President’s Report

Submitted by: Yale Freeman, President of the Board of Trustees

I’m grateful for these past two years. Many thanks to my fellow members of the Board for your help, support and hard work.

My sincere thanks to our staff who has worked so hard to keep us on track: our education directors, Caren Plotkin and Seyla Cohen; our office team, Jo Icaza, Maxine Gould, Randi Butterworth, and John Kepsel and his staff; and to Susan Daugherty for her years of dedication to Temple Shalom.

Thank you to Rabbi Miller and Cantor Azu. For your ideas, your enthusiasm, your support and your leadership – both spiritual and in all Temple matters.

Thank you to Sisterhood and Men’s Club for feeding us, sponsoring so many activities, and providing generous financial support, year after year.

Thank you to each and every member of our congregation. I’m so fortunate to have met and gotten to know many of you. So fortunate that so many of you work for the betterment of our Temple.

Thank you to every Temple member for choosing to be affiliated with Temple Shalom. Thank you to those who have participated in activities, attended services, given to causes and contributed to our funds. Thank you to all who pay your annual dues, your Bar and Bat Mitzvah fees, and your religious school or preschool fees.

Thank you to each and everyone who has volunteered your time at an event, for an activity, on a committee, in the Temple office, or in our Religious School or Preschool. You’ve made a difference.

Thank you to each and everyone who has taken the time to contact me and meet with me, to not only present problems, but also offer solutions and sometimes even offer to be part of the solution.

Thank you to those whose exceptional financial support has been abundant and frequent. You give when asked. Above and beyond. Again and again. In good times and bad. Your generosity is a blessing.

As a Temple family, we have achieved much. We’ve scribed Our Torah which is taken from the arc every Shabbat and has already been read from by several B’nai Mitzvah. We are restructuring our management and have restructured our committees. We have prepared a strategic plan and have begun implementation. Our One Family initiative driven by “relational Judaism” has gotten off to a good start.

There is so much more to accomplish as we move forward as One Family. Like any family, we’ll have difficulties. We’ll have disputes. We’ll have financial concerns. We will need to deal with how we educate our children and how we practice our religion. But we will move forward, together, on that next part of our journey.

I want to apologize to those whose initiatives or suggestions could not be moved forward during this two-year period. I apologize to those who I may not have been adequately responsive to or those who feel I did not deal with other issues facing the Temple. I am sorry.

As this portion of our trip draws to a close, I thank you for this incredible opportunity to try to make a difference, and to kick off the next 50 years of Temple Shalom. Most importantly, thank you for sharing your stories with me.

Todah Rabah!