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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.

Cantor Carries on Tennis Tradition

Located at Beverly and Crescent Heights boulevards, Beth Israel was founded in 1899 as the first Orthodox congregation in Los Angeles, and was also known as the Olive Street Shul.

Q & A With Rabbi Robert Gan

Rabbi Robert Gan, 63, has been senior rabbi at Temple Isaiah, an 850-family member Reform congregation on Pico Boulevard, for more than 30 years. At Temple Isaiah, Gan demonstrated his commitment to social justice, inviting such speakers as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to address his congregation. This year, Gan begins his newest role, as president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, an agency of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles that brings together 250 rabbis from all denominations. Gan spoke to The Journal about his plans for his new position, and the problems facing the Jewish world today.

Part-Time Work, Full-Time Families

Women form slightly more than 11 percent of the RA\’s membership today, with both JTS and the University of Judaism (UJ) ordaining them as rabbis.

Unsolved Mysteries

Over the High Holidays, somebody scrawled Nazi swastikas and the epithets \”Cursed evildoers\” and \”Evildoers, you will die\” on the front door of the Reform movement\’s Har-El Congregation synagogue in midtown Jerusalem.This was only the latest act of vandalism against Har-El, Israel\’s oldest Reform synagogue, in recent months. Over the summer, someone smeared human excrement on the synagogue door. On two other occasions, somebody poured acid on the synagogue garden, turning the grass yellow. All these incidents took place when the building was closed.

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