On Sunday, May 31, 2026, Schuster Hall at Sinai Synagogue was transformed into a fancy event center for Rabbi Friedland’s retirement celebration!

Thank you thank you Thank you for this evening’s tribute.  I am overwhelmed with gratitude and humbled, truly humbled by the praise.  I am deeply moved. 

I guess the only thing more I could have wished for is that my parents be here to shep nachas.  

‍ I’ll start exactly where I ended last year’s June-August president’s message: Don’t expect this summer to be slow!

I know. We just finished a jam-packed first half of 2026. Can’t we just catch our breath?

I’m sorry to say: No!

Thank you to everybody that helped prepare Saturday kiddush lunches and Sunday brunches for our two visiting rabbis in May.

Thank you to everyone that helped make our Shavuot meal so yummy.

Thank you to the members of our bookclub who donated to sisterhood in the memory of Janina Goetz.

The Sinai Synagogue Board of Directors held a strategic retreat Sunday, January 25, 2026, at the Jewish Federation of St. Joseph Valley, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in order to give themselves a chance to meet in person and to discuss the “Big Rocks” facing our shul in the next 18 months.

We started downtown at the Morris Performing Arts Center with sufganiyot and speeches by community and civic leaders.

Five Minutes of Torah from Sinai is an email Rabbi Friedland sends 2-3 times a week.  Each email contains material from rabbinic texts on the Torah portion of the week with a contemporary interpretation. Ask to receive the emails and start reading the Torah with new perspectives!

This fall, we will have another Read Hebrew America class on Sunday mornings. It will begin November 16 (which is after the holidays and a personal trip to see Rabbi Friedland’s father-in-law). The class will run for 8 weeks.

The materials we receive are from the National Jewish Outreach Program. It costs nothing, but we do want to know how many people are interested in the class so we can get enough materials before the class begins to start on day one. We will run the class on Zoom.

These are challenging times for Jews all around the world. What can we do? The same thing we’ve always done: Reconnect to your Jewish roots. Take a few minutes each week and read the Torah. So grab a friend or a relative and join us, where our community reads just one Torah portion a week, and discover some surprisingly modern wisdom in a very old book. Go to simchattorahchallenge.org