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Congregations offering loans and grants to lure young families

They were looking to move anyway, said Stephanie Butler. And the $50,000 incentive being offered by Temple Emanu-El in Dothan, Ala., to young Jewish families willing to relocate helped tip the scales. “We never would have looked at Dothan if not for this program,” she said.

First black female rabbi to leave congregation

The first African-American female rabbi will leave her congregation this summer. Rabbi Alysa Stanton\’s contract with Congregation Bayt Shalom in Greenville, S.C., was not renewed, the Forward reported Thursday. \”We felt Rabbi Stanton has brought a lot of gifts to the congregation, but we felt she wasn’t a good fit for the direction we’re going,” board president Samantha Pilot told the Forward. “I can tell you with certainty that race — I never heard that come up once during her tenure or now. It’s a non-issue.\”\n

Friendship and freedom at Adat Chaverim

Adat Chaverim is a small congregation of secular, Humanistic Jews, whose brochure proposes that \”reason rather than faith is the source of truth, and human intelligence and experience are capable of guiding our lives.\”

How I returned

But as much as she loves the pulpit, Naomi, like me, finds the modern synagogue problematic. She believes that Judaism offers people a sense of purpose, a mission to heal society and a fulfilling spiritual path, but that too often standard synagogue services don\’t attract or inspire Jews, much less compel them to commit to a community.

Teenagers reveal why this service is different from all other services

Since the recent holiday of Passover was one of asking questions and thinking about transitioning from one state of being to another, it is an appropriate time to think of the bar and bat mitzvah in a similar context. These four questions — or more accurately one question and four answers — can be recited by 13-year-olds, but their explanations are particularly relevant for all of us.

A pioneering minyan celebrates double chai birthday

Pressman and the group did create another entity, what has become known as \”The Library Minyan,\” named for the downstairs library where the 15 families began to meet weekly to pray. Members organized and participated in all parts of the service (especially the weekly sermon), discussed all aspects of Judaism and debated the increasingly complex issues of the changing times.Thirty-six years later, the Library Minyan, with its opportunities for engagement and intellectual rigor is seen as having helped to start a revolution — empowering lay leaders in the essential structure of spiritual leadership. It has become a model for many Conservative and Reform congregations seeking to create alternatives both within and outside the fold of conventional synagogue structure, and has allowed individual congregations to morph it into new and ever-changing incarnations.This weekend, the Library Minyan will celebrate its double-chai anniversary (two times \”life\”) with a Shabbaton Nov. 2-4 that will remember the past but also look toward the future.

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Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.