Synagogue Life

Local Pick for Top Conservative Post Heads Into a Maelstrom

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In selecting Rabbi Steven Wernick, religious leader of Adath Israel in Merion Station, as its next professional leader, the Conservative movement's congregational arm is betting that the 41-year-old is the right man to steer the ship at a time of anxiety -- even upheaval -- in the movement. In the past two weeks, two separate groups of Conservative leaders have...

Business

That Was Then; This Is Now

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Fredda Sacharow, JE Feature

" ... Synagogues struggled under heavy financial burdens and mortgage debts, watched their memberships shrink, and were often forced to curtail programs and dismiss personnel. ... [The crisis] threatened both the economic health and substantive role of synagogues." University of Pennsylvania historian Beth S. Wenger was writing about another large city and another financial crisis in her 1996 book, New...

Synagogue Life

Yeshiva U. Gets Into the Matchmaking Biz

By:

Aaron Passman, JE Feature

In 2006, after leading a congregation in Birmingham, Ala., for nearly a decade, Rabbi Avraham Shmidman was looking to make a move. But how to go about finding that next job? After all, there's not exactly a CareerBuilder.com for rabbis. That's where Yeshiva University's Center for the Jewish Future comes in, specifically the Morris and Gertrude Bienenfeld Department of Jewish...

Local

Society Hill Synagogue to Spruce Itself Up Via a Matching Grant

By:

Aaron Passman, JE Feature

If it were a TV show, it might be called Extreme Makeover: Synagogue Edition . Society Hill Synagogue will soon begin repairs and renovations to its historic home, thanks to an $80,000 matching grant from the Philadelphia Regional Fund for Sacred Places, a division of Partners for Sacred Places, a nonprofit established in 1989 that provides assistance to congregations occupying...

Local

When Life Hands You Apples ...

Doing their share of the home cooking (from left), are Bruce Broser, Budd Cohen and Ken Hornstein of the Temple Brith Achim's Men's Club, who recently transformed 10 bushels of apples (approximately 1,200 of them) into hundreds of containers of applesauce. The organization then sold the applesauce as part of a fundraiser during the King of Prussia synagogue's Chanukah gift...