The MERCAZ USA General Council meeting took place on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 via Zoom. During the meeting, we discharged our outgoing board and installed our new leadership team. Please download the Report of the Nominating Committee to the Membership here.
As part of our program, an important panel discussion was presented:
Our world is becoming more polarized. We see it in world politics and in Israel, and we even feel it in our practice of Judaism. As Ohavey Tzion (Lovers of Israel) the Conservative/Masorti movement created a Zionist organization and named it MERCAZ, meaning “center.” But what are the limitations of that center, particularly as extremists seem to pull us to one pole or the other. How do we maintain our “big-tent” brand of Judaism and Zionism? Do we find strength in having different – and, sometimes, quite contradictory – voices around the table?
Join us for a powerful conversation with our panel representing the rising generation of Rabbinical leadership –
Rabbi Erez Sherman currently serves as the Senior Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He founded the Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship, which trains future Rabbis through seminaries across North America how to engage Israel in a deep and nuanced manner.
Rabbi Tracy J. Kaplowitz, Ph.D., a member of the Rabbinical Assembly, currently serves the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue as the Schwartz Israel Fellow, with the mission of “re-charging” ties to Israel within her congregation and the wider Reform Movement. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and has served the Schechter School of Long Island, the Jewish Chaplains Council and the U.S. Air Force.
Rabbi David Minkus has served as rabbi of Chicago’s Congregation Rodfei Zedek since 2014. Within the congregation, he is the founder of Mercaz: the center for purposeful living, a portal where religious, committed, and ambivalent Jews, as well as fellow travelers, come together and make sense of the wisdom and technologies that have grown out of Judaism.
Moderated by Rabbi Eytan Hammerman, Vice President, Mercaz USA.
The panel discussion starts at 7:05: