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A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT, MARCIA RAPP I am writing this article in advance of my trip to San Diego where Sandra Edelboim, Barbara Simmonds, and I will participate in the URJ Biennial. Approximately 4,000 Reform Jews from North America, Europe, and Israel will attend this 4-day conference of workshops, study sessions, plenary meetings, innovative worship services, and lots of information exchange. This is my first Biennial, and I’m really looking forward to representing our Temple. Barbara, Sandra, and I met several weeks ago to pre-register for the specific workshops that we will each attend in order to bring back programming ideas for our congregation. Many of the sessions that I will attend deal with long range planning. Our Temple is in the formative stages of creating its own long-range plan. Though each congregation is unique, I hope to bring back some innovative ideas that we can adapt for ourselves as we move forward. Long range planning is focused, goal oriented, and self-reflective. It requires that a congregation ask itself where it is right now; where it would like to see itself at a given point in the future; and how to go about getting there. These past months, we have reviewed the responses to the many questionnaires that were returned. We have also conducted five focus groups, each one representing the wide diversity of our membership. We have convened the first meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee, chaired by past president Dodie Weinstein. George Fink, Mark Neckes, Karen Mintz Margulies, Joanne Gelfand, Gerry Gunzburger, Scott Singer, and I compose the core committee with Rabbi Tuffs and Sandra Edelboim serving as staff resources. We will develop a number of sub-committees to analyze the many aspects of Temple life, and hope to involve many of you – our creative and talented members – to use your personal and professional expertise and skills to enable us to complete this important project for our Temple As you look through the pages of this Bulletin, you can see that Temple Beth El is a busy place. So many of you have mentioned to me how much you appreciate receiving emails listing the monthly activities, and the January – February schedule is no exception! B’Shalom |
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