From Sea to Sacred Sea

Rabbi Michael Lezak 0 Comments

Sixty 15 year-old Jewish campers from L.A. are on a three-day hike through the Santa Monica Mountains.  No mattresses.  No stereos.  No showers.  No hair dryers.   Not an easy task for these pampered kids from the Valley and West L.A.    It’s their last summer as campers.  The summer before they become Counselors-in-Training.  They stay up late.  Telling silly stories around the campfire.  Singing their favorite camp songs.  Eyeing that summer’s crush.  On the last night, these campers and their beloved counselors sleep on a beach in Malibu as the sounds of the waves crashing help them to feel profoundly alive.  They wake up, dip their feet in the ocean and walk en masse along Pacific Coast Highway back to camp.  As they amble into the […]

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Changing Communal Culture in Synagogues

Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz 0 Comments

When I became the rabbi of Temple Beth El (TBE) in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2008, two congregations were merging: Temple Beth El and B’nai Jacob. Temple Beth El was a large Conservative congregation showing signs of a growing malaise. Membership had declined from about 900 to 600 member units, the physical facility felt neglected, and the classes and programs that had once been quite successful were no longer particularly well-attended. Many congregants seemed disengaged, the congregation relied heavily on its professional staff, and it was challenging to recruit and sustain committed volunteers. Still, when interviewing with the members and the leadership I sensed a deep love for the Temple and a powerful desire to rebuild. B’nai Jacob was a very different congregation. […]

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Re-Thinking Synagogue Dues

Rabbi Dan Goldblatt 1 Comment

In the summer of 2007, we carried our Czech Memorial Trust Torahs from the Congregational church that had hosted us for ten years and celebrated a glorious shehechiyanu moment in our beautiful synagogue home perched on a hill overlooking the lush San Ramon Valley.  We added a lovely pre-school wing and expected to grow and flourish.  Little did we know that the subprime mortgage crisis was about to hit the country like an economic tsunami and many people in our community would lose their jobs and some could no longer afford living in our upscale suburb. We lost scores of members who could no longer pay synagogue dues and watched as the percentage of remaining members on “dues subsidy” skyrocketed from a little over ten […]

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Synagogues: Thinking Big

Rabbi David Steinhardt 0 Comments

I serve as the senior rabbi of B’nai Torah Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Boca Raton Florida. During my 20 year tenure the congregation has doubled in size to approximately 1400 families. The growth has been fueled in part by demographics. But it also has been a result of a conscious decision to reach out to every segment of our synagogue population and beyond our walls. When I first arrived the programming was fairly conventional and it reflected the interests of a small leadership group. I believed that if we wanted to attract a wider cross-section of Jews in our area we needed more diversity in our programming. I especially wanted to introduce programming that would appeal to a younger generational cohort. My specific area of focus was […]

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The Vendor Trap: Why Selling Spirituality Doesn’t Work

Rabbi Michael Wasserman 1 Comment

Michael Sandel, in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, argues that the two decades since the end of the Cold War have been an era of market triumphalism. As winners often do, we have over-learned the lesson of our victory. The vindication of free markets has led us to assume that markets ought to govern practically everything. The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms is one of the most significant developments of our time. Consider the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military contractors . . . the reach of commercial advertising into public schools; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and […]

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An Alternative Minyan with a Twist

Rabbi Bruce Dollin 0 Comments

Over the course of the past year, our traditional Conservative congregation created a second Shabbat morning service we call Shir Hadash that meets every shabbat of the year, which includes spirited congregational singing led by a team of singers and accompanied by drums.  The service is not unlike what one might find at new congregations like Romemu in New York or IKAR in Los Angeles.  What is different here is that Shir Hadash was created and thrives in a traditional synagogue of 940 families with an 85-year history. When I came to Denver in 1994, Hebrew Educational Alliance was a declining Orthodox congregation of 300 families located on the west side of Denver.  The Jewish community had long since moved across town.   We quickly set […]

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Taking Prayer Seriously

Rabbi Laura Geller 0 Comments

I didn’t set out to transform our synagogue by creating an alternative Shabbat morning minyan.  I only wanted a place to pray. I knew that the ultimate measure of the success of my congregational rabbinate would be if I could pray in my own synagogue. When I came to Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills in 1994, it was a congregation in distress. It was close to $5,000,000 in debt, the previous senior rabbi had left, tension between the day school and the synagogue was toxic, and it was about to be acquired by another major congregation in what was called a merger. The Board of Directors of both synagogues favored the merger, as did the rabbis, including the emeritus rabbi of Emanuel who was called […]

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Vision and Change in a Conservative Synagogue

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf , , 0 Comments

When I first got to my synagogue six years ago, it was on its way to becoming an anachronism.  In many ways, it was advanced in that it had sophisticated programs and multiple minyanim.  Many members felt, however, that the clergy-led services were too formal and even passionless.  The members of the non-clergy-led minyanim felt “tolerated” but frowned upon by the synagogue leadership.  The lay-staff relationships were limited.  The various elements of the synagogue–the different age cohorts, the religious school community, the gan community, the older generations – these and many more were in silos.   The professional staff had very little sense that they were a team. Furthermore, at 150-years-old, it was the solid establishment synagogue of Washington. Its very prestige and history were weighing it down.  For some, it […]

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A Synagogue Stimulus Plan

Rabbi Sid Schwarz 0 Comments

At the recent national convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Ed Feinstein was reported to have said, “The house is on fire,” as a way to signal to Conservative congregations that the hour is too late for synagogues to think about modest changes in the way they do their business. Since the 2000 publication of my book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue, I have worked with many congregations and rabbis across the denominational spectrum about strategies to move their institutions from the current paradigm — the synagogue-center — to a new paradigm, the synagogue-community, which is far better suited to address the changing reality of American life and the next generation of American […]

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