For some it was a ride down memory lane, for others, a trip to unfamiliar territory.

But for everyone aboard a bus chartered by Congregation Beth El, the sightseeing trip from South Orange to Newark on April 22 provided a look at the Jewish community's past, president, and future in New Jersey's largest city.

Moments after the bus pulled out of the synagogue's parking lot, Sam Convissor, a Newark native who was the trip's organizer and tour guide, jokingly issued a directive: "Those of you who are graduates of Weequahic High School are required to break out into the alma mater."

Fewer than half of the 48 people on board had grown up in Newark or attended the school that was once a preeminent institution in what was the city's Jewish section. But all could connect with the tour's first stop.

As the bus pulled up to the Grove Street Cemetery off South Orange Avenue, Newark native Alice Gould climbed aboard.

Since 1995, she has been involved in the cemetery project of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, a massive mission to identify every person buried in a Jewish cemetery anyplace in the world.

Author of The Old Jewish Cemeteries of Newark (Avotaynu), she is also a member of the Beth El Memorial Park Foundation (no connection to the synagogue). Staffed by the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the foundation is entrusted with the upkeep of the area's historic Jewish cemeteries.

"It's like the store Toys ‘R' Us, Gould joked. "I've become Cemeteries ‘R' Me."

Briefing visitors before a walking tour of the burial grounds, Gould, a resident of West Caldwell, noted that many of the plots were arranged together in groups established by congregations, civic groups, and landsmanshaften – hometown social and burial societies.

"One of the first things many Jewish immigrants did when they got here was organize health and burial societies, even before they started synagogues. In the ‘Old Country,' burial societies were an integral part of Jewish life," Gould said.

She pointed out that among the graves, there were, "sad to say, many of infants and children, and many of them buried with mothers who died in childbirth."

As the bus headed downtown, Convissor said that Newark's Jewish population hit its peak around 1948, when there were between 60,000 and 75,000 Jews and 59 synagogues in the city.

Nearly 60 years later, only two synagogues remain – the Mount Sinai Congregation, which caters largely to a Russian immigrant population in the Ivy Hill section, and Ahavas Sholom, the Conservative synagogue sandwiched between African-American and Latino churches on Broadway.

During the group's visit to Ahavas Sholom, which celebrated its centennial last November, they met with Eric Freedman, the Jersey City resident who has been its president for more than 10 years. His synagogue, he boasted, has a loyal and heterogeneous membership.

"We actually fill the room on the High Holy Days. Last Yom Kippur we probably had 165 people," he said. "We have 144 permanent seats, so we had to line up some chairs."

"The membership is not large," Freedman said, "but we have a really solid core." Among them are seven or eight members who still reside in Newark. And even as longtime members have passed away, new members have replenished the congregation, including African-Americans, Peruvians, Brazilians, Iranians, and Ukrainians.

"To me, it is the most interesting aspect of our synagogue right now," said Freedman. "I grew up in White Meadow Lake, and we didn't have that kind of diversity," he said with a smile.

As she led her four-year-old son, Simon, to Ahavas Sholom's vintage mahogany carved ark that stands as a centerpiece of the sanctuary, Beth El Rabbi Francine Roston marveled.

"What I think is so wonderful is that people come and continue to daven here and use this beautiful space and create community," she said.

As the bus headed down Prince Street, "once the heart of Newark's Jewish ghetto," said Convissor, the travelers peered out at a landscape dominated by vacant lots.

One of the few buildings in sight housed two Jewish congregations in succession: Oheb Shalom from 1884 to 1911 and Adas Israel/ Mishnayes from 1911 to 1939, before becoming the 50-year home of the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

Now the headquarters of the Greater Newark Conservancy, the historic structure survived a threatened demolition and underwent extensive restoration. It now houses a leading environmental education center.

"We bring thousands of inner-city schoolchildren here to teach them about the benefits of nature," said the conservancy's executive director, Robin Dougherty.

On an acre and a half outside the building is an ecosystem featuring an herb garden, a greenhouse, a wetlands area, a sundial, and an unusual meeting of urban and rural environments, with several pairs of shoes and sneakers used as flower pots for small plants.

As the bus headed back to the suburbs, Mark Brownstein of Maplewood, a board member of the conservancy and president-elect of Beth El, reflected on "the monuments of the Jewish community of the past in Newark and how many of these buildings are coming back to life."

Roz Diamond of South Orange went on the Newark trip "to get in touch with my roots and the Jewish immigrant experience in America. The cemeteries are a context in which that history comes to light. And seeing a congregation that's been in operation for more than 100 years – that's what amazes me the most," she said.

Although Edith Stiller was raised in the Weequahic section of Newark, she had never been in Ahavas Sholom before.

Stiller, who resides in Springfield, said she was "very impressed" with her first visit to the old synagogue. "I was very thrilled with this trip. It gave me a lot of nostalgia."

David Koenig is a Maplewood resident who grew up in Westchester, NY.

"Not having grown up here," he said, "I can only feel an affinity in knowing there is this history that has been left behind as the Jews moved out to the suburbs."