CBST End-of-Year News Update

Dear Members of our CBST Community,

As the Chanukah holiday winds down and the secular New Year approaches, we write to send our blessings for a year full of the light of the candles we are now lighting. We also wanted to provide you with a year-end update about some of the key issues and projects we will be working on in 2010.

1) The Assistant Rabbi Search: As you know by now, Rabbi Cohen is leaving CBST after ten wonderful, meaningful years. We have appointed a committee to conduct the search for an Assistant Rabbi and we hope to make a decision by the end of March. No one will "replace" Rabbi Cohen, who has left an indelible mark on our community and its members, and who will always be a part of CBST's extended family. Instead, the person we hire will bring different strengths to our community. Going forward, we expect that the Assistant Rabbi position will focus (about 50%) on our programming for families with children, allowing us to increase continuity and expand our offerings to meet the growing needs of our community. This focus will also free both of our rabbinical interns to concentrate on the pastoral care work that the Cooperberg-Rittmaster internship was intended to fund. The search committee will also address transition issues to make sure that the new Assistant Rabbi is well integrated into our community. While we can't discuss specific applicants during the process, feel free to talk to any of us about your hopes and dreams. Finally, it is important to us to ensure that we as a congregation have an opportunity to show our admiration and love for Rabbi Cohen and all she has brought to CBST over the years. We are currently planning a celebratory event on July 29, 2010.

2) The Torah Project: "With Our Own Hands: The CBST Torah Project " kicked off on December 8th when 150 people gathered at Bethune Street to celebrate the start of our journey to write a new Torah for our congregation. The new Torah, made possible by a bequest from CBST member Myrna Reich z"l, is being written in celebration of CBST's 36th Anniversary. When it is completed, it will be one of the only Torahs in the world written specifically for a historically LGBT congregation. While the Torah poses some vexing questions for our observance, we believe that one way to address them is to bring to the Torah our own voices and perspectives. CBST's Torah will contain the same language that has been set down through the ages. But the intentions we bring to those familiar words by participating in the creation of our own Torah will undoubtedly alter and enhance their meaning for each of us, and constitute a lasting contribution to our community's understanding of the religion we share. Each member will have an opportunity to participate in many different ways in this historic undertaking, including by fulfilling the mitzvah of inscribing a letter in the new Torah scroll or the tzedakah of dedicating a verse, book or Torah accessory.

3) Staffing: During the past year, the realities of a difficult economy forced us to make some difficult choices with respect to CBST's budget. We eliminated three staff positions, froze salaries (with certain staff members taking voluntary pay cuts), shifted the position of full-time cantor to a cantorial intern position, reduced the number of Cooperberg-Rittmaster rabbinical interns from two to one, and asked that one (Melissa Simon) to focus on programming for families with children because we could not afford to hire a separate children's educator. This prudent planning and sacrifice has paid off in the form of a balanced budget - something many other synagogues and nonprofits are struggling with as they continue to implement staff cuts in order to make ends meet. While we have no crystal ball, of course, we are cautiously optimistic about the year ahead and we are planning to return to two Cooperberg-Rittmaster interns. We have also received a generous grant from the Arcus Foundation to expand the work we are doing on the social justice and civil rights issues central to our mission and history. This grant has allowed us to hire Alex Weissman as our full-time social justice coordinator and we have brought back former Cooperberg-Rittmaster rabbinical intern Cecilia Beyer as our social justice intern. We are tremendously excited about the work Alex and Cecilia will be doing and urge you to introduce yourselves to them if you have not already.

4) The Search for a Permanent Home: Our Capital Project Committee is continuing its work to look for a new permanent home. In the past year, we have been very active and have considered a number of different potential sites, working closely with our team of real estate and architectural consultants. We are considering a variety of different scenarios, from sites that would accommodate both our Friday night services and all of our classrooms and offices -- with room for future growth -- to sites that would replace and upgrade our Bethune Street facilities, while continuing to use the Chelsea sanctuary at 9th Avenue and 28th Street for Friday night services. We also recently completed an updated capital campaign feasibility study, to evaluate our ability to raise the funds necessary to complete this project in today's economic environment. Overall, we have found that the downturn in the real estate market has created new opportunities for us, even as the recent experiences of other religious institutions and nonprofit organizations has reminded us how important it is to keep our ambitions within a realistic budget.

5) Communications: Our terrific communications committee has been hard at work on improving CBST's internal and external communications. During the past year, we launched a redesigned website , which includes a variety of new features and functions, including podcasts of key drashot. We also launched Facebook pages for CBST and Rabbi Kleinbaum, which are proving very popular. And keep an eye out for CBST's "new look" -- an updated logo and visual identity -- which we expect to introduce in the next few months.

As always, please feel free to talk to any of us if you have questions or concerns about these or any other issues facing our community.

We wish you a happy secular New Year,

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi

Stephen E. Frank, President of the Board
Ilene Sameth, Executive Director