A MESSAGE FROM RABBI OURACH

This year we will celebrate Confirmation on June 9 at 8:00 p.m. This service is always one of the most exhilarating and moving of the year. Our confirmands create and organize the liturgy for the service. Each of them expresses their own commitment and understanding of what it means to be a Jew today.

Each year, I think about the pride and joy that the confirmands and their parents share at this milestone in their Jewish lives. Indeed, if all the students who shared their Bar/Bat Mitzvah year with them were standing on the pulpit on this evening, we would have exactly tripled the number of students in the Confirmation class. These five young people are the cream of the crop. They have made the commitment to study, to question, and to support each other, not only through seventh grade, but through the three year program leading to Confirmation. They are our leaders of the future. They understand what it means to be part of the future. They understand what it means to be part of a community.

I hope you will lend them your support and encouragement as members of Temple Beth Israel. I hope this year you will make a special effort to attend the Confirmation service and listen to the thoughts, ideas, and emotions expressed by these talented and gifted students. Your attendance lets them know that their contribution to Jewish life is significant. Your attendance reinforces the message that we are a community which is bound together by belief and vision.

Rabbi Robert E. Ourach

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