New York Jewish Week — I was late to the havurah movement: the egalitarian, counterculture congregations that blended grassroots spirituality, social activism and skepticism about mainstream synagogues and the Jewish establishment. By the time we joined Farbrengen in Washington, DC, in the late 1980s, the founders of the movement were sprouting gray hairs and more than a few were leading mainstream synagogues and establishment institutions of their own.

Still, my memories of that time are unmistakably and anachronistically of the 1970s. That’s in large part thanks to the photographs of Bill Aron. A trained sociologist and street photographer, Aron took iconic photos of his fellow members of the New York Havurah in its 1970s heyday. Many of those photos were included in “The Jewish Catalog,” a do-it-yourself guidebook created by members of the New York Havurah. Decades after it was first published in 1973, it remained a touchstone for Jews who were trying to lead the kind of hands-on, committed Jewish life that their suburban parents had put behind them.

Those images of the New York Havurah are a small but essential part of a new retrospective running through June 4 at the Center for Jewish History, which draws on more than five decades of Aron’s work, now stored in the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society. The men, women and children in those black and white photographs are displayed between Aron’s images of Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side in the early 1970s, and future projects showing Jews in Cuba, Russia, Los Angeles, Israel and the American South.

Together, they offer a visual conversation between tradition and........

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