Blog

What a strange year we have all had.  Locked in our homes, unable to do many of the things we loved or see many of the people we loved.  But quiet as the rest of our lives might have been, Shir Shalom has not been quiet.  In addition to adding new programs, and increasing our worship services, our education offerings and our contacts with our congregation, as many of you readers know, we also took advantage of the quiet time to reenergize our administration.  Our new office administrator, Sari White, was our first change.  Sari helped us install a new database that will allow us to contact you more easily and process our donations and bills faster. Jen, Sarah and Sarit, our new Communication and Technology  Committee (C&T), helped us redesign our website and our logo. We now call ourselves Congregation Shir Shalom Vermont/Woodstock Area Jewish Community.  We hope everyone will go to the website, www.shirshalomvt.org, update their accounts, and put in the new information that helps us.  Also, if you have any comments or recommendations for improvements, please send them to Jen Anderson, chair of the C&T committee or me. This is a work in progress .and we plan to update the site to make it better and better

We also have a new Hebrew School Director, Leah Gawel, and we are excited about what the new school year is going to bring for our children.   She has 17 years of experience running Hebrew Schools and brings a wealth of knowledge about Jewish education as well as a fabulous sense of humor that I am sure all of us, children and adults, will enjoy.  Leah’s goal is to make our Hebrew school so interesting and so much fun that our kids want to come to class while also making the school more flexible to respond to all of our children’s learning and time challenges. She also plans to ask the community to help her.  So, if you have any skills you would like to share, whether you are an artist, a musician, a baker, a carpenter or a knitter or a candlestick maker, or you can help mentor our .children and their families through the B’nai Mitzvah process, please let Leah know

Shir Shalom Vermont is a growing community and we appreciate all our new members, some even coming from as far away as Texas and California.  We pride ourselves on making everyone feel welcome whether to our services, our learnings, or our events.  This past year has been so difficult for so many of us, but the coming year offers great promise.  We are fortunate as a nation and as a synagogue .to be able to come back together and we know that we are stronger and more connected because of all we have gone through