The POWER of Volunteers!

For those of you who participated in the Hanukah Bowling Party – and many of you did – I don't need to tell you what a success it was. Those who weren't there hopefully heard about it from others or maybe read about it in the local press. But even those who were there don't realize the community effort that went into the party. Without this effort, we couldn't have possibly had the party.

It started with 4 families who donated money toward the party. I don't know if you all know this but the party was heavily subsidized by the synagogue. The $5.00 admission fee basically covered the food and the paper goods but not more than that. The rest of the money came in part from individual members: The Bergman family, Aaron Rosloff (who didn't only donate the donuts, but also went to buy them), Marcia and Jeff Schwartz and Brenda and Mark Sherman. Within the synagogue, Membership, Activities and the Ritual Committee donated a share of their budgets towards the party. The Religious School didn't only donate all the money that was needed for the gift bags (from their fundraising money) but, their Toranim physically prepared the bags with all the goodies inside.

During the planning stage with the bowling alley, I discovered Patty Brams, a long time congregant who works for Brunswick Zone. Patty helped us with all the needed onsite coordination with the bowling alley for the event.

Now we get to people who helped with the preparations. The wonderful flier for the party was designed by Dave Spivak. It was a very eye-catching flier which I am sure helped to attract people from outside our community to our party. The flier was distributed all over town by Cindy Gittleman, Danny Greenberg, Mark Jiorle, Beth Schurman and Ruth Shindler with her son Jason (Jason was actually the one who patiently cut all the little stubs on the fliers, so people could easily pick one up).

Bobbi Binder, with the help of volunteers, picked up the activities for the children, the paper goods and some food items. The volunteers who helped her were Debbie Allen and Lori Kaye (who kept having to go out and buy the paper goods again and again because the numbers kept climbing constantly through the day of the party itself).

On the day of the party, we had a whole army of volunteers helping at the bowling alley. Some of whom you might have noticed: Gary Bergman, Lynn Biderman, Bobbi Binder, Cindy Gittleman, Danny Greenberg, Ann Kanarek, Lori and Melissa Kaye, Lisa Mason, Jeri Roller, Jay Scheuer, Lisa Seidman, Ruth Shindler, Colleen Snow and Debbie Stein-Lamoreaux, a new congregant who works at the Brunswick Zone Bowling Alley and helped us through the entire evening.
These are the people who made it happen. Without them it would have been an impossible task to carry. I am hoping I didn't forget anybody. So many people helped, that I need to apologize in advance to those I might have forgotten.

I would like to give a special thank you to Lisa Mason who helped me carry the whole crazy plan forward at the time that nobody else believed in it!

And now to the future: We have plans for big things to happen on Purim. This year the evening of Purim will be March 3rd – a Saturday night. We are trying to plan for a party that evening just after the Megillah Reading. We are also working on making the Purim Carnival a bigger event than usual. We want it to be a community event, such as the Hanukah Party, at which we had close to 300 people, 25% of whom were not members.

In order to carry on these plans we will need volunteers again: For the planning, preparations, monetary help and the event itself. If you can help with any of these aspects, please contact the office or the Youth Commission (mainly for the Purim Carnival).

I am hoping that the Purim events will be bigger and better than anything we had in the past!

B'shalom,
Nitsat (Hadas) Elami