Hi folks!
My wife and I are moving to a rural area for work. There is a synagogue in town, but it hasn’t hosted services in a long time. The nearest synagogues with services are over 80 miles away. There’s still a small Jewish community there, though.
We’ve been very active in our urban synagogue, and we’d love to engage our new community as much as possible. We’d love to hear any ideas folks have for invigorating Jewish life in this small community!
Here are some ideas we have so far:
- Having folks over for Shabbat dinner.
- Running some lay-led services, or figuring out a way to stream services from another synagogue.
- Making our sukkah, lulav, and etrog available to folks for Sukkot – either setting it up in our backyard or on the synagogue grounds. (We have a large mitzvahland sukkah and also a small pop-up one.)
- Having folks over for our Passover seder.
- Hamentashen baking.
- Megillah reading and Purim puppet show.
- Shofar-gram (going to folks’ houses and blowing the shofar for the High Holy Days).
- Jewish movie nights.
- Mezuzah decorating.
- Synagogue open house with the local historical society.
- Shacharit group. (I have two sets of tefillin, so I could loan one out if I find someone interested?)
- Bringing folks latkes and sufganiyot for Chanukkah.
- Weekly Torah study group.
Other things we’ll be looking into regarding community upkeep:
- Cemetery and synagogue maintenance.
- Getting visiting rabbis or rabbinical students to do some services.
- Registering as a “pod” with Moishe House for increased visibility and access to resources.
- Setting up a website for the synagogue/community with a monitored email address.
- Figuring out a yahrzeit reminder system.
- Putting together a “circle of care” for when folks are sick.
- Reaching out to other Jewish communities for Hebrew tutoring if there’s enough interest.
Any other ideas? Thank y’all so much! 😎
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