During our summer annual planning meeting, we talked about doing something big and special for our 13th anniversary. So, we decided to have a ‘Bar Mitzvah’ for our annual Men’s Club Shabbat.

We had three goals:

1) Honor those who have been crucial to our growth
2) Make the entire Temple Israel of Natick community a part of the celebration
3) Raise some funds

The first thing we did was to set a budget and form a committee of three chairmen for the program, who along with the chapter President would be the team with overall responsibility. The committee chairmen were responsible for:

1) Service Committee – Coordinating the service and the honors
2) Food Committee – Identify someone to buy and cook the food; determine the luncheon menu; identify people to help in the kitchen and identify the cleanup committee.
3) Tribute Book Committee – Organizing the ads for the tribute book along with coordinating with the layout artist
4) Publicity Committee (This would be handled by the Chapter President along with working with the other arms of the Temple)

Service Committee – The Service committee chairman first met with the previous Men’s Club Shabbat Chairman to review the Honor’s needed for the service, the spreadsheet to track Honors and some of the ‘need to knows’ about the day. They then met with the Chapter president to determine those that we wanted to give special Honors to (i.e. Aliyot). The month before, when all the parts of the service were handed out met with the Rabbi and Cantor to review. Once everything was completed, the roles were distributed to the Rabbi, Cantor, Temple Office, Men’s Club Board Members and Ushers for the service.

Food Committee – Every summer the Men’s Club helps with one of the Friday night service/BBQ’s. In return for helping, the people who do the cooking for the BBQ/service very much wanted to do all the cooking as a way of saying thank you to us (One of the cooks is a Men’s Club member and his wife is a big supporter of the Men’s Club). In November the Food Committee (Chairman and cooks) sat down and created the menu which would be nicer than the traditional Kiddush Luncheon and made sure to keep within budget. They decided on a ‘Mediterranean/Israeli’ theme for the luncheon. We normally have about 75 people at Saturday Services and estimated another 50 would attend who are Men’s Club members and don’t normally attend. So we planned for 125, which is almost exactly the number who would attend eventually attend.
For kitchen help, a few members of the Sisterhood offered to help, which allowed all of the Men’s Club to attend the service without being involved in the kitchen. For cleanup, all the Men’s Club members chipped in to help.

Tribute Book Committee – The chairman of the Tribute Book Committee (who is also a Regional Officer) and the Chapter President sat down to divide up the tasks for this most involved portion. The chairman arranged for the layout artist (who happens to be a member of another chapter) who offered to do the work for no cost and took care of layout and printing. The chapter President was responsible for Publicity. We decided to do a special mailing/appeal to all members of the Temple. As ads came in we put them in DropBox which the Layout artist also had access to. The booklet was updated as ads came in which made the layout portion quite easy and was done without stress towards the deadline. The booklet had ads, letter from the Rabbi and Club President, advertisement for Men’s Club Programming, Ad for International Convention and pages honoring Current officers, Past Presidents and former ‘Keeper of the Flame’ honorees. We made many extra copies of the booklet and is now part of our advertising when the Temple has membership events at which we get a table to recruit new members.

The service:

After a tremendous amount of planning, who could have predicted that Saturday, February 9th would be the biggest snowstorm of the decade with 27 inches of snow. After seeing all the weather warnings earlier in the week, we decided to postpone on Thursday before we bought the food and hold the event the following week as there were no other Temple events that morning. In a short time period, the Service chairman re-organized the service honors, found others who could learn a Torah portion in a week’s time and coordinated with other Temple members who originally had roles for that week. Temple members were extremely helpful, including one who had originally scheduled to sponsor the Kiddush in honor of her and her grandson’s birthdays, graciously moved it to the following week. We persevered the date change and came through!

A few other notes:

Color Coordinating – Last year the Men’s Club bought orange 3 button down shirts with our logo in black. We have become known for our orange shirts. For the service we wore our orange shirts with suits. The Tribute Book cover was in orange and we had orange flowers at each table for the luncheon.

The result:

- Our growing Men’s Club got great publicity and respect for putting on this event and with the ad book, we now had another item for recruiting new members.
- We got lots of publicity in terms of recruiting new members
- After helping us with our event, we helped the Sisterhood for their Shabbat and have started planning for a joint program for next year – the first time we have ever worked together
- One of the chairmen has agreed to be VP Religion for next year – Succession Planning
- We raised some much needed funds (Revenue: $1240; Profit: $500). Usually the Men’s Club Shabbat costs us $275 with no associated revenue – basically a $775 difference form past years. This money is allowing us to provide subsidies for International Convention.