Lots of people say they go to Assif for the singing. The singing can be amazing – heartfelt, spirited, and actually beautiful. Then again, it can be off-key, shouty, and downright blah. A lot depends who’s there and who’s leading the service. What's clear is that Assifniks relish the noise they make and believe that God, whoever He/She is, does too.
The Drawing Room at the Manor House (at the Sternberg Centre on East End Road, Finchley) is in many ways a perfect space for a shul. It's stunning features (high ceilings, beautiful moudings on the walls, grand ornamental fireplace, massive windows and noise-proof door) make it both grand, and at the same time, small-scale and intimate – you can always see and hear who's there. A changing selection of art on the walls is a pleasing distraction during the boring bits, and glorious mature trees outside ruffled by sun and wind are both soothing and awe-ing.
There's also a lot of traffic in and out of the Drawing Room, which eases the tedium of an entirely unrevolutionary service. For the service, apart from being fully egalitarian and featuring a lot of different individuals, is unremarkable, practically indistinguishable from a standard United Synagogue service in fact. There's nothing experimental or cutting edge about it once you get over the (novelty?) of seeing women doing stuff. (They score extra points if they're holding a toddler at the same time.)
So who goes to Assif? There are some grey-haired folk but just enough to feel like a real shul, lots of thirty-somethings, both with and without kids, and a pretty good selection of twenty-somethings, (particularly considering that most people in their twenties don't make it to shul on a Shabbat morning), some American and Israeli Conservative/Masorti tourists, and quite a few small children and babies who play charmingly and distractingly under the bima or and occasionally start shouting and have to be dragged out. There's a higher than average sandal count, a pleasingly anarchic lack of consensus about women's tallitot and kippot, and an unexpected yekkish professionalism to some of the leyners and daveners.
Nobody's quite decided if Assif is smug and cliquey or open and accessible. It seems still to be run in large part by the thirtysomethings who founded it 10 years ago, but the make-up of the service seems to vary greatly from one Shabbat to the next. The size of it means you can't really sit at the back and gossip but if you're an Ortho-sceptic feminist traditionalist who can't be doing with new rituals, poetic alternatives to the haftorah, and "sharing" of any sort, and even enjoys a sermon as long as it doesn't say anything that wouldn't sit well with readers of The Guardian, this is really the one for you. (But you probably won't get a snog, let alone a life partner out of it.)