STATE OF THE TEMPLE

June 8, 2009

Presented by Bill Simon, Temple President

Introduction

TIOH is an incredibly vibrant and exciting place for so many of our 950 families – some of whom have been members for more than 40 years, others just a few days.  We embrace an incredibly wide range of congregants, families, ages, backgrounds, economic levels, family structures and backgrounds, and even some range of individual personalities.  But common to all, I believe, is a notion that TIOH opens up an important dimension in our lives, and the lives of our families, our children, our grandchildren, our friends, our neighbors and even a few others.  As I have said before, we have a very big tent that embraces our community in all its diversity – because we really are, TIOH.

We have also been going through -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not -- a transition across our whole community.  Many of us who have been members for a long time recall when this was a small and intimate Temple here in Hollywood.  But based in great measure by John Rosove’s leadership, along with other key clergy, staff, and lay leaders over many years, we have grown into a complex and sometimes confusing larger community.  But that should be considered, I hope, a champagne problem.  We are a synagogue founded on strong personal connections, and have grown from roughly 500 families 20 years ago to over 950 families today. We have a RS, DS, NS, adult education, worship and community service opportunities, pastoral care, and so much more.  It’s become a pretty big place that requires professional staff, professional management, budgets, committed lay leaders, and 24/7 needs and programs that touch and serve this broad array of congregants.  The complexity and demands of our community are often difficult, challenging, expensive, both fun and frustrating.

As everyone here knows first hand – these last 12 months have been an incredibly difficult and challenging time in the life of our community and nation in so many different ways.  All of us have been touched in some way – some more severely than others – by the steep decline in our economy.  As such, our Temple community has faced many unexpected challenges that impact our members and their families.  Before  I detail some of these challenges, I want to share with you some of the positive things that have happened within our community in these last 12 months.

The Last 12 Months:

We Welcomed Chazzan Danny Maseng

First, we welcomed our new Chazan, Danny Maseng, to TIOH.  With his wife, Terry, and their sons Jonathan (who lives here) and Jordan (who lives here, has lived in Oberlin, and China and is now off to Oregon), we have a fabulous new family to add to our Temple community.  Danny and Terry have dived right in from Day 1.  He has been working closely with the clergy, John and Michelle, with Eileen, Sherry, Eden, Micol, Stephanie, Toby, and Jeff, and just about everyone else on staff, and families in our community, to make our worship services, classes, and celebrations even more meaningful, beautiful and enjoyable to us. He is a world class educator, musician, composer, singer, and community leader.  We are very lucky to have him and his family here with us.  We are thrilled, as well, that Danny works so beautifully with an incredibly talented pianist, Tali Tadmore, and that he and Michael Skloff collaborate in such a creative and profound way.

Our New Director of Development - Jeff Kramer

We also added another key player to our senior team this last year, Jeff Kramer, our Director of Development.  As most of you in this room know, development means fundraising.  What a challenging time for anyone to be out there raising money!  Jeff has has met with nearly every group across our community.  We are prioritizing and organizing our fundraising efforts in a way that is the most effective, efficient and successful for both our community members and our Temple.  Just a couple of weeks ago we held our Annual Temple Fundraiser and honored Eileen Horowitz, our retiring Head of Schools, that drew over 450 people here on a Saturday night. We had a big fundraising goal to meet and we have achieved 93% of that goal!  Thanks Jeff, and thanks to all of our key staff who were helped to make this happen, including: Toby, Stephanie, Patrick, their staffs, our event co-chairs: Robin Frank, Alexa Pogue, Tracy Scott Miller and Scott Mauro, and so many others.

Eileen Horowitz - Retiring Head of School

We sadly bid farewell to our beloved Head of School, Eileen Horowitz, who has decided to retire at the end of this school year, next week, after 14 years as a superb educator who has distinguished our TIOH Day School as among the most outstanding private day schools in our community and across the country.  While her retirement has meant sadness for so many, we cannot ever forget that Eileen has served us so well for so long.  She has earned this next opportunity to spend more time with her ever expanding/growing family that now includes 7 grandchildren.

New Head of School - Rachel Lewin

Her retirement, however, has brought us the opportunity to recruit a new Head of our Day School and we had a fabulous search committee, brilliantly led by Board members, Steve Sloan and Roberta Berrent, who brought us a great list of potential candidates from which to choose.  We are excited that we have found someone quite special indeed, Rachel Lewin, of the Warnick Jewish Day School in Northern California. Rachel has already been spending time here with Eileen, Sherry, Roz, Hadar, the faculty, staff, children, parents and many others so that she can get off to a running start when she begins with us on July 1^st.  We are thrilled once again that our DS children will next week graduate from TIOH and move on to great upper schools across LA.

Gratitude to Eden Cooper Sage and Micol Zimmerman

Interim Religious School Principals and Bnai Mitzvah Coordinator

We had a transitional year in our Religious School when we lost our RS Principal, Laura Hyman, to her home town of Boston for a great career opportunity for her husband a little more than a year ago.  We were lucky, however, to have two great people help us through this period, Eden Cooper Sage and Micol Zimmerman.  We owe them a great debt of thanks for stepping in and stepping up to help our RS families and Bnai Mitzvah program thrive through this last year.

Micol is leaving to join her new husband in London where she will serve as an educator in the same synagogue Danny will serve as a Rabbi; and Eden is moving into an important new staff position here working closely with our clergy and families overseeing the B’nai Mitzvah program and all life cycle events and programs as “Family Life Educator.”

New Rabbi, Religious School Educator, Jocee Hudson

We formed another search committee, to find an educator to lead our Religious School, this one led by Leila Winnick, Kirsten Hanson Press and another great team of leaders.  They helped us to recruit Rabbi Jocee Hudson from Santa Ana to become the new Rabbi Educator/Director of Temple Israel’s Religious School.  Though still serving full-time in another synagogue in Santa Ana, Rabbi Hudson has been meeting with clergy, staff, lay leaders, families and others over the last several weeks to get acquainted with the programs we have here.  She is a dynamic, brilliant and inspirational leader who is already considering some exciting new plans for our RS students going forward with ideas being developed to reinvent the RS experience under Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh’s supervision. She starts officially on July 1^st.

You should also know that our Nursery School, under the continued inspirational and seasoned  leadership of Sherry Fredman and her great team, continues to grow, offer winter and spring break sessions, and so much more. What a successful program this is feeding at an entry point for so many of our families our overall temple membership and our schools.

Economic Challenges Led by Our

New Head of Finance Department – Dave Wolinsky

We have changed the head of our finance staff with the addition of Dave Wolinsky as our Finance Director last Fall.  He and his team have been working on dealing with many other surprises and issues – a couple of good ones like some well earned grants and donations, and some not so good, like economic chaos impacting so many of our members across the congregation.

All of us know that change can be difficult.  I am not going to tell you here tonight that there haven’t been some challenges this past year.  But you should all feel confident that your senior staff and lay leadership have taken their fiduciary responsibilities quite seriously. Our staff, especially Dave Wolinsky and his finance department, Toby Berkow and her key people, along with our Treasurer Aliza Lesser and Assistant Treasurer, Steve Sloan, and many others, have worked tirelessly to make certain that our families are being treated as respectively, sensitively and appropriately as we would all want to be treated in such difficult circumstances.  Because of the downturn in our economy we had to make some tough decisions to lay off personnel and make ourselves a bit leaner in order to provide the level of service and programs we all need and expect.

As the economy continued to decline and hurt so many of our families directly, we made the difficult, yet careful decision, to put our building expansion program on hold so that we could more urgently direct our efforts to maintaining our current level of operations and programs for ALL our members, thus assisting our families in need.  Simply stated, we thought it better to help our member families in need today rather than continuing to raise money and building new facilities at this point in time. And you know what?  It was a difficult decision as so much has gone into this process already.

The Status of our Capital Campaign

We have been working with great architects, KoningEizenberg, and working with great lay leaders like Thelma Samulon and Linda Brettler, along with their various committees.  You should know, as we said in a letter to the entire membership that we are near completion of the city approval/permitting process.  That means that we will be all ready to build our expanded synagogue facility at the appropriate time over the next several years. I am pleased to say (again) that we will use monies we have in hand already to start construction on our new and expanded parking structure that covers the southern stretch of Martel.  We are hoping to begin work in early 2010 after we complete our city permitting approvals.  At last, we will all be able to provide adequate parking making all our programs more accessible.

Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary

Gratitude to Retiring Chairman of Hillside Council – Eliot Samulon

Many of you know about one of our broader and more long standing services to our own TIOH community and the entire Jewish community of LA – Hillside Cemetery in Culver City. Through the wisdom and vision of some of the early leaders of our community, Hillside has been a proud branch of our Temple community for over 50 years. In addition to the caring service it provides to families at their time of great need, Hillside also provides significant financial assistance to the Temple.  For the last 4 years, Eliot Samulon has served as the Chairman of our Hillside Council.  He will continue to serve on the Council but will pass the Chairman’s baton to our former Temple President, Keri Hausner, next month.  A big thank you to both of you for your immense service to our community.

This past year was filled with so many incredible and special occasions on top of all of the regular programs that fill our rooms nearly 24/7, including:

New Programs Initiated This Year with More to Come

New once per month “Simply Shabbat” services led by Chazzan Maseng with our Rabbis;

The Tzahalah Israel student exchange program with our Religious School and Day School combined;

Joint Israel trip with St. Thomas Church;

MLK event with Word Center Church;

Honor of hosting the HUC Rabbinic Ordination;

Big Sunday and Christmas dinner engaging 50,000 people across our community in more than 300 projects;

Record breaking attendance at the Women’s Retreat;

A year of Sunday morning learning at “TIOH Jew U”; and so much more.

Retiring Board Members

Two Board members are retiring at the end of June. Leslie Blagman, who has served us for many years in a variety of capacities and most recently has been our VP of  Education.  She has served our board and almost every committee at Temple on and off for the past dozen plus years.  Glenn Krinsky has also served in a great many roles in our religious school and on our Board.  A big thank you to both of you for your dedicated service.

We welcome one new Trustee, David Cremin, with your approval today, who will begin his service on July 1^st….please, don’t be scared.

Best  Wishes to Rabbi Rosove for a Full Recovery

John, let me say to you, on behalf of the entire Congregation, how pleased we are that you are recovering so well from your recent surgery.  Seeing you tonight, we all know you will fully recover and we look forward to having you at 100% strength very soon.

Challenges of this Past Year

Onwards and Upwards!

When we began this fiscal year last July 1^st, we had a lot on our plates to accomplish.  We had added some critical people to our team to serve us better; we were getting closer to the finish line on our plans for our new buildings; we knew we had to recruit a new Head of the DS and RS Educator, but we knew that those were manageable challenges.  Frankly, we did not anticipate the economic downturn nor the impact it would have on so many of our Temple families.

But it happened.  Your senior staff, under the leadership of our clergy and our Executive Director, Toby Berkow and all our support staff, have worked tirelessly to bring a measure order and compassionate, strategic and careful use of all our human and financial resources.  You should, as I am, be very proud of your Temple clergy, staff, teachers, lay leaders, and members.  This was an extremely difficult year, but we are discovering that it has been also a rewarding one in which we know that we will become a stronger community and congregation and a more vibrant home to our many families. Onwards and upwards!  Thank you.

Welcome everyone.  My name is Steve Sloan, and I currently serve as TIOH’s Assistant Treasurer.  You have just elected me to serve as Treasurer for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on July 1^st.

I want to spend the next few minutes giving you a brief overview of some of the financial highlights, and challenges, of this past year.  As well, I would like to talk briefly about what we have identified as our highest priorities for the upcoming fiscal year.

(Challenges)

As Bill just mentioned, all of us are aware of the how different things are today, compared to just a year ago.  We are in the midst of a severe recession, caused by a number of concurrent events, including a meltdown in financial markets, lack of credit availability, and a significant reduction in real estate values.  Unemployment is increasing, income for those still employed has in many cases declined, net worths have declined, and consumer confidence is clearly eroded.  This impacts all of us in one way or another.

Like all non-profits, TIOH has not been immune to the effects of the economic downturn.  As our year unfolded, we saw more and more families within our community face financial challenges.    It is critically important for you to know that in response to these challenges, TIOH provided significant additional financial support for its congregants, in the form of increased dues assistance/relief, as well as increased school financial aid / scholarship.

The bottom line of all this is that TIOH, for the first time in 6 years or so, finds itself facing a deficit for the current fiscal year, even after the budgeted $400k in subvention from Hillside.  The good news, however, is that we have substantial resources to draw upon to close this projected deficit.  Thankfully, our congregational leadership had the foresight to ensure that when times are good, we set aside monies to be used when times became tough.  I am happy to report that we will be able to fully close the deficit by drawing upon such resources, and that our doing so will not impair the financial health of our community.

(Highlights)

Despite the challenges of the past year, we were still able to accomplish so much, including:

·        Our worship and educational programming remained outstanding, and continued to break new ground in an effort to meet the evolving needs of our congregants;

·        Our capital expansion project, while on temporary “pause” in terms of start date, continues to move forward in terms of the entitlement, planning, and design process;

·        We have ensured a successful leadership transition in our Day and Religious Schools, with the hiring of Rachel Lewin as our next Head of School, and of Rabbi Jocee Hudson as our next Religious School Director (and on that note, let me take a moment to extend my personal thanks to Eileen, and to wish her the best as she enters into a new phase in her life);

·        As a result of the current economic environment, we (like many organizations) saw this as an opportunity to reevaluate how we do things; as a result, we have taken steps to more efficiently manage our operations; to control expenses; and to think in a more strategic way;

·        Perhaps above all, it is important to point out that we kept our promise to you that we would reduce or eliminate financial barriers to participation at TIOH.  To do this, we extended significant additional aid this year, in the form of dues relief, discounts, and scholarships. 

(Going Forward)

As we move into the new fiscal year, we are mindful that the economic situation remains difficult, and that we need to be sensitive to the needs of our congregants, while still striving to deliver excellence in terms of fulfilling our Mission Statement.  Our priorities for the new fiscal year include the following:

·        First and foremost, we will continue to deliver outstanding and creative spiritual, educational, and arts programming and services for our congregants;

·        Secondly, we are doing everything reasonably possible in terms of providing help/support to our congregational families;  Let me mention 4 primary ways that we seek to do this:

1.      The TIOH Board of Trustees has passed a budget which is balanced, yet which provides for no increase in Temple membership dues.  This is a step that will directly impact every family in the community.

2.      Tuition for the Religious School is not being increased.

3.      Increases in tuition for our Day and Nursery schools are modest, and are below increases in recent years.

4.      Even as we have budgeted for no increase in Temple dues and RS tuition, and only modest increases in DS and NS tuition, our budget for the upcoming fiscal year provides for significant additional financial support for our families, in the form of both dues relief and increased scholarship assistance.

·        We will continue to look for new ways to create operational efficiencies, and we will continue to carefully manage expenses.

·        We will continue to be responsible stewards of all of TIOH’s financial resources, including our endowment, building, and scholarship funds, as well as Hillside Memorial Park (which is wholly owned by TIOH, and which provides annual funding critical to the synagogue’s budget)

·        We have strengthened the level of financial expertise, on our Board of Trustees as well as various committees, by adding talented Lay leaders with deep financial backgrounds.

(Conclusion)

While in these times it is always tough to talk about financial matters, let me assure you that there is much cause for optimism.  We have a fundamentally viable community here at TIOH, one that is comprised of over 900 families.  We are blessed that so many families have stepped up in an effort to help other families in need.  We have resources available to close our current year budget deficit.  We have passed a balanced budget for the upcoming year, and were able to do so even with no dues increase, only moderate tuition increases, and with substantially increased provisions for financial assistance.  And we continue to be able to deliver outstanding worship and educational experiences for our congregants.

Thank you.