For my site visit I chose Beth Israel Congregation & Community Center, which is located at 2204 Morganton Road Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was during the Friday night service on November 20, 2015 before sundown. The service is known as Shabbat, for the Jews which begins at sundown before the day of rest. In this report I want to partake in what I learned and explain my observations.
Beth Israel Congregation is a conservative, diverse, multi-generational, and modern congregation. Eve Eichenholtz is the first female rabbi in Beth Israel's history. The congregation website is www.bethi.org.
The religious service, Shabbat began at 9:30 am and the congregants lead both the Kabbalat Shabbat and Ma’ariv sections of the service. Kabbalat Shabbat
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They built a new sanctuary and chapel in the Beth Israel Center, which became the home of the congregation. The congregation would periodically need to find new classrooms for its growing number of students. By the 1980s, there were 500 Jews in Fayetteville. This growth began to affect the nature of the congregation’s religious service. In 1972, Beth Israel officially became a Conservative congregation and rewrote its laws to give women more rights in religious participation. In the 1990s, women were called for aliyah and were counted for a minyan, and in 2014 they hired their first female …show more content…
Paden stated, “Religions create, maintain, and oppose worlds.” The Shabbat blended conservative and modern aspects of Jewish thought and rituals. The arrangement of the service included a number of prayers, meditations that praise God, acknowledge the wonder of life, and thank God for the many blessings received. There was time for prayer, responsive readings, and included a Torah lesson with contemporary application. Some members of the congregation were called upon to share in the reading of various prayers. Service included the following components: The call to worship, the Sh’ma and its blessings, the Amidah, which it’s the central prayer of the liturgy. The Rabbi called a member to read the blessings found on pages 166 and 167 in The Gates of