TORONTO — Beit Rayim Synagogue is moving to the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus.
It will hold its first Shabbat services there this weekend with New York-based Rabbi Moshe Edelman of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, who also led Beit Rayim’s High Holiday services this year. The congregation will meet in the beit midrash of the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Kimel Centre.
This weekend’s services – including Friday evening and Saturday afternoon – will be part of a Chanukah Shabbaton.
Following Havdalah, there will be a children’s Chanukah study session, then congregants will join UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s community Chanukah celebration in the same building.
The egalitarian synagogue, which is affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, has been holding services at the Reena Battle Centre since 2006. Its administrative offices and Hebrew school will continue to be housed in separate locations for now.
“Our goal is to establish a home where we can get all three operations under one roof,” synagogue president Irving Siegel told The CJN last week.
In the new location – in addition to weekly Shabbat morning services led by Cantor Eli Bard – there will be monthly Kabbalat Shabbat services as well as festival and holiday services. Rabbi David Eligberg, who joined the shul four years ago, is no longer with the congregation.
The move to TanenbaumCHAT is considered short-term. Beit Rayim is negotiating with UJA Federation of Greater Toronto about the possibility of renting space at the Schwartz/Reisman Centre, the Jewish Community Centre expected to open on the campus in Vaughan in September 2012.
“Our long-term goal is to have a building on the Lebovic campus,” said Siegel, “We’re working towards that with a capital campaign.”
Last year, the synagogue, which has 240 member households, was planning to partner with Robbins Hebrew Academy to move to the campus by spring 2010 in a shared building, but the school was not prepared to go ahead by that time.
The shul’s history goes back to 1975, when a few couples in Richmond Hill started a group that became the Richmond Hill Jewish Community, and then Congregation Shaareh Haim under the leadership of the late Rabbi Sol Tanenzapf. The synagogue folded in the early 1990s due to financial difficulties, but was reborn as Beit Rayim.
Further information is available online at beitrayim.org.
