Whether you are looking for ways to innovate worship and music in your community or just love Jewish singing, join us for Hava Nashira 2021, the official Jewish worship and music conference of the Reform Movement.

In Reform congregations across North American, teams of clergy, staff, educators, and lay people have worked together to develop innovative ways to re-open, re-enter, and reimagine our Jewish community life. But the challenges that congregations face in strategically thinking through reopening are more than any one community should have to take on alone. The Reform Movement as a whole will continue to work to help congregational communities envision and plan for the future.

Dear Synagogue Leaders,

We keepers of the flame
Of Jewish communal living

Know --
If we haven’t already done so
That the time to go back
Is arriving soon.

We want to go back to in-person worship
We want to go back to in-person meetings
We want to go back to

Not surprisingly over the past number of months, the word “hybrid” has become popularized to refer to this new world we have entered. We want to make an argument for a new, and more precise term that some congregations have started to use: multi-access.

The first wedding at which I officiated as a newly ordained rabbi was on the island of Maui. The couple planned their ceremony in a location that rarely received significant rainfall.

As the STEM educator and director of education, respectively, at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA, we’re sharing reflections on introducing STEM to Jewish learners in our building pre-COVID and in our online learning community.

On March 7, the NFTY General Board met to participate in our annual mid-term Asefah to elect our next NFTY North American Board and celebrate all of our successes in a year full of unprecedented challenges.

Last Passover began the urgent quest to reinvent much of Jewish life, highlighting that some of the ways we “do” Judaism needed to be updated. This year has been a powerful catalyst to shifts in how we perform our holy work.

This year's conference will cover topics that address the need to balance maintaining a strong congregation for today while leading change for the future, plus the dilemma of dealing with the urgency of the pandemic and long-term challenges to congregations.