Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex

Shana Tovah!
The renovations and reconstruction are nearly complete and services are now being held in the building again!
It’s a beautiful new building!
Built with Jerusalem stone (evoke nature and ancestral land), earth tones, sky lights, much more «greening» will be happening…
There is a very active environmental group here which I encourage you to meet with and join.
Come on over but try to use public transportation as parking can be difficult sometimes. It’s close to public transportation.
Alternatively, you could walk or bike.
This is an egalitarian place affiliated with the Conservative/​Masorti movement, associated with GreenFaith and The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) and The Coalition on Alternatives in Jewish Education where your head, heart and hands join together as Rabbi Silverstein likes to say.
There are the «head» Jews who study Jewish texts and so forth. Rabbi is an historian and likes to bring wonderful speakers such as the recent speaker former Ambassador of Israel to Ethiopia who helped bring the Falashan Jews to Jerusalem «Canfei Nesharim» (on the wings of eagles) and continues to help integrate them successfully into Israeli society; Rabbi Tamar Elad-​Applebaum, part Sefardi, part ashkenazi, formerly orthodox, visited from Israel to discuss a bold wedding intiative there, A speaker discussed her double lung transplant she had to have twice and Rabbi encourages organ donations, Environmentalist speakers such as Alon Tal, Michael Trachtenberg and Jeremy Benstein have come, Rabbi Gershom Sizom came from Uganda (did you even know there were Jews in Uganda?), Mr. Eric Boalye Peasah is coming from Ghana to discuss how he saves children from a life of servitute there, then there is the Rwanda connection, and there’s so much more.
«Hand» Jews reach out to others bringing food to the hungry, flowers and song to the elderly, sick and shut-​ins, environmentalists freezing their tuchis (behinds) off to have symbolic protest in front of the Environmental Protection Agency’s New York Regional Office on Tu B’Shevat (Jewish New Year of the Trees) and Martin Luther King Day (you have heard of him, right? the brown-​skinned social activist with a dream?) to urge the EPA to do its’ job to PROTECT the environment and avoid Global Warming, hosted a screening of «An Inconvenient Truth» by Al Gore (inconvenient too that he won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize and had his photo taken at the White House with his rival for the Presidency, President George «Dubya» Bush who managed to be gracious for the occasion… and even smiled for the cameras) and an interfaith discussion afterwards.
These are the Jews with a bulletin board showing famous women around Purim Time:
1986 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine Rita Levi Montalcini, an Italian-​American Neurologist. As a Jew, she was forced into hiding in Italy during WWII where she continued to conduct experiments on chicken embryos in a homemade lab. She made ground-​breaking discoveries during the 1950’s of Nerve Growth Factor that helps to understand disorders like cancer and Alzheimer’s
.
2006 Women’s History Month Honoree and vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader, Winona LaDuke-​part Jewish and part Ojibwe, author (Last Standing Woman, All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life; Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming) and environmentalist. She advocates on a national level for native environmental groups.
Zeinab Musa works or worked for World WIldlife Federation on the Kiunga marine reserve in Kenya, directing the education and conservation awarenes program and managing the WWF Girl’s Scholarship Program. This remarkable woman, one of nine children, grew up in a village where education was not a priority and girls traditionally did not receive any. Her goal is to use education to influence the world.
«Heart» Jews sing with all their neshama (soul/​spirit). Listen to the teen Hazamir choir sing acapella with such emotion that biblically –proportioned tears will come to your eyes; stretch and tone through yoga accompanied by a Jewish thought for the day for a healthy mind, spirit and body; meditate to «quiet the mind, focus on the present and tap into the voice of the soul»; and engage in interfaith activities.
This place is so heimish (closely knit, warm like a family) you are sure to find a spot and friends you can fit with and maybe a havurah (social group with common interests) to join.