From the Warden's Box

Aim High - Message from the Chairman

The current Shul magazine's theme is 'New Horizons'. New horizons mean many things to many people, but from our synagogue's perspective, we look at our past accomplishments and objectives that we have achieved, and then we set ourselves new goals and objectives and try to aim yet higher!

This past year, the Shul has achieved much across our membership. Our existing wide range of programmes continues to improve and strengthen with the range of speakers and activities for members. All of our events, such as our regular Bridge Club sessions, continue to be a great success. The Connect programme we started with Jewish Care has really become a hallmark for the elderly during the week. Our Young Professionals group has considerably expanded, and in fact as many of you would know, we now regularly have approximately 20-30 new young professionals in Shul every Shabbas. We have recently hired Shira and Rafael Joseph as our new Youth Leaders, both professional teachers who will hopefully this year lead us to grow our youth programme across the various age groups in our community. Earlier last year, we worked hard with Saatchi to help them reintegrate into our community and this year they have hosted various fantastic events that have led to a greater involvement and outreach in our community. We have undertaken various important building works including refurbishment and maintenance of key elements of our assets such as our front gates of the synagogue. From a monetary perspective, we have re-established the financial health of our Shul and significantly reduced our obligations to the United Synagogue.

While this has been fantastic and would not have been possible without the significant effort of our community and the incredible hard work of the Dayan and Rachel, our Chazan and Nechami, Richard and Melanie, and Loraine, we now have significant new challenges and horizons to explore.

These new horizons include continuing to increase our membership and our depth of programmes in the Shul. It includes some major refurbishment works including the carpet for the main synagogue, a Shabbas lift for the upper floor and serious progress on establishing an Eruv within our neighbourhood. In addition, as many of you know, we are in serious discussion with Anshei Shalom and we hope to be bringing them to the building in the near future.

We all need new horizons and we all need to work on achieving them. This Shul needs each of us to focus on his or her involvement with our community and to try to do more. It's simply not good enough to sit back and watch, and let others take the strain. We would love all of our members to be more active in the Shul and to get involved. As you can appreciate, we are very keen on having new Honorary Officers so we can expand the team as well as allow others to help lead our efforts.

As with mountain climbing, reaching peaks is about taking each step one at a time in a measured and careful way, without losing any momentum and never forgetting the main goal. We hope to continue our successful efforts and reach these horizons to then aim even higher!

The Honorary Officers wish you Chag Sameach over the Passover holidays.
Keith M Breslauer