Synagogue Dues are Dead

Rabbi Paul Kipnes and David Weisz 0 Comments

What’s the price point at which quitting the temple becomes unnecessary or nearly impossible?”  So asked a business leader in our synagogue. “Figure out that price point and our synagogue will grow organically instead of continuing to shrink. During a fascinating lunchtime conversation with this trusted congregant, the search for answers to challenging questions about our dues structure came to an end and we began to envision a new way forward. Like most synagogues, Congregation Or Ami (Calabasas, California) understood that dues represented the largest portion of our budgeted income. Our membership, once climbing, had been slowly declining. After years of a 14% resignation rate, our 2011-2014 data showed that 22-24% of our households were leaving each year. While we had robust levels of new […]

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How our pandemic experience might help faith communities engage “nones” and “dones”

Rev. Alexis Lillie 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: While this article is fully rooted in a Christian context, the analysis of the “nones” and “dones” aptly describes a phenomenon widespread in the next Gen Jewish world. And the prescriptions for how to draw such disaffected people back into spiritual community is completely relevant to synagogues that hope to be relevant today. For the third time in as many weeks, I opened my email today to find a message from someone questioning their faith and the validity of church. Typically, these questioners desire a religious practice that encompasses more than believing the “right” things and are not sure there’s a place for them at the table of American Christianity. I have lost count of the emails I’ve received and conversations I’ve had […]

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Nothing that is Not Sacred

Dr. Lori Wynters 0 Comments

Pesach was the holiday that I think most informed and continues to inform why I’m still Jewish and why I chose to go to rabbinical school. “Care for the stranger”, zecher l’tziat mitzrayim, the commandment to remember that the very reason that we were taken out of the narrows of Egypt was so that we could know that our liberations are tied to each other.  It was the anchoring element of the Judaism I was raised with in New York City in the 1970’s-1980’s. It was an unspoken principle and practice in our living rooms, seder tables and kitchens…this cellular knowing that our freedoms are interwoven with each other. As a kid I marched with my mom at Racial Equity in Education marches, actions by […]

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How one Synagogue’s Social Justice Engagement Led the Way to Renewal and Revitalization

Rabbi Mike Rothbaum 0 Comments

In the late fall of 2016, I was making plans for the next phase of my rabbinical career.  As fate would have it, the morning after Election Night, as Donald Trump crossed the 270-vote threshold in the electoral college, I was preparing to board a plane from my then-home in Oakland, California to the East Coast.  I had a weekend visit to a synagogue in New Jersey, and a Skype interview with a synagogue in Massachusetts. The weekend was lovely, but it would be that Skype session that led to my current role.  I sat in the basement of a friend’s house in Rockland County, 20 miles north of Manhattan.  The smiling faces on my screen exuded warmth, but it was flecked with distress — and […]

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How a Mr. Rogers Ministry Guided My Pandemic Rabbinate*

Rabbi Ilana Schachter 0 Comments

“I’m not that interested in ‘mass’ communications. I’m much more interested in what happens between this person and the one person watching. The space between the television set and that person who’s watching is very holy ground.” -Fred Rogers[1] When I was a child growing up in a largely secular Jewish home, I took tremendous comfort in watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was an educator and a pastor, who used television as a vehicle to communicate his torah, which was that each person is unique and special, worth seeing and celebrating. Through the camera, he saw us. Through a screen, Mr. Rogers would invite us into his living room and would share things that were precious to him. He would share stories about his […]

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A Rabbi on High on the High Holy Days

Rabbi Alex Lazarus-Klein 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy last fall. Given how many congregations are needing to pivot to deal with the upsurge in the Covid/Delta variant, many planning a mix of on-line and in-person services for the coming holidays, we thought the spirit of innovation represented by this article was worth re-publishing. Packing the drive-in-movie-theater with over two-hundred cars on Yom Kippur, the Cantor and I conducted services from, of all places, the rooftop of a snack shack.  Far from ideal, we had to battle the elements, with winds of over thirty-miles an hour whipping by us, and navigate a sound system where people could hear much better in their cars, than those of us actually leading the service. And, this […]

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Rituals for Reopening

Rabbi Chai Levy 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California After fifteen months of pandemic and social distancing, our communities are reopening. So too, synagogues and Jewish community organizations, which have been operating primarily online for more than a year, are resuming in-person gatherings. As we reopen our buildings and prepare for in-person services and events, there are many questions to address. Covid Response teams and Reopening committees are asking: How many people can attend an indoor event? Can we require proof of vaccination? Is communal singing safe if people are masked? Jewish organizational leaders grapple daily with the exhausting work of adapting our operations to the continually evolving public health protocols. Beyond these kinds of safety protocol questions, […]

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Turning a Synagogue into a Jewish Cultural Campus

Rabbi Jeremy Barras 0 Comments

Temple Beth Am in Miami is a large Reform congregation that owes much of its success to the vision of its founding rabbi, Rabbi Herbert Baumgard, z”l.  A pioneering rabbi in many respects, Rabbi Baumgard’s lasting legacy is punctuated by his belief that in order to flourish and remain viable, Temple Beth Am needed an exemplary Jewish day school. Today that day school contains approximately 500 students from pre-K through 5th grade. We are a 1500 family member unit congregation that has grown by about 400 families over the last six years.  We attribute that growth to three factors: a) our synagogue provides outstanding programming; b) our day school has acquired a reputation for educational excellence; and c) several other local congregations have either closed […]

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5 Shifts Congregations Need to Make to Keep Up with the Changing Times

Rabbi Esther Lederman and Amy Asin 0 Comments

Let’s review some key data: The Jewish community is dramatically more diverse than we once realized it was: One in every seven to eight Jews is a person of color; we have a sizeable LGBTQIA+ population; and the number of Jewish-adjacent individuals in our communities is growing. At the same time, religious affiliation is in decline, more houses of worship are shutting their doors than opening up for business, and “Jews of no religion” are on the rise. What’s more, today’s increasing lifespans mean we’re serving as many as five generations of adults in our congregations. Although this diversity of life experience is a blessing, it can also be a challenge. Often, as with any group of different experiences and generations, its members have varying […]

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Can Mussar Help Us Repair the World?

Rabbi Lori Shapiro 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: A longer version of this article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal on July 22,2020. Revolution is complex and not for the fainthearted. Most of us are not meant to be Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, yet the fate of the world rests upon the work of each and every one of us and the perfection of our individual path. Judaism is built upon the concept of an interior experience of personal betterment through actions. It combines a study of past wisdom applied to the refinement of our present actions to help build a better tomorrow. Judaism’s goal, fueled by ancient concepts of the end of days, redemption and a Messianic world to come, is to cultivate […]

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