For several years after Maureen King and Marc Feldman were married, a Christmas tree and a menorah shared space in the home they made with their two children.

King was raised in the Protestant church and Feldman is Jewish, and the religious symbols in their Kennebunk home reflected their different faiths.

But when the couple’s son, around the age of seven, asked why the tree was there, King decided to put the Christian symbol away.

“He had very much identified himself as Jewish,” King said. “He really felt like he belonged in a synagogue.”

King has converted to Judaism herself, sent her children to Hebrew School and is a member of the Etz Chaim synagogue in Biddeford.

In interfaith families like King’s, questions about Jewish identity and connecting with Jewish institutions can be a significant issue. How families respond to that issue will have an important effect on the broader Jewish community in southern Maine, according to a major new demographic profile.

The study of the Jewish community in southern Maine found 61 percent of Jewish households in the region are intermarried – the highest percentage of any North American community studied.

It also found that levels of religious practice, affiliation with Jewish organizations and Jewish philanthropy are particularly low in intermarried households. That has implications for Jewish institutions like synagogues, schools and social service programs that depend on membership and financial support to stay healthy.

“They are facing a situation where a good percentage of the Jewish population in Maine does not feel connected to the Jewish community,” said Ira Sheskin, the author of the study and a geographer at the University of Miami who specializes in the study of Jewish demography.

Sheskin said the Jewish community needs to improve outreach to newcomers, particularly intermarried families; raise awareness of Jewish programs and activities and build philanthropic support that will be critical to the survival of synagogues, schools and other Jewish community institutions.

The study also yielded encouragement, in the form of opportunities for building community. For example, Sheskin said he found that Jews in southern Maine use the Internet at a much higher rate than those elsewhere for obtaining Jewish-related information.

He said the community could capitalize on that finding by focusing on using the Internet for outreach.

Sheskin’s study was commissioned by the Jewish Community Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports the Jewish community with cultural, educational and social programs.

Charles Miller, an attorney in Portland, is the chairman of a demographic study committee that represented the alliance and other Jewish institutions in overseeing the study.

He said Sheskin’s work served an important purpose by corroborating and quantifying what had been anecdotal information about the characteristics of Jewish households in southern Maine. However, he said the study also contained some surprises.

For example, he noted that donors to the alliance’s annual philanthropic campaign, which operates much like the United Way, give an average of $1,000 per family. Yet the study disclosed that many Jewish families don’t know about the alliance and are not being reached by any Jewish organization.

“I see this as a real opportunity for us to do outreach to those families and engage them in activities that are meaningful to them,” he said. Alliance president Sam Novick said he plans to form two new committees that will study the data closely and develop a plan for using the findings to strengthen the Jewish community and its institutions.

“There’s many different ways to look at the numbers,” he said. “This is not going to happen overnight.”

Southern Maine has about 4,300 Jewish households, which include a total of 11,825 people, of whom 8,350 are Jewish, the study found. That...