August, 2011

Greetings from your Rabbi Search Committee!

We thought the congregation would like an update on our activities and progress in the search for a new Rabbi.

As you know, our beloved Rabbi Bennett is retiring on June 30, 2012. This gives us another 10 months to find hisreplacement. To do this, your RSC has been very active exploring who we are as a congregation and who we would like to become.

Given that we are a member of the URJ (Union for Reform Judaism), one of our first big decisions was whether or not to use their hiring process. Our other option was to open up the search to unaffiliated candidates and manage our own search. To work with the URJ would mean that we could only hire Rabbis ordained through the Union, and applying through them, thus potentially limiting our choices. However, the URJ provides tremendous advice and support, and they stand behind the quality of their candidates, their education, and their experience, and will help us make the transition, both before and after we hire someone. As a dues paying congregation, we saw this as a great opportunity to realize the value of our membership, so we decided to commit to the URJ.

We completed a URJ application about our congregation and they have posted it on their job board. Our application emphasized leadership, musical ability, organizational skills, plus being able to awaken and develop our congregants' spiritual lives. From that posting Rabbis will submit their résumés, which will then be forwarded to us by the URJ.

Current and Next Steps

Receiving Résumés. Now the résumés come in, and they have been! Over the next few months we will be collecting them, sifting through them, and picking the most promising ones.

Meeting the Candidates. We will then begin conducting preliminary phone interviews, preferably by Skype. Once we have narrowed the field, we will select a small handful of candidates to meet in person. We are also exploring the possibility of attending a new event in Cincinnati, being held by the URJ, which offers an opportunity to meet the graduating seniors coming out of Reform Seminaries from Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and New York.

We have been cautioned about offering a job too soon, so we will make sure we find some of the best candidates for us and we will invite them to come visit our congregation so we can get to know them better. Once the RSC selects a candidate, it will forward its recommendation to the Board of Directors, which will vote to accept or reject the recommendation. If all goes well we expect to announce our new Rabbi in March, 2012.

While Rabbi Bennett, as our Rabbi Emeritus, will certainly function as an advisor to the new Rabbi, there won't be any formal training period. Rabbi Bennett will retire on June 30, and the new Rabbi will start July 1. This timing is intentional. School will be done for the year, as will our fiscal year and Annual General Meeting.

Starting in July will give the new Rabbi time to get settled and "learn the ropes" of Temple Israel before the High Holidays. Then, at Rosh Hashanah, our whole congregation will get to meet our new spiritual leader!

Thank you for your questions and opinions! Please feel free to write us, or just come up and talk to any of us at a Friday night Oneg or other event.

Sincerely,

Your Rabbi Search Committee
(Walter Jacobs, Stacy Reid, Howard Sidorsky, Cindy Berk, Lauren Helfand, Matt Lessinger, Mirna Lessinger, Bill Schaff, Suzi Scher, Patti Stein, Eric Strimling).

August 15, 2011

• Present: Cindy Berk, Walt Jacobs, Matt Lessinger, Mirna Lessinger, Stacy Reid, Suzi Scher, Howard Sidorsky, Patti Stein, Eric Strimling.
• First we reviewed our Rabbinic Search timeline and confirmed that we are remaining on schedule. We then finalized a letter to the congregation that will go in the Temple Israel Bulletin, updating the progress of our Rabbi search. We then discussed the information packet that will go out to each potential candidate who makes the "first cut."
• The packet will contain Temple history, Alameda history, area information, photos, our bulletin, and perhaps local magazines and other similar publications. In our next meeting we will finalize the contents of the packet.
• Finally we began reviewing resumes and comparing candidates. Before the next meeting we will individually rate each candidate, so that we can then compare our ratings.
• Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, September 12th.

May 16, 2011

• The committee continues to work on what we want in a Rabbi. Meanwhile various Rabbis have come up as candidates already. While it is too early to consider anyone yet, there appears to be an abundance of available Rabbis.
• We have started to work on the application to the URJ Rabbi search process. Members of the committee were assigned individual sections to work on. We are also developing our packet to send to future candidates. It should express our Temple personality, emphasizing our small and cozy congregation. Remember, while we are selecting a Rabbi, the Rabbi is also selecting us.

February 28th, 2011

• The meeting was attended by, Howard Sidorsky, Walt Jacobs, Stacy Reid, (Co-Chairs), EricStrimling, Cindy Berk, Lauren Helfand, Suzi Scher and Patti Stein.
• We were joined by for this meeting by Rabbi Bennett!. He responded to question about what sort of Rabbi he thought we should have by saying that it the wrong question. We need to first decide what sort of congregation we want to be in the future, then we can find a Rabbi who can lead us there. We talked about how this is a two way process- we pick a Rabbi but the rabbi also picks us.
• The Rabbi talked about the different Jewish movements, what it means to be Reform, and the possible ramifications if we went outside of the Reform movement (not changing our congregation's affiliation).

January 24th, 2011

• The meeting was attended by Matt and Mirna Lessinger, Howard Sidorsky, Walt Jacobs, Eric Strimling, Cindy Berk (Chair), Stacy Reid, Lauren Helfand and Patti Stein. Missing was SuziScher.
• We are changing our leadership! Cindy, who founded and formed the committee, is now stepping down as chair (though she will remain a member) and a triumvirate of Walt Jacobs, Howard Sidorsky, and Stacy Reid will be our new leaders. Our thanks to Cindy for getting usstarted, and we look forward to lots of hard work with our new co-chairs.
• Progress has been made on the new membership survey. Cindy is working with Shaun Reid to prepare and focus the questions.
• Cindy has gathered past press clippings as part of our effort to put together a "Who We Are"packet. Do you have old press releases or articles about the Temple? Please contact Cindy, we need to fill in our historical base.
• There was a discussion about the use of focus groups, and we reviewed their use at the Hazon town hall meetings.
• We plan to ask Rabbi Bennett to attend our next meeting. We'll ask him about what it really means to be a Reform congregation, and about what he has learned about Temple Israel over the last 15 plus years.

December 20th, 2010

• We examined the results of our recent survey, where we asked members what they are looking for in potential rabbinical candidates.
• We then discussed the questions that should be included in our next survey, so that we can get more specific feedback from Temple members.
• We also discussed the content of the informational package that would be provided to prospective rabbinical candidates.
• Finally, we identified the people who would participate in the preparation and gathering of the materials that would be included in that package.
• We will continue to meet on the third Monday of each month.