Micaela - MH Cape Town

Moving into the Johannesburg Moishe House this year has truly been an incredible experience. Living amongst friends and having constant Jewish social interaction has been amazing fun and has allowed for real personal growth.

On a personal and social level, I feel I have gained so much from the experience. I have taken part in every Moishe House event this year. From a Tu B’Av event and crazy Girls nights, to sessions on the occupation and National Women’s day, the year has been filled with fun, laughter and a lot of learning.

I have been able to keep in touch with my Judaism on a very real level and engage with topics that are relevant in South Africa, Israel and internationally. Thank you to everyone who makes it possible!

Popularity by Vitaly Moishe House SF RSJ

Popularity

When starting our house from scratch, I made one of our top goals to give our house a good name and spread the good word about us across the bay area Russian Jewish community.  While in the beginning, it wasn't smooth sailing and most the people that came were our friends, eventually we saw numbers rise and new comers found their way to our door at an average rate of 1 person per event now.

I think our greatest success has been in helping people who just moved to the city make friends and network with people of a similar background.  Having moved from Chicago without knowing almost anyone 3 years ago, I know how challenging it can be.

I'm very proud of our house and we've made big steps from having to call every single person we knew to have a successful event, to the mentality: "if you plan it, they will come".  Popularity and reputation is something that naturally spreads on it's own.  Once you establish a presence and provide a positive experience, that experience will broadcast automatically and seamlessly without even your knowledge.

Nikki Levitan - MH London

I discovered the Moishe house London purely by chance shortly after I returned to London after living in Israel for many years. I thought my return to North West London would be very hard, but I was pleasantly surprised to find this delightful, open, fun, cross denominational community with like minded people.

Some months later I was lucky enough to get a place in the house as a resident and since then life in London for me has exploded in an amazing way.

The house always has flow, creativity, good people and high energy. Whether it is open mic night at the house jamming good quality music or just some of my housemates hula hooping and doing poi, I am constantly inspired to be more and to be creative and active.

My housemates have become like family and they each bring something unique. Because of this I feel as a house we offer a diverse range of awesome programmes from Jewish Learning, fun big Shabbat dinners, Zumba, cooking for the homeless and a pop up cafe to name a few.

As a community organiser in Social Justice in my profession I am able to take the skills I have leant through my work and apply them to building the community around us.

My mission in the house and the community is to bring more people in who do not know about us and share the love and wealth of our golden community. I hope non residents also feel some sort of ownership over this community by bringing in their skills and running events at the house themselves.

I am working on inspiring our community to becoming more socially active and responsible.

I do this through exposing the community to amazing local and national charities and initiatives and encourage people to find their niche and get involved.

In time I am also working on setting up a regular moishe house London Social Action project where we can and will effect positive change within our local area.

Thank you Moishe house and my fellow housemates for changing my life. I am truly blessed and hope to live life in the future in some sort of communal way.

Nikki Levitan :) x

David Kadosh - Moishe House West LA

I love Moishe House! What an incredible experience this has been for me since we started our house in West LA last December. Moishe House empowers its residents to run with their ideas and share their enthusiasms in an inspirational way with the community. I’ve also been lucky to meet so many awesome people in the last 8 months and build strong, lasting friendships. My passion has always been Jewish self-defense and empowerment. Both sides of my family have suffered and been uprooted because of anti-Semitism. My mother’s father had many members of his family killed in the Holocaust and survived 5 years in the Plaszow concentration camp and Mauthausen death camp. My father’s father had his clothing store in Casablanca set on fire twice because it was Jewish owned. Jews around the world have been easy targets of anti-Semitic fueled aggression. I have made it my life mission to practice situational awareness, understand self-defense, and to prepare for a wide array of potential threats. Now, thanks to Moishe House, I am able to share my knowledge with other young Jews in my community. Moishe House West LA runs a monthly self-defense program which focuses on Krav Maga (Israeli close quarters combat). We started our trainings with simple techniques, but as our classes grew and members kept coming back, we needed to expand. I applied for a special grant from Moishe House which helped us purchase some of the necessary equipment we needed to expand our training. We now have punching pads to practice our strikes and rubber knives and guns to practice weapon disarming techniques. At Moishe House West LA we have a core group that looks forward to the monthly training and is dedicated to actualizing a life of Jewish self-defense. Moishe House has given me such a tremendous opportunity to share my passions with my peers and to build strong connections and friendships. I love being a part of the Moishe House community!

Cheesecake and things - Sam Lederer MH Palo Alto

The date is 4 Sivan, 5772 / May 26, 2012, the hour 6 PM. I have two cheesecakes in the oven and I am thinking about quantum mechanics. The venture capitalist, the yoga teacher, the art curator, and the financial-analyst-turned-software-engineer are confirmed, but nobody has heard from the documentary filmmaker. I am beginning to worry, but of course I always worry and things always turn out great when the Moishe House of Palo Alto hosts something this ambitious. Allow me to explain. The event is entitled TEDmh (after the TED talks of internet fame) and it's our way of celebrating Shavuot with a Silicon Valley twist. The holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah to Israel at Sinai, and is traditionally marked with an all-night extravaganza of Jewish learning fueled (for reasons never satisfactorily explained to me) by dairy foods. We decided we liked the dairy foods (hence the cheesecakes) and we liked the late night learning, but that our community could go to almost a dozen places in the area to learn 100% Torah, and that revelations from the arts, sciences, and humanities also deserved a place in this joyous celebration. So we assembled an engaging program of speakers from our community. Some we solicited, others saw the facebook event and stuck their neck out. The diversity of interests and backgrounds was invigorating. As the event took form the guest list grew, as did expectations. Doubts began to form: Will people really sit quietly and listen, or will it just collapse into the usual schmoozing? What if it's too quiet, and just ends up lame? What if my talk on one of history's most elegant experiments runs too long and bores people? WHAT IF MY CHEESECAKE CRUST STICKS TO THE EDGE OF THE PAN?! Fast forward: 6 Sivan 5772 / May 28 2012, 2 AM. The cheesecakes are now little more than stray crumbs of oreo and almond crust (in case you were worrying, they turned out perfectly—not that it would've mattered). All the speakers made it, plus a surprise visit from an astrophysicist who showed that minds near stupefied by fatigue and cheesy goodness could still be blown. To call the event a success would be an understatement. It was fun, meaningful, and just Jewish enough to feel the community spirit in the air. The lesson I've learned from helping plan events like this is that, even when logistics are tricky and things don't go as expected, there is really no such thing as failure. In the two years since the Palo Alto Moishe House got started, a real community has formed. Gather together a bunch of Jews who all want to be there and the results will never disappoint.

Meg Stewart - MHSF

"As a teenager in a suburb of DC, B'nai Brith Youth Organization(BBYO) was a social scene that my high school could not fulfill. It was the first opportunity in my life that i really felt connected to a community of my peers. The stimulation i experienced in BBYO created the foundation for my interest and loyalty to leadership in the Jewish Community. Somehow i am still surprised when i meet a Jew in San Francisco or on my travels and we immediately play Jewography and clearly know someone in common. That kid that showed up to shabbats in college, his brother's girlfriend... yea we went on birthright tommorrow, oh yea, of course, Rachel Cohen?! The infinite community that Judaism provides is so attractive to me. It was only natural that i stumbled upon Moishe House after living in San Francisco for 6 months. The house was exactly what i needed in my life, a positive community to fall into. Moving to a city where you know so few people is daunting, but Moishe House made it so smooth. I feel excited, grateful and honored to be a resident at the San Francisco Moishe House. It is literally a dream come true. I look forward to hosting so many more shabbats, art classes, yoga practies and general opportunities for people to meet and connect. I live for that, Moishe House is the avenue to my success in creating and participating in human relations."

Making Leaders feel Valued - Annie from Moishe House Boston

Every spring Moishe Kavod House hosts our community retreat, when 40 people come together for a weekend of relaxation and community processing. This retreat is also when we elect our new board, a finance chair, a president, a membership chair and a development chair. Each year, finding a board is challenging. The amount of work done by our leaders is daunting and other leaders in the community are more than hesitant to commit to the amount of work they see being done by their predecessors. This year, we were having a particularly difficult time finding a finance chair, ironic since it is the easiest position. It is also the least interesting position however so we found ourselves unable to fill it. We set about trying to find a candidate, creating a list of folks who we thought would be good candidates, and I sent out an email to our current board list asking them to keep an eye out. As I started calling our two top candidates I was surprised to find a reply to the list from one of the current board members, Rachel, volunteering to run for the position. This put me in a tricky position. The board member had been planning on leaving the board after having had a very difficult time in her position. Sensitive to criticism, in constant fear of judgment, and struggling to meet deadlines she was often unreliable and constantly struggling to lead her team. Her fear of judgment often hindered meetings, leading her to go off on defensive tangents or unable to take even minimal feedback, sometimes becoming rude and isolating others when she felt judged by them. As soon as the board member's offer to run went out the the list, I almost instantly had emails from three other board members expressing horror at the idea of her continued board role, and some board members who has planned on resigning offering to fill the seat instead of her. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell Rachel, “Sorry, we're going to have one of the other board members take it even though you offered first.” I replied all and thanked her for her offer, explained that had already reached out to a couple of candidates and wanted to follow through with that process rather than rescind all the encouragement we had given folks. Still, Rachel persisted and said she had thought about it and really wanted the position. I was torn between being honest with Rachel and just working incredibly hard to make sure someone else got elected. I decided that though I had reservations about Rachel's running, I didn't think it was worth the tension it would cause to ask her not to run, but other board members persisted in pushing other people to run and pushing me to follow through on my contacts. However, they were unwilling to tell Rachel how they felt, and I was unwilling to get in the middle of it. Unsurprisingly, however, especially given her insecure disposition, Rachel detected the reservations board members had about her candidacy and confronted one of the board members who had been recruiting other candidates. The board member responded by trying to explain to Rachel the concerns that various board members had about her, which of course only made Rachel more upset. In the end, I, and our Board President, ended up having to do what we should have done in the first place, having an honest conversation with Rachel about what she had done well in the past year, what had been hard for her, how that had been hard for us, and openly asking if she really felt continuing would be a good idea. We should have stressed the things we felt she did well, and been creating about articulating roles she might take in the community that would fit her better, make her happier, and be more helpful for the rest of the community. It was a testament to our community and our skills as organizers that we were able to do that in the end, and Rachel was not upset when she was finally defeated in the election. But we shoud have trusted Rachel, ourselves, and our community to have that conversation in the first place. It reminded me that a little bit of honest tension is better than a whole lot of hidden drama, as hidden drama will always explode.