Our first Moishe month

I felt we had a very successful first month as a Moishe House here in Montevideo. We hosted 9 events, some big, some small, an average of about 17 guests at each one. For me though, the real measure of success is how much fun people are having at our events, and those levels seemed pretty high.

Coming into the month I had no doubts that our events would be fun, since we have fun just living together, but I was worried about planning so many events and getting people to come. It averages out to one event every three or four days, and to have any variety that requires a lot of ideas.

The task of bringing the community together seemed daunting, and it does take some time and effort. Fortunately our house works well together, and everyone's willing to help out to make sure the place is always presentable and welcoming, and to spread the word about our events. For this it helps that we're already so active in the community and know a lot of Jewish people our age. (Lior, Elkana, Yonatan, and Zev are Shlichim at Yavne, one of the Jewish day schools here. I work at Hillel Uruguay.) All of our event promotion has been through word of mouth, which seemed to work just fine. Between the five of us inviting people, and the guests who wound up bringing more of their friends, getting a lot of people to come over turned out not to be as hard as I thought.

My other main concern, hosting a sizeable amount of events, also somehow seemed to resolve itself. Some of the events, like the Israeli sleepover and Sunday Night Futbol, were pretty spur-of-the-moment. I actually believe that more and more of our events will be that way as we develop as a Moishe House. People will wind up coming more and more often just to hang out, and as a group we'll do what we feel like doing when we feel like doing. It think we will have accomplished a lot once our community starts gathering itself together automatically like this.

Aside from our Moishe House helping bring the community together, our events have also helped me personally to meet more people, which is great, something that I really enjoy. And I feel that the five of us residents have grown closer through working on a shared project together too. My Moishe experiences have all been very positive so far, and I'm looking forward to having many more.

Jay Krefman
Moishe House Montevideo