It’s hard to believe another school year is about to begin. Once again our educators at Temple Beth Ami are planning and developing a program which focuses on stimulating students’ minds and inspiring them to begin their own personal Jewish journeys.  

This month we welcome Cantor Kenny Ellis to his role as Cantor/Education Director.  In addition to bringing a wealth of experience and education to this position our cantor will now be working with all B’nai Mitzvah as tutor, and this dramatically increases his ability to take a lead role as clergy in our community.  We look forward to having him around much more this year.

The wonderful contributions our religious school students have made to the class level led services and community service projects have been inspiring.  This is in large part due to the dedication of our teaching staff as well as Judith Stolnitz our devoted Education Director whose time at the helm has come to an end.  It is also a testament to the parents, who drive or carpool, and who have made it a priority for their children to receive a quality Jewish education.

This summer we are proud to dedicate our new Youth Lounge, the Bat Mitzvah project of our own Samatha Swartz.  She took it upon herself to raise the money and committed herself to do the work necessary to complete this task. She was joined by her friend Kayla Halberstam, and we want to thank some devoted students as well as the families who donated their time and resources to make the lounge possible.  In the coming months the lounge will be filled with our Jew Crew teen group, so please make sure if you have teens in the family they are following the Youth Events page in our newsletter, eblasts and website.  We want to thank Taylor Halberstam and Stacey Guss who have on the parent leadership of the teen group.

In the realm of Adult learning, we have continued our Talmud study with the Tuesday morning class that meets at 9 AM.   Our Wednesday evening Torah class meets at 7 PM and is coming up on a year of weekly study of the Divrei Torah, may Torah insights written by our own community:  www.templebethami.org/tba-words-of-torah-divrei-torah.  Both classes are open to all, continue year round, and can be joined at anytime.  You didn’t have to be in last week’s class to jump in.  They are self-contained units, like Law & Order, or maybe better yet the Twilight Zone. 

A new addition to our adult education offerings is our Hebrew class facilitated by our wonderful teacher Yorit Gafni.  We also also offering classes on Jewish Meditation, Intro to Judaism and Conversion classes as we have over the years, and will be having some guest presnters over this coming year as well.

We look forward to expanding the educational offerings for people of all ages and backgrounds.  As our community continues to grow, so will the opportunities to expand the mind, heart and heart through Temple Beth Ami. We believe that we will truly be stronger as a community when we are all devoted to lifelong learning.

I hope you have a great rest of the summer and best wishes in the New Year ahead,

Rabbi Mark Blazer

Today we commemorate our day of national day of mourning, Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av.  As we are not permitted to fast on Shabbat for this holiday, so we carry this solemn anniversary into Sunday this year.

As we consider the existential fate of the Jewish people today, and specifically those enemies striving to destroy the Third Temple, the modern nation of Israel, this holiday takes on added significance.

Please find the attachment below as a guide to marking this day and understanding how we have dealt with the darkest chapters of our history.  Never again! 

Greetings from the first Temple Beth Ami trip to Europe!  As our travelers visit the great capitals of Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Budapest, we are surrounded by profound and tragic history as well as cultural magnificence.

The Jewish people are woven together into the tapestry of each of these places.

Unfortunately, many of the sites we visit are no longer actively used by Jews.  They are museums and shells, inhabited only by tourists and the spirits of the generations who worshipped and lived there.

We know that for many of these communities their last generation was murdered, and the bodies turned into ash at Auschwitz and other camps in this part of the world.  Many other individuals emigrated to the USA and Israel after the war.  Some of us on this very journey are their descendants, and many of us at Temple Beth Ami are alive because our families were fortunate enough to have left before the Shoah began.

Regardless, every Jew today is a survivor.  That doesn’t mean we live in the past, or we must obsess on the Holocaust.  It does mean that we are very fortunate to be alive, and that consequently we have the responsibility to not only remember, but to live and celebrate our Jewish identity.  

As Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, a survivor himself wrote:

We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.


The nation of Israel is a living testament to survival and vitality for us as a people, but as Jews living in another amazing country we must connect to that same energy and joy in our homes.


At Temple Beth Ami we work to instill that feeling in every person who walks into our shul or comes in contact with our people.  While the spiritual energy emanates from our history and tradition, it is amplified by each generation.  Each individual has a spark lit or nurtured by the work we do as a kehilla kadosh, a holy community.


As we enter a new year in our TBA community, we welcome the new leaders and board members led by our president Rosemary Watson.  We hope that each of you will find a way to give back this year through Temple Beth Ami– by engaging in an activity that you haven’t participated in before, by bringing your own friends in for the first time, and simply by continuing to support our shul with your energy and economic means.


We need to ensure that our community not only survives, but continues to serve as a light for the rest of the world.


An ambitious project for our little outpost in the SCV, but as Jews have we ever expected anything less?