MHSS House Goals

We're approaching the second-and-a-half anniversary of the founding of Moishe House Silver Spring Maryland, and our community has already grown and changed in many ways. Our most popular regular program, our Open Shabbat Dinners, routinely pull 25-30 attendees, MHSS spin-off groups like the Mussar collective have taken on a life of their own, and we regularly join with other Jewish organizations from around suburban Maryland and the DC metro area for high-impact events. Our living room has been host to not only our own movie nights, shofar blowing lessons, open mics, and holiday observances, but to meetings of Jews United For Justice, an area social activism organization, and to Segulah, a neighborhood Shabbat-morning minyan.

The social geography and human universe we work in keeps changing: friends and community members move away from town, some move into the house, some bring their friends, some drift away from the community. We try to keep up-to-date on what the needs in our area are and what programming MHSS community members and potential community members want. As MHSS residents come and go, and as we get more integrated into the Jewish institutional fabric of the Silver Spring region, we've got both the challenge of retaining our current base while appealing to new populations, and the opportunity to have many more people involved.

One year from now we want to be on everyone's minds around here. Even more synagogues and institutions will see us the way our neighborhood ones do now - as a medium for reaching out to the younger area Jews, and as a creative resource that can work on community-wide programming. We will have a unified and clear presence on the internet, as well as advertisements in local Jewish and alternative media.

Three years from now we want to have moved to a better location, even closer to downtown Silver Spring and its transit links. We see more interested community members taking a lead on programming, appealing to social groups and interest groups we didn't imagine. We know that already, many folks around town know that MHSS is a spot run by their peers which is welcoming and fun and open to their ideas and passions. In three years we'd like that knowledge to be universal, and develop an active community that can take things to even bigger heights.

In five years some of the original MHSS Moisheketeers will be almost 35 years old! We can't imagine who will be MHSS residents then or what other developments the Maryland, District, and Virginia communities might see. The Purple Line might even have started construction! But if we continue doing what we're doing, and make sure that those who succeed us stick to our vision of making homey, eclectic, comfortable, Jewish, and free-form community their priority, well, the possibilities are endless. And as long as MHSS is doing all the multifaceted programming what the people want, and bringing young Jews like us (and not like us) together, we'll know we did all right.