Category — Getting Started

By: Benjamin Maron

So you want to start a new havurah or minyan.

Starting a new community can take a lot of work, medications energy, pestilence and effort, but can also be quite rewarding. The following guidelines can help ensure both that you are not too exhausted to enjoy the first meeting of your group and also that people show up and want to get involved further.

Why do you want to start a new Jewish community? Is there a type of davening (praying) that you would enjoy that doesn’t exist in your area? Do you want to start a group that meets for holidays and learns Torah together? Do you want to start a minyan or havurah with a focus on a specific theme, like social justice or families? Identifying why you want to start your havurah or minyan will help you “sell” the idea to others.

Once you have a vision for the type of havurah or minyan you would like to start, check in with your friends and extended network. If you see a need/void, do others as well? See if their ideas mesh with yours. Have a meeting, or three, to figure out the basics: how often you would like to meet, where you would like to meet, what type of services or programming you would like to offer, and who’s going to do what. Establish a core group of people who are willing to help you get the minyan or havurah off the ground, at least through the first few times it meets.

Create hype! Email your friends and networks, post on Facebook, create a Twitter account, post to listservs and email groups, create a website (this can be done for free as a blog (Blogger or WordPress, for example) or on Google Sites), and in general spread the word that your new havurah or minyan is starting. Don’t forget to mention the details for the first time it will meet (where, when, etc.), a few words about the new minyan or havurah, and encourage people to help spread the word as well.

At the first few meetings of your havurah or minyan, aim to impress. If your focus is on musical davening, find someone who is a truly talented song leader to lead the service. If your focus is on social justice, make sure the d’var tikkun (a talk on a social justice issue) is passionate and exciting. If your goal is for family-inclusive services, make sure there are families and children who know the tunes you’ll be using and will sing loudly and can fully participate. Keep announcements short and succinct. And have a way for people to sign up so you can increase your volunteer base – either leave a sign-in sheet or have slips of paper with the minyan or havurah’s email address, website, or other contact information.

Good luck!

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

Many of our communities start off meeting in a living room or other non-synagogue space. While this provides a level of intimacy and comfort for community members, patient it also often means that we are scrambling for resources. A common phenomenon is the “BYOS” (bring your own siddur (prayer book)) service, price where participants are encouraged to show up for services with their own prayerbooks, sildenafil and havurah or minyan organizers who have extras bring those too.

The resulting hodgepodge selection of siddurim (prayer books) means that people will participate in services with a familiar siddur, but this can provide some unwanted confusion in calling out pages. “We’ll start with Yedid Nefesh on page… uh….” One solution is to make a grid for siddurim (prayer books), listing prayers or other liturgical markers down one side, the various siddurim across the top, and filling in all of the page numbers in the grid. It can be a lot of work to compile these. Luckily, much of the work has already been done for you.

For Friday night services, Kol Zimrah has prepared this grid [doc] showing ten different siddurim.

For Saturday morning services, Minyan Tikvah and Segulah have similar grids to hand out. You can find the former here [xls] and the latter here [xls].

Tremont Street Shul has their grids for both Friday nights and Saturday mornings on their website.

Feel free to use these as examples for your own minyan or havurah. You can add any additional siddurim to them, or remove any that are not used in your community.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

When starting a new havurah or minyan, salve or getting involved in Havurah Judaism for the first time, link many of us are asked by our peers – both synagogue members and unaffiliated Jews alike – how these communities can function without a professional leader, usually a rabbi, in charge.

There are several ways to explain this model, the most common being that with enough knowledge, resources, and support, any of us can lead a community in prayer, any of us can offer a thought-provoking d’var Torah (word of Torah) or text study, any of us can contribute to life-cycle events. In a paper [PDF] presented to a conference of rabbis, Mitch Chefitz framed the history of rabbis’ roles in Jewish communities as learners and teachers of the tradition through study of Talmud and later the Shulchan Aruch, the rise of mysticism, the broadening of religious authority, and the transition of communities led largely by rabbis to other forms of leadership. The paper also addresses the significant changes in religious and spiritual authority from changes such as the proliferation of siddurim (prayer books), the formations of “communities that are sustained by niggunim [songs without words],” JDate, and “Jewish leaders … being tacitly ordained from below rather than from above.” How does this apply to us in the Havurah world? What can we learn about how our members are resources for community leadership? What is, and what should be, our model of religious and spiritual authority? Where might we need leadership, knowledge, or resources not available within our communities, and where might we find people or information to guide us?

Read the paper “Religious and Spiritual Authority in the New Jewish Paradigm” [PDF] in full… and feel free to share thoughts, and any answers to the concluding questions, in the comments.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

Using the Havurah of South Florida as a model, store Mitch Chefitz published the Havurah Guide [PDF] in 1990. Twenty years later, the contents are still useful for those looking to start a havurah or minyan or wanting to find suggestions for improving an existing minyan or havurah.

The Havurah Guide provides a comprehensive introduction. Many topics are covered, from how a havurah or miyan could be run to guidelines for fostering a Jewish fellowship; from the role of text study and how to nurture learning to which holidays and life-cycle events can be observed; from how to incorporate social action to other resources for further programming.

While this is a case study of a specific havurah, we can all learn from each other’s communities across the country (and around the world). If you use part of this Havurah Guide, please let us know in the comments. If your havurah or minyan has practices that would complement this resource, please share them!

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

A collection of resources for helping you and your community further supplement and explore prayers and Torah, physician plan services, misbirth and more:

• Gather The People is a downloadable resources for preparing divrei Torah (words of Torah) and more.
• Mechon Mamre lets you print sections from the Torah side-by-side in Hebrew and English, medical and in several other formats.
• ScrollScraper lets you print a tikkun page (page for preparing to chant/learn Torah) for your Torah Reading.
• Siddur Chaveirim Kol Yisrael, by the Progressive Chavurah/Siddur Committee, is a Friday night and Festival Evening siddur. It features transliteration, traditional text, gender neutral translations, and a multiplicity of voices in the commentary.
• Siddur Eit Ratzon, by Joe Rosenstein, follows the same format as Siddur Chaveirim Kol Yisrael and has many kavvanot and meditations, as well as guideposts for learning and experiencing Jewish prayer services.
• L’chu N’ran’nah is an egalitarian bencher used at the weddings and in the homes of many NHC members.
• Az Yashir Moshe is a printable bencher in PDF format.
• Green & Just Celebrations is a booklet published by Jews United for Justice, containing specific suggestions for how families can make purchasing choices for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, etc., in ways that are mindful of workers’ rights and environmental impact.
• HebCal is a perpetual Hebrew calendar that can be localized to your ZIP code.
• Shabbat People, is a web application for signing up participants for services.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

Many havurot and minyanim have their policies or guidelines available on their websites, viagra dosage as handouts available at services, patient or as documents that are sent to new members of their email lists.

Looking through them, one can get a feel for the variety of models that our communities use for governance, membership, services, and more. Feel free to peruse the following examples, discuss them in the comments below, and make use of them as guidelines for your own community.

• Havurah Norms [doc] outlines one anonymous havurah’s mission statement, history, and policies.
• Kol Zimrah’s FAQ and guidelines for service leaders [doc].
• Tikkun Leil Shabbat’s Footnotes for the Perplexed: glossary, guidelines, and frequently asked questions.
• Ben Dreyfus wrote guidelines for giving a d’var Torah (word of Torah) at Hadar [doc].
• Q’s and A’s about Fabrangen: what to expect as a new member and how to get involved.
• Gather The People‘s community organizing resources include different models of governance, planning, developing, etc.
• From Two Heads of Lettuce, a guide to making your community’s potluck work, including an introduction to the two-table system (accommodating different kashrut (dietary law) standards).
• And a guide to pluralistic meat potlucks on the Mah Rabu blog.
• Guidelines from Hadar on being inclusive in davening (prayer) without sacrificing quality.
• Suggested guidelines for hiring people in lay-led minyans.
• A collection of links and resources for getting started or improving your independent community – what has been coined “the 21st-century Jewish Catalog (alpha version).”

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.