Term 2, Week 6: Spring Half Term and Some Grumbles
As week 6 was half term and several families were away, we didn’t do anything particularly new, just made challah again (braided bread eaten on Shabbat, which we first made during our second ever session). Pedagogically, not very exciting. We did, however, encounter a problem when the adult education session ran late AGAIN. Very late, so we were hanging around downstairs for ages before we could get into the room to even get the dough started. Not only does this make for a disrupted start for the kids (whose behaviour is affected for the rest of the session), but it also meant we didn’t have time to finish cooking the challahs, so I had to trek around in the evening delivering them.
Now, this may seem like a fairly minor grouch, but it is symptomatic of a long-running lack of co-operation from the community in general and the committee in particular. At best, the committee is completely uninterested in what we do, which means we can get on with it without interference. Sometimes, however, the Cheder and the adult community have to encounter one another, and the Powers That Be just don’t make an effort.
Given that the shul premises are very small and that the Cheder doesn’t have the money to hire different premises whenever necessary, there does need to be a certain amount of consideration, if not support, and so far I haven’t seen it. The Chanukah party hosted by the Cheder was only attended by a tiny handful of people from the community; the sponsorship forms for the Holocaust Memorial Day charity event were largely ignored (and would have been ignored by some people who should know better, if I hadn’t knobbled them in public), and the Torah L’Am adult education group hijacked our Sunday morning time slot every fortnight for the whole Spring term.
On the one hand, the Torah L’Am course was booked and planned a few months before the Cheder was set up, so it wasn’t reasonable to move it. In theory, I had no problem with that. What did irritate me was the complete lack of interest when I tried to find a solution, and the way that almost every session ran over into our time, even though I’d explained that we couldn’t run late to make up the time (we had a breastfeeding mum who had to get home to the baby, plus families with young children who live a long way away). If it had been the other way around, you can bet they’d have been down on me like a ton of bricks.
So here’s the dilemma: How do you persuade a group of middle-aged and elderly people, who either have no children or whose children have long since grown up and moved away, that bringing families into the shul is important? It seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not…
Now, this may seem like a fairly minor grouch, but it is symptomatic of a long-running lack of co-operation from the community in general and the committee in particular. At best, the committee is completely uninterested in what we do, which means we can get on with it without interference. Sometimes, however, the Cheder and the adult community have to encounter one another, and the Powers That Be just don’t make an effort.
Given that the shul premises are very small and that the Cheder doesn’t have the money to hire different premises whenever necessary, there does need to be a certain amount of consideration, if not support, and so far I haven’t seen it. The Chanukah party hosted by the Cheder was only attended by a tiny handful of people from the community; the sponsorship forms for the Holocaust Memorial Day charity event were largely ignored (and would have been ignored by some people who should know better, if I hadn’t knobbled them in public), and the Torah L’Am adult education group hijacked our Sunday morning time slot every fortnight for the whole Spring term.
On the one hand, the Torah L’Am course was booked and planned a few months before the Cheder was set up, so it wasn’t reasonable to move it. In theory, I had no problem with that. What did irritate me was the complete lack of interest when I tried to find a solution, and the way that almost every session ran over into our time, even though I’d explained that we couldn’t run late to make up the time (we had a breastfeeding mum who had to get home to the baby, plus families with young children who live a long way away). If it had been the other way around, you can bet they’d have been down on me like a ton of bricks.
So here’s the dilemma: How do you persuade a group of middle-aged and elderly people, who either have no children or whose children have long since grown up and moved away, that bringing families into the shul is important? It seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not…
posted by Gonetomars at 4:38 pm
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