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From The President's Desk

President Susan Tepperman

Thank you and Yasher Koach to all who participated in our rabbi search! March has been a busy and an exciting month for our congregation. By the time you receive this bulletin, our Board of Directors will have selected our new rabbi to replace our beloved Rabbi Ostrovsky. As you know, last month Jon Shalen and I traveled to New York to interview ten candidates. We chose four of these candidates to invite to visit Munster. Three of these candidates accepted our invitations and by now, many of you have met one, two or all three of these incredible men. Our search committee (comprised of Jon, myself, Judy Rooth, Michael Gideon, Ed Feldman, Bobbye Schatz, Stacy Kaufman, Becky Handler and Barry Rooth) will make a recommendation to our board, and a decision will be made on Sunday March 30 at our board meeting. We hope to begin contract negotiations during the first week in April. This process has been a challenging one, but an exhilarating one as well. I am thrilled with the interest that our congregation has shown in our candidates. I am very proud of our community, and in the way in which we participated in the opportunities to get to know the candidates. The process was a great learning experience as well. Each candidate brought different skills and strengths to the table. Each had great suggestions on how to strengthen our community. I plan to implement much of what I learned during these interviews in the future planning of the synagogue. I truly enjoyed spending time with each of you over the past three weeks, and I sense that you enjoyed spending time with one another as well. We really came together as a community, and I felt honored to be your president during this process. All three candidates were impressed with the level of participation and the warmth of our community. I sensed a real energy during our search process and I plan to build on this energy so that participation and interest remain high in the future. Many of you expressed interest in the Friday Night Kabalat Services, and others expressed positive reactions to the Saturday Afternoon study sessions. Please continue to call or email me with your thoughts and comments. This will help me to help our rabbi elect to best understand and meet our needs. Again, thank you for all that each of you did to make this process a huge success!
This month (from March 27th thru March 30t), I will attend “Sulam”, a conference for presidents of conservative congregations from all over North America. I will attend leadership training seminars, planning sessions and I will share ideas with other presidents. I hope to bring back new and innovative programs to enhance our synagogue. This year’s conference will take place in Chicago’s North Shore, so I don’t have to travel too far from home.
Finally, I want to tell you about a wonderful program called the “P.J. Library”. This program is sponsored by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, and it is a program designed to deepen the identities of Jewish families and to strengthen their relationships to the Jewish Community. (Harold Grinspoon is a generous and forward thinking philanthropist from Massachusetts.) The P.J. Library provides books for Jewish children ages 6 Months thru 7 years of age. Each book is accompanied by a compact disk which is designed to enhance the story. The books are mailed to each child’s home monthly for one year. Each child receives twelve age appropriate stories with accompanying disks. The idea is that bed time stories (hence the name P.J.--or pajama-- Library) can generate Jewish learning and pleasurable interaction between parent and child. This is a joint program involving Congregation Beth Israel, The Jewish Federation of Northwest Indiana, and the parents of each child. The cost of the program is $60.00 per child. The costs will be split equally between the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, CBI and the Jewish Federation of Northwest Indiana. Therefore this program is being provided at NO COST to the individual family! If you have a child in this age range, you will be receiving books as soon as we can submit the information to the Grinspoon Foundation. If you are a grandparent whose grandchild does not live in our community, but would like to receive these books, please contact the Federation. I am told that there is a possibility that arrangements can be made (for an additional cost) so that non CBI members can receive these wonderful stories.

That’s all for now. Until next month……think Spring!!!

B’ Shalom, Susan