JTA News and Features

Congregation Ner Tamid in Henderson, Nev., webcasts its bar and bat mitzvah services for family and friends who cannot attend.

The preschool director at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Va., tweets from the classroom several times a day, so parents can feel a part of what their children are learning.

At Congregation Beth Sholom in Columbia, members have been posting photos on Facebook, while in Alexandria, congregants at Agudas Achim have been using LinkedIn to trade information on job openings.

Synagogues, religious schools and other Jewish groups have been signing on to Facebook, blogs, Twitter and other social media eager to learn how new technology can strengthen their organizations and improve their outreach.

Faith-based organizations, however, have been "the last to the social media party," say experts at NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network. Now they're jumping in with enthusiasm -- even the pope has a Facebook page, with nearly 80,000 fans.

What they're finding out is that these tools are transforming who they are and how they operate. That can be scary to leaders comfortable with old organizational models.

"Social media changes the way people look at their faith-based institutions," says Lisa Colton, founder and president of Darim Online, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps Jewish organizations get over their trepidation and understand new media's potential. "Organizations don't have a monopoly on organizing anymore. People can talk to each other directly."

When synagogues and religious schools first turn to new media, Colton says, they tend to use them to perform typical tasks, just more efficiently. They send event invitations by e-mail instead of snail mail, or create a Web site that clergy and staff use as an online bulletin board. The messages arrive quicker at homes, and without stamps, but it's still one-way, top-down communication.

By delving deeper, Colton continues, Jewish clergy, educators and others discover that these media tools demand a different way of talking and listening, encouraging active participation and grassroots involvement.

For Gabby Volodarsky, program director at Temple Sinai in Oakland, Calif., that means being able to rally support quickly for someone in need.

Someone posted a note recently on the temple's year-old Facebook page saying that she was "praying for the speedy recovery" of two new members. Volodarsky wrote back immediately and found out that the couple, who didn't know many people in the congregation yet, had been in a car accident.

"Within an hour, they got calls from all our clergy and me," Volodarsky reports. "I asked what our Caring Community could bring them. Because I saw that posting, I was able to reach out and make them feel cared about. Now they're among our most active members."

At Tikvat Israel in Rockville, congregant Janaki Kuruppu, one of the synagogue's Webmasters, would love to see the congregation make better use of social media.

While it has had an active listserv for several years, Tikvat Israel's blog and Twitter haven't taken off. Rabbi Howard Gorin and a handful of congregants have posted blog items, but, Kuruppu says, they don't lead to discussions the way the listserv has.

As for Twitter, president Sam Freedenberg has been posting messages on average twice a week -- mostly about activities -- but Kuruppu would like both the blog and Twitter to be more than a bulletin board.

No one at Tikvat Israel is quite sure how to do that, she says. "What I would love for Twitter to be able to do for us is help us" get enough people when a minyan is needed, but there aren't enough congregants using it.

Agudas Achim's communications committee co-chair, Andrew Cohen, also would like to see more activity on the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that began about six months ago. For now, "it's mostly announcements. We want it to be interactive, but we're struggling to make it into that, he says. "We'd like to see people having more conversations."

Beth Shalom has been a little more successful. There, youth director Becca Roberts has been using Facebook to get in touch with kids; last week, she used the site to announce the birth of her baby -- within hours of delivery.

Rabbi Susan Grossman has been heartened by the shul's Friends of Beth Shalom Facebook page. "It has been fun to see the photos that are shared and the relationships that are strengthened through Facebook," she says in an e-mail.

At Kesher Israel in the District, David Sloan has seen fellow congregants use the Orthodox shul's Facebook as a "way to expand and create their own social networks in ways that they couldn't on Shabbat" when they're unable to exchange contact information.

Also in the works is a podcast of Kesher Israel Rabbi Barry Freundel's weekly d'rash -- Torah exposition -- to be recorded either before or after Shabbat. "The idea," Sloan said, "is to podcast it as quickly as possible while it is still fresh in people's minds to get some conversation going."

Often, people share information online that they would not share face to face. That's especially true of younger people, says Rabbi Jonathan Blake of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., who uses Facebook to keep in touch with his religious school graduates when they head off to college.

When he first set up his page, Blake was pleasantly surprised that so many of his former students "friended" him. Now the rabbi is an ongoing presence in their lives, a link to their hometown Jewish community.

"I'm not there to spy on them," Blake says. "But I know more about what they're doing Friday night than their parents."

If they're involved in anything dangerous, he can step in -- as a pastor, not a parent.

Social media enable congregants to talk to each other as well as to clergy or staff -- a fact used by the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in D.C. to help promote its Chanukah cooking contest. Instead of sending out a straightforward invitation, the staff used Twitter to create online buzz, tweeting about the potato dish one woman planned to bring and linking to her blog.

Readers of her blog were linked back to the synagogue's Web page -- better advertising than anything else the synagogue might have come up with, says Meredith Jacobs, director of family programming.

"Why do young people come to synagogue? For community," Jacobs posits. "With the Holy Chef contest, I saw them tweeting back and forth. They could see who else is going and get the word out fast."

Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., did something even riskier -- the congregation gave its senior rabbi a flip camera.

Although many older folks hesitate to use new media, Rabbi Alan Lucas took to the gadget immediately. Earlier this month, he posted his first YouTube video showing him at his desk discussing the recent Chanukah song written by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). His video has generated dialogue even outside his own congregation: One person gently accused him of taking offense that a Mormon dared write a Jewish holiday song, to which Lucas responded he thought Hatch's decision to write the ditty "a bit strange -- but I love it."

Tikvat Israel, too, has used YouTube -- it recently posted a clip from a Mama Doni concert at the shul and one from weekend scholar Rachel Musleah.

In just two weeks, the latter garnered 131 views, brags Freedenberg, who also says, "We're trying to be as communicative and as cutting edge as we can be without leaving members behind."

Debra Rubin, WJW editor, contributed to this article.