Who We Are

In Rabbi Jason and Stephanie Sobel's living room in Cary, a home group of New Horizons Fellowship became a Messianic chavurah (fellowship): Jewish followers of Yeshua and friends gathering around Shabbat, Scripture, and prayer, with New Horizons' blessing.

The chavurah gathered from home to home—the Roessners', the McKinney family's—then returned to the Sobels' living room in the summer of 2001 for learner's Shabbat services.

Two days after moving from New York, Barb Littauer walked into the chavurah carrying her guitar. She knew none of the songs and very little Hebrew; she learned fast. To equip her, Rabbi Seth Klayman recorded a cassette of melodies from his home congregation, Beth Messiah in Columbus, and worship leaders at Beth Messiah and at Baruch HaShem in Dallas sent stacks of Messianic song sheets. Our worship began as a gift from congregations that came before us.

Our sending congregation often named the congregations it planted Sar Shalom (Prince of Peace). Rabbi Jason Sobel had a different name in mind for this one: Sha'arei Shalom, the Gates of Peace. Not a title over a door, but the door itself, standing open.

Sha'arei Shalom was organized as a kehillah kedoshah (spiritual community), with Rabbi Jason Sobel, Rabbi Seth Klayman, and Jim Roessner serving as its first board. Public Shabbat services began at Providence Baptist Church as the year 5762 began.

In the congregation's first season at Providence Baptist, the Blake family, sent by Tikvat Yisrael in Richmond, Virginia, faithfully drove a portable sound system and a Torah scroll from Richmond every single Shabbat so the community could read from a scroll it did not yet own. Then a Torah scroll arrived from Israel and was received into a congregation that had no building of its own to keep it in. We were a chavurah (fellowship) meeting in living rooms and borrowed sanctuaries—and we had a Torah. The scroll's ketubah still records the date of its dedication.

After a year at Providence Baptist Church, the congregation moved in 2003 to a rented sanctuary at Reedy Creek, its home for the next six years, and became affiliated with the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC).

On 25 Kislev 5763, Shabbat Hanukkah, a young man raised in this congregation stood and read from the Torah as a bar mitzvah—the first of our children to do so. He is grown now, and living in Israel. The photograph of him reading is in our archives.

The congregation received its charter members—a handful of families who had been present since the living-room years and who chose, formally, to bind themselves to this community's future. Their names are held in our records, and several of them are still with us on Shabbat mornings.

A year to the Hebrew day after that first bar mitzvah, on 25 Kislev again, Shabbat Hanukkah, Barb Littauer and Stephanie Sobel prepared and read from the Torah as b'not mitzvah (daughters of the commandment)—adults claiming, in public and in Hebrew, what had not been offered to them earlier in life. It remains one of the truest pictures of what this congregation is for.

Rabbi Seth Klayman, who had led the congregation since 2005, was ordained on July 22, 2006. A recording of the service is kept in our archives.

Sha'arei Shalom purchased its current property at 700 Old Apex Road in Cary, a permanent home after seven years of rented rooms.

When we moved from the sanctuary we had rented for six years to the building that would become our own, we did not pack the scrolls into a car. The congregation carried the Torah three miles on foot, with a police escort, through the streets of Cary, from Reedy Creek to Old Apex Road. Whoever wanted to carry it, carried it. At the doors of the new building, a mezuzah was affixed: the oldest act of Jewish homemaking there is.

We dedicated the building at Hanukkah—the festival of dedication itself. The significance was not lost on anyone present.

Sha'arei Shalom traveled to Israel together for the first time. In Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, Rabbi Seth Klayman purchased the congregation's small Torah scroll and brought it home to Cary.

Scaffolding went up in the sanctuary, and the work of Terumah (offering) began—the congregation's gifts turned into plaster, paint, and light. Behind the Ark, beneath what everyone had assumed was finished wall, the builders found brick. A new bimah was built by hand, board by board, in a member's woodshop.

The congregation purchased the adjacent property, forming the campus we worship on today.

Rabbi Jeff Lerman was affirmed as Congregational Leader and Elder of Sha'arei Shalom in late March 2025. Before coming to Cary, he served for a decade in Sarasota, Florida, where he planted a Messianic synagogue and helped cast a vision for the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. He began teaching at Sha'arei Shalom in June 2025.

Over the years this congregation has helped form and send out young leaders who served here as interns before going on to their own ministries.