Masorti Olami Incoming President Instructions

Masorti Olami Incoming President

INFORMATION

• Product Name: Masorti Olami
• Category: Religious Organization
• Focus: Support, engage, and enrich Masorti Jewish communities worldwide
• President: Margo Gold
• Headquarters: New York City

WORKING

Connecting Masorti Jews Worldwide:
As a member of Masorti Olami, your role is to help connect Masorti Jews globally. Utilize the resources and platforms provided by the organization to engage with communities and individuals around the world.

Supporting Children and Young Adults:
Invest time and effort in supporting the younger generation within the Masorti Jewish community. Encourage participation in Jewish life experiences, summer camps, and educational opportunities like studying and traveling in Israel.

FAQs

• Q: How can I get involved with Masorti Olami?
  A: To get involved, reach out to your local Masorti community or contact the headquarters in New York City for more information on volunteer opportunities and programs.

• Q: What is the mission of Masorti Olami?
  A: The mission of Masorti Olami is to support, engage, and enrich Masorti Jewish communities worldwide and foster connections among them.

ABOUT

August 29, 2023. New York City
Congratulations to all our new Officers and Board members and thank you to all those continuing in their roles. Special thanks also to our Officers and Board members who have concluded their term of office. I hope you will continue to stay involved.

I am greatly honored to become President of Masorti Olami and privileged to follow my good friend, Rabbi Philip Scheim, in this role. Phil and I forged our friendship on a bus in Israel, sharing a seat during a Conference of Presidents mission and laughing a lot. Phil has guided Masorti Olami these past 4 years through some unprecedented times. He did so displaying the same leadership traits that marked his success at the helm of the Rabbinical Assembly and of his Toronto pulpit: wisdom, intellect, calmness, humor and a steady hand.

I’m also so pleased by all the esteemed guests who have joined us today, here at JTS and from around the world, via Zoom. One of the best parts of being involved in communal work are the people you meet who share your passion, and become friends, colleagues and mentors. Before me I see individuals who work hard on behalf of our movement, our communities, teaching our clergy, our educators and our leaders, nurturing our members, engaging our children, inspiring our young adults. Thank you for honoring us with your presence.

My husband, Larry, wasn’t able to be with me here today. Larry and I share a love for Israel, social justice and Conservative Judaism. And whether Larry is in the room or there on Zoom, I always feel his love and his support and am ever grateful.
But just two weeks ago in Atlanta, Larry and I shared a very special, probably once-in-a-lifetime experience together at our synagogue, Congregation Ahavath Achim. We wrote a Torah, completing the 613th mitzvah passed along by God through Moses.

(Deut 31:19) “Now therefore write down for yourselves this song and teach it to the people of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be My witness against the people of Israel.” Our rabbis explain this commandment binds every individual Israelite to write a scroll for one’s own use. We commit ourselves through this task. And because it can take a long time to write a Torah, the rabbis, in their wisdom, instructed that ‘If he brings even one letter, the text considers it as if he has written the Torah.’

So Larry and I wrote the letter chet in the parsha Song of the Sea. The scroll in which we were privileged to write was a Torah rescued from Hungary as one of the 1500 Torahs saved following the Holocaust. In 1977, our congregation was loaned the scroll in perpetuity by the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London. It was not a kosher scroll so has been displayed in our synagogue museum ever since. But on the occasion of renovating our sixty-five year-old sanctuary and transforming it into a space more reflective of our values of spirituality, respect, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, it was the perfect time to restore the Czech Torah, rededicating it to serve current and future generations and perhaps best of all, enabling our congregation to participate and fulfill the mitzvah of writing a Torah.

In my Jewish life, some moments stand out for being meaningful in ways I never expected. Writing that chet, with Larry, in the Song of the Sea was one of them for me.
Our Senior Rabbi, Laurence Rosenthal, had shared with Larry and me the teaching that ”If one writes a Torah, it is as if he received it from Mt. Sinai.” He also shared the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, who interpreted the mandate of mitzvah 613 to mean…“It is not enough that you have received the Torah from me. You must make it new again in every generation.”

As the sofer showed us the faded letter on the parchment – our letter – we held the quill with him, and with a careful stroke, we re-formed the letter. And there it was, the same, but new. Just as sacred but now restored to serve a new generation.

Rabbi Sacks writes further, “Each of us is a letter in the scroll. Now, all meaning is expressed in words, and all words are written in letters, but a letter on its own has no meaning. So it has to combine with other letters to make a word, other words to make a sentence, other sentences make a paragraph and other paragraphs to make a story. So I think Judaism, the meaningful life, the life worth living, is the life suffused with meaning, that I am a little element of that. But I have to join to others to make my family, and my family has to join with others to make a community, and the community has to combine with others to make a people, and that people has to connect with all previous generations to continue that story.”

And that for me is Masorti Olami. Just as Rabbi Sacks describes, letters join together to form words, words make sentences, sentences join to make paragraphs, paragraphs come together as a story. But the letters first need a quill, an instrument that helps give them shape, a role much like ours. Our mission is to nurture the Jewish soul of every individual; each is a single letter; to bring individuals together as family – words; to cultivate a kehillah is to form a sentence; to help a community to flourish, that is a paragraph. And the story told by these letters, words, sentences and paragraphs is one of contemporary people.

Masorti Olami is like a scroll, filled with letters and words, stretched across the globe, connecting us by our common embrace of an inclusive, passionate, authentic Judaism. We are committed to halacha and mitzvot; we embrace tradition and practice and values as the expressions and means to how live those tenets. But we are also graced by the wisdom that to endure, to find meaning, the Torah we inscribe first and foremost is the one written in our hearts, that pumps through our bodies and brings life to every niche of our being.

I feel so privileged to take on this role, helping to connect thousands of Masorti Jews around the world through Masorti Olami, an entity dedicated to support, engage and enrich our communities and connect them to one another, in the many ways we have learned about today.

But even as we celebrate our amazing work, how do we deepen our strengths and address our challenges? We can deepen our strengths by bringing more resources to our communities. We are dependent upon KKL and WZO for the majority of our funds and we are grateful. But we cannot ignore the growing efforts to delegitimize Masorti Judaism and our Masorti institutions within Israel and within the WZO structure. We need to work hand-in-hand with MERCAZ, our political wing, to assure our representation at WZO remains strong and our voice influential. That will mean our entire network of congregations will need to step up in 2025 to assure a large delegation at the WZO Congress that will enable us to do so.

As an organization, Masorti Olami and our work have been blessed by the beneficence of philanthropy, with individual donors and foundations supporting our work. Look at the incredible response for funds to support Masorti Jews in Ukraine. But think how much more we can do by thoughtfully growing philanthropic investment – ideally locally – that can support the movement and the communities we serve. Delving into opportunities in our communities around the world will be another area for our Board to explore together.

And ideally, we will pour a large part of that investment into our children and our younger adults. They are more than the next chapter. They are our now. They deserve to experience the richness of Jewish life, the fun of summer camp, the awesomeness of study and travel in Israel (perhaps at the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center).

We need to continue to grow our leadership, to bring new voices of every age and perspective into our governance space, and then to use those leaders in impactful ways. I have always maintained that the more issues we confront as a movement, the easier it is to recruit dedicated, skilled board members. People want to be at that table; they find it meaningful to be part of the conversation, the effort to understand the challenges, the search for strategies, the creativity in envisioning solutions. So finding those people for whom that sounds like a great volunteer job description is a goal. It may be harder when our reach is global – I have learned so much in the past years about the varying cultures of our regions and communities – but the richness of that tapestry is what makes leadership in Masorti Olami so special.

And finally, standing together as Masorti/Conservative Judaism is much on my mind. Our communities are confronted by bold acts of antisemitism around the world that most often go unaddressed and unpunished. We are threatened by hostility and assaults on our legitimacy and status as Jews – in of all places – Israel, our homeland. We must stand together and bring our collaborative strength to bear. We need to stand up for our values of inclusion, diversity and respect, and we need to assure that women cannot only pray as they please at the Kotel and read Torah there, but that they have equal rights throughout Israel.

We in this room and Zoom represent Masorti/Conservative Jews of Europe, Latin America, Australia, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, North America, and Israel. I implore each of us to step in a little closer, to place ourselves into closer alignment, just as the letters of the Torah do. Creating words, building sentences, crafting the cohesive message that proclaims our commitment to one another, our bond to Israel and our passion for Masorti Judaism and this beautiful Torah we continue to write anew for all generations.

Margo Gold
Masorti Olami Incoming President

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