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Dear KI Congregants,
Shanah Tova! I wish you a sweet new year filled with health, love, and peace.
Thank you for all you’ve done this year and in years past for our Congregation. Your generosity of spirit, financial support, and dedication to KI is unmatched and vital to our Congregation’s growing success. If you’re new to our family, welcome!
We’re adding new programming all the time, including the Rabbi’s Cancer Support Group, live Torah study and a monthly Shabbat morning Service, our Safe Space LGBTQ+ group, KItchen programming, the now one-year-old KI Men United (KIMU) men’s group, and Color War! for our Religious Education students.
You can support our staff and clergy in this flourishing work with our youth, families, seniors, and all Congregants by donating below.
In addition, KI has launched new initiatives to overcome the challenges inherent in today’s reality, including a decreasing emphasis on organized religion and an increasingly unpredictable economy.
- First, we brought together some of KI’s most accomplished entrepreneurs to assess our financial position and recommend steps to erase our recurring deficit and to strengthen our financial future.
- Next, as we approach the 180th anniversary of our founding in 2027, we’re seeking a development professional to guide the planning for our upcoming fundraising initiative, AND – I envision – to join our staff to lead and scale up our ongoing fundraising efforts, including our Legacy Giving program.
- In addition, we have a team of facility professionals preparing a report outlining our available options for ensuring that our facilities can meet our goals for the coming generation.
- Meanwhile, our Bylaws Task Force is working hard with staff, clergy, and lay leaders to identify a series of needed updates to the set of rules that are the bedrock foundation of our governance and organizational structure.
- Finally, our new Leadership Pipeline Working Group is busy tracking and supporting new, aspiring, and ascending leaders here at KI.
Thank you for donating to our HHD Appeal to build organizational capacity.
For thousands of years, it’s been our tradition to enter the new year through prayer and reflection and the setting of goals for how we’ll live our lives in the coming year. It’s the job of our leadership to look at our synagogue through a similar lens, assessing how KI performed in relation to our values and charting a path forward.
To that end, I invite you to join KI leaders to bring us closer to that vision of justice and loving kindness that we share.
You can support our growing list of initiatives to push back on the hateful actions maligning and scapegoating immigrants and transgender individuals as well as all vulnerable populations, including Black people, women, those with disabilities, and sadly so many more.
In addition, join us in defending Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland and speaking truth to power when Israel’s leaders behave in a way that doesn’t reflect Jewish values.
Join us as well to confront antisemitism, which is spiking to levels not seen in decades. We are working daily with the youngest to oldest members of our community, encouraging all of us to stand up to hate and wear our Judaism with great pride.
The High Holy Days offer an opportunity for you to contribute to KI to allow us to continue our critical work building community, caring for those in need, and providing meaningful opportunities to worship as a Congregation.
Will you commit in these Days of Awe to do more than you did last year? I’m confident that you will. That’s who we are and what we do.
As I say: We are creating tomorrow together.
L’Shanah Tova,
Andrew Altman, KI President kipresident@kenesethisrael.org
P.S. Please donate below, mail your donation today, or call the office now at 215-887-8700 to pledge your support. Your tax-deductible donation will help ensure that we surpass our target again this year. I am grateful for your gift this High Holy Day season.