Great Happenings

February is a great month to celebrate community. Here as Solel we have done a lot to celebrate community, most notable, we continued our tradition of holding our annual Invite Your Neighbour Service on Friday February 22nd. The service was incredibly well attended, with over 200 people, both our own Solelniks as well as 20 plus community and faith groups. One of our goals of the service is to teach and Rabbi Pollack did an incredible job of explaining the service and helping our guests understand each component of the service and the meanings behind many of the prayers, and admittedly, I always learn something I didn’t know. Of course, Arliene always does an exceptional job of talking about the artifacts in the Sanctuary and answering questions. This kind of evening cannot take place with the incredible support of the entire community and I would like to thank everyone who baked, helped to set up and attended the event and especially to Carol who continued to accept RSVP’s and was a wonderful greeter.

I would also like to thank Members of the Membership committee who earlier in the month hosted a youth games night. We had a great turn out and it is wonderful to see so many of our children turn out to play games and meet up with friends. I would like to offer a special thank you to Romina Loeffler, Jennifer Werenich and Marla Stoch for organizing, chaperoning and brining the whole evening together.

I also had the opportunity to attend a special event sponsored by our Muslim Community. I was honoured to attend, on behalf of Solel, the annual Family Day Walk-a-Thon in support of Credit Valley Hospital. The event was the culmination of a fund-raising drive to raise $250,000 for the Trillium Health Network with a secondary pledge to raise another $250,000. This event talked about the importance of supporting everyone in our community and coming together in support of healthcare for all. It also reminded me of many of the social action events that Solel has participated in and our need to continue to focus on social action and community support.

I am also long overdue to share the efforts being put forth on our renovations. As we are very cautious and want to make sure that we spend appropriately we have been working with an architect and a designer to outline preliminary plans. Our main focus continues to be on fully accessible washrooms, more effective meeting space, a functioning children and youth room and updates to the kitchen. We are intending to have a congregational meeting in April to gain further insights from our members before moving into any kind of construction phase.

Finally, please check the calendar as we have a lot of events coming up, but I want to draw your attention to the weekend of April 6-7. On April 6 we will be having a special service to celebrate Rabbi Pollack’s 25 years in the Rabbinate and on Sunday April 7th Dan Nichols will be performing at Solel. We are hoping that all of our families will attend the concert and we are looking at this event to raise some funds to go towards various initiatives at Solel. Dan is an outstanding rock musician and this event will be spectacular. For just $18.00 for Solel families you will see one of the best all age’s musical performances of the year. We are hoping to see everyone at Solel come out to support this event. Tickets for non-Solel members are also available for very reasonable prices and will be available in the office and at Bet Sefer starting March 3. I look forward to seeing everyone at these wonderful events.

Robbin

Filed under: President's Message

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