This year, as we have done for almost 20 years, our family led High Holiday services at Five Star Premier Residences of Chevy Chase – a senior living community. Due to the pandemic, we were unable to be there in 2020, but this year we were determined to find a way. We arrived as a […]
For the past two years, I’ve been working to develop Connections, a program for preschool-aged kids on the autism spectrum. I started Connections because of my older brother, Matthew, who is on the autism spectrum. When he was young, there were very few social opportunities available, especially during the summer when most kids were at […]
September marks the start of school and, shortly after, Temple Sinai Religious School. The end of Summer’s “lazy” months brings a hectic period of chauffeuring our children to and from secular activities like travel hockey, baseball, and school clubs, along with religious school, Chug Ivrit and now bar mitzvah preparation. I won’t deny that we […]
Like me, many in our congregation “belong” to two temples: our beloved Temple Sinai in northwest DC, and the temple of our youth—where we attended services with our families, went to religious school, became a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and perhaps learned a few Jewish songs. We may or may not still visit that temple, […]
I’ve always been an idealistic but organized activist. I began in my college years in the 1960s as a civil rights supporter and opponent of the Vietnam War, especially while serving as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian (“DP”) newspaper. In our first DP editorial, we adopted an old Kansas newspaper editor’s motto […]
I came to Temple Sinai as both the Executive Director and a member in 2008. The hardest part of the transition was eased thanks to Cantor Laura Croen and her gracious family as they invited us to share a bar mitzvah date for my 11-year-old son. After leading the service together, our sons were celebrated […]
My earliest memory of Temple Sinai is of my religious school kindergarten classroom that seemed cavernous at the time but looks so small now, in the way that time distorts the childhood landscape. My mother’s father had been a founder of a conservative congregation in Richmond, VA, and my father’s family had been members of […]
It’s Friday night around 6:30. My husband, Frank and I enter Temple Sinai’s front lobby in anticipation of Shabbat services. We flip through the box of name tags and locate ours. Smiling faces greet us. We exchange “Shabbat Shaloms”—even the staff member who opens the doors welcomes us into the building with the same warm […]
The story of how one New Yorker found friendship, support and a spiritual community in the outer reaches of Washington, DC Five years ago, when I decided to leave New York, everyone—friends, colleagues, clients; cousins and classmates; students, neighbors and doormen—thought I was nuts. They laughed at the idea that there might be intelligent life […]
I grew up in the 1970s, the daughter of a progressive Rabbi who delighted in observing, reclaiming and creating Jewish traditions. Ordained Conservative at Jewish Theological Seminary, Dad had studied under Rabbi Heschel, and together, they prayed with their feet during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1971, my father, Rabbi Everett Gendler, took a small […]
