Resources for your community

by BZ [➚] · Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Are you interested in starting a new grassroots havurah and/or minyan? Are you working on sustaining an existing one? If you’ve never done this before, the way to go about this is usually to talk to people who have. But what happens if you don’t know who to talk to? Like Ezra and Yehudah HaNasi, we’re living in a time when it makes sense to start writing down some of our oral Torah. But thanks to technological advances, the 21st-century Jewish Catalog doesn’t have to be a static document, but can (like the real Oral Torah) be continuously expanding.

Toward this end, the National Havurah Committee has just launched a Havurah Resources site to support new and existing havurot and minyanim by collecting and consolidating new and existing online resources. There’s a lot there already: Are you starting a new community? Exploring options for incorporation so that your havurah can collect donations? Interested in learning to gabbai the Torah service at your minyan? Trying to figure out how to make decisions in a non-hierarchical community? Looking for ways to plan a text study or engage your community in social justice? It’s all there, along with multiple collections of links to other resources around the web.

Everything on the Havurah Resources site is just intended to begin the conversation, so each of the articles has comments enabled. If you disagree with something there, great! Add your voice. Most important, if you have something to add, about any aspect of running a grassroots Jewish community, that isn’t there yet, email resources at havurah dot org, so that this collection can expand.