentator Esther Cohen.

DERBY, Conn. -- This Rosh Hashanah my family will not be able to attend services at Beth Israel Synagogue, where they have celebrated the holiday for nearly 100 years. The synagogue served four towns in Connecticut -- Ansonia, Derby, Shelton, and Seymour -- four unJewish towns of American immigrants, all anxious to eat hamburgers, play baseball, and shed their foreignness, their accents, their pale, Old World ways.

This summer, the doors of the synagogue closed for the last time.

The synagogue was the center of our lives. Not the luminous, enlightened, glowing center, still there it was and there we were, Jews in a small, thorny factory town on the Naugatuck River in a low-lying area with too few trees.

The building itself was a dark place, with the flatness the 1950s called "modern." The rooms were clean right angles with none of the rounded elegance and high vaulting of other religious structures. The god in our synagogue was a rational and practical American -- the way we saw ourselves.

My family had no past to speak of, no long stories about roots. This was true of many of us then. I did not know anything about the towns my grandparents, who helped found the synagogue, came from, or about their lives before America. They didn't want to tell me when I asked. I only knew that my father's small family, his mother and sister, lived two blocks away from our maroon wooden house in a white wooden house of their own. In that house, they became Americans, eating apple pie, watching Julius LaRosa on TV, celebrating Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. They didn't eat pizza, but sometimes had ice cream.

Their lives were my small history. The synagogue, with its eternal light, was the bridge between the mysterious unknown world of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism, wars, other identities and the world of America in Derby, Conn. -- football fields and hot dogs, Italians and Irish, a sweatier, noisier life.

The synagogue was our clubhouse, a place where Jews came together to learn to live American lives. We went there all the time because it was where we could belong. My grandfather Oscar came from Vilna, Lithuania in 1891. In Vilna he had been a scholar. In Ansonia, a small, unbeautiful town with crooked streets and a ball bearing factory, Oscar Cohen was a tailor. He and some other new immigrants created a synagogue where they would have somewhere to go, to be Jews together in this unfamiliar world, to drink whiskey and tell stories of a life they remembered less and less.

The synagogue moved a few times as the number of Jews in the four towns grew to several hundred families (out of some 100,000 people). There were only two or three of us in each grade, but at Beth Israel we were a tribe, memorizing one another's names for eternity -- not knowing that by college we would disperse once again to New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, even China. After a while our parents, too, disappeared, moving to Florida or New Mexico or L.A., leaving this industrial valley as silently as they came, carrying one more set of memories.

Not my father, though. He died right there. He had never really wanted to move. And my mother, who arrived in the 1940s from Grand Forks, South Dakota, doesn't want to move much either. She doesn't like heat or travel or change. So she was there with 200 others who came from all over to the synagogue farewell lunch, to the final closing of those opaque doors. Doors that once led from cities all over Eastern Europe out somewhere into America.