When the Roosevelt administration created the city of Greenbelt in 1937, it set rules about how many government workers could live there; how many people could come from D.C., Maryland and Virginia; and how much money everyone could make.

It also set rules guaranteeing religious diversity, leading to the founding of a synagogue that is still around today, as members celebrate the first night of Hanukkah.

“To ensure against religious discrimination in selection, the administration developed quotas based on a religious census taken in 1926 showing the Washington area to be 59 percent Protestant, 34 percent Roman Catholic and 7 percent Jewish,” noted author Cathy D. Knepper in a history of the town.

After moving in, a group of four Jewish families went door-to-door to sign up members for what they called the Greenbelt Hebrew Congregation and began holding services in a school music room and a firehouse.

The group borrowed a Torah from a synagogue in Philadelphia, and a member carried it and an ark on a children’s wagon to services each week.

When the congregation grew big enough to need its own building, members built it themselves using plans drawn up by an architecture professor at Howard University, often working at night by the light of their car headlights. Few had any construction experience, but word spread and they soon received help from the community.

“In their spare time Catholics, Protestants and others sweated alongside our members, all working to build a House of God,” recalled one longtime member.

Impatient after three years of work, the congregation raised money to hire a contractor and the synagogue was finished in 1955.

Now named Mishkan Torah, the congregation is Conservative and Reconstructionist, allowing women to participate equally in all services since 1973.

The Roosevelt administration’s approach to deciding who would move to Greenbelt had its problems, especially since it barred African-Americans, who did not start moving to the city until the 1960s.

But its welcoming attitude toward religious diversity helped shape the city.

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