From The President

December, as expected, was a very busy month for CBS. Starting with Sunday School consecration, the board honoring Scott Biewer, Latkas and Vodkas, the Chanukkah Party, and our First Responder's dinner.

The Chanukkah party is such a great event because it not only allows our members to share in this joyous occasion but it also attracts many unaffiliated families from our community, as it did this year.

Earlier this year your Board of Directors met for a "Board Vision" planning meeting. As president, my goal was to try to make our congregation into a "Thriving Jewish Community Center." This was based on my observances of the diversity of our Modesto Jewish Community, and is also the direction I have asked the Rabbi/Cantor Search committee to take when choosing a new spiritual leader for our congregation.

Our congregation may be under the umbrella of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, but not all of our members are conservative, reformed, reconstructionist, or orthodox. We are a mix of many levels of observance who come together at CBS because we are Jewish, plain and simple. The Board believes that CBS has something to offer all Jews in the Modesto/Central Valley area, and we are trying to find many opportunities to attract all Jews, affiliated or not, to come to CBS. The Chanukkah party was a great example, as is our Passover seder and the High Holidays. We hope to make more such opportunities available as we develop programming that reaches out to unaffiliated Jews who want a connection but not necessarily through coming to services.

For those who don't know, we are now offering an adult Jewish History class on Sunday mornings, taught by Sheldon Werber. Please see the information elsewhere in the Bulletin about the topics for his classes.

Andra Greenwald teaches Judaism 101 to members who need a refresher course on Judaism or who are interested in embracing Judaism. Andra also teaches a Torah Study on Wednesday afternoons to anyone who is interested.

We are also planning to restart our Jewish cultural/movie night with showings of classic and new Jewish movies. Listen for a phone tree for our next movie or if you have a particularly good movie you would like to show, speak with Marlene Gonsalves and she can help plan a night for viewing the movie.

We also have been asked by the Area Agency on Aging to help with a very special volunteer project. "Friendly Visitor" volunteers are concerned individuals who establish a friendly relationship with an isolated, often lonely older person residing in their home. Volunteers may be male or female and at least 18 years of age. They are matched with older individuals based primarily on location, although we consider the personalities and interests of the two individuals involved. The friendly visitor is asked to visit with an isolated person once a week for 1 or 2 hours. Please see the information on page 4 of the Bulletin about the training and requirements. Contact me if you are interested in volunteering as a Friendly Visitor.

Finally, I would like to thank all of our volunteers for helping in our first ever First Responders dinner, which we served to on-duty police, fire and ambulance workers on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The outpouring of volunteers from our congregation was been amazing. Raleys was unable to donate turkeys to us, but they gave us nice discounts and donations from many of you paid for the turkeys and most of the dinner. I heard from many people in the community who were very touched that CBS was providing this meal. A large thank you goes to Tom Gough for the idea of a holiday meal and to Flo Loeffler for suggesting the first volunteers and Gale Orland for organizing the volunteer shifts and Tammy, Sandy, and Laura for helping with the turkeys.

We served about 100 meals, including 14 to elderly shut-ins. We took about 20 left-over meals out into the community to the homeless we could find. The responders were thankful to have a place where they could sit down to a hot, home-cooked meal, and we hope to make this an annual event. Thank you again for your showing of support for our Modesto Community.

Wishing you all a warm, dry, healthy, and happy New Year.

Search for Cantor Begun

At our semi-annual meeting in December, members agreed to conduct a search for a Cantor who would fulfill some of the most important needs of CBS in terms of being a dynamic service leader, leining torah, and training Bnei Mitzvah students.

The committee has been selected from a cross-section of members representing different needs in the community. The committee is temporarily chaired by Laura Biewer, and members include: Joel Youngheim, Mike Loeffler, Steve Jacobs, Rochelle Rosen, Tammy Kempner, Joyce Gandelman, Gary Kailes, Ana Meyer, and Josh Sigman.

Mazel Tov!

To Laura Biewer, who has been selected as 1 of 4 Notary of the Year special recognition honorees for 2009 by the National Notary Association.

Nominees are submitted nationally for their exemplary application of notary law standards, their ability to stand above other notaries in using their skills for community service and representing the office of Notary Public with distinction.

Laura teaches Notary Law classes monthly in various cities around Northern California. She has been a notary just over 4 years and has donated over 400 notarizations free to skilled nursing and assisted-living facilites, community hospice, and to members of Congregation Beth Shalom. She also co-facilitates a Notary Networking Group that offers free classes to raise the bar of professionalism for all notaries in Stanislaus County and is a mentor for new notaries through the Ambassador program at NNA.

It is highly unusual that an individual with only 4 years of experience should be awarded such an honor (most have been doing notary work for 15+ years). Laura will be honored this June at the NNA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, before an audience of over 2,000. Wow, Laura, all that hard work paid off and we are all proud of you, indeed! Yasher Koach!!!

Mazel tov to Leo Egel, our championship table tennis player, who will be competing in the age 85-90 group this summer in Las Vegas, Nevada (seems a lot of people will be in Vegas this summer...). Leo has been a table tennis champ most of his life and has taught classes at MJC, doing what he does best! We wish you much luck, Leo, in your latest competition. We'll keep our fingers crossed for that championship!

Drop In And Decorate Report

Our Drop in and Decorate event was a success. Thanks so much to all who helped prepare and participate in the event. We decorated and distributed almost 200 cookies. Half of the cookies went to local homeless people in Modesto and the families at the Redwood Center. The other half were saved for the First Responders Holiday meal served at CBS.

We performed a great mitzvah and had fun, food, and conversation in the process. Hopefully, we can host more Drop in and Decorate events at CBS. If you are interested in participating or chairing this event in the future, please call Kelly Villalobos at 527-7480. To learn more about Drop in and Decorate visit their website.

Remember, half of every subscription to J- will go to Congregation Beth Shalom.  See your Bulletin for details.