“share information on the most important websites today for connecting with your Jewish family and friends on-line, discovergin your heritage, and sites you can use to increase your family’s knowledge on all things Jewish.”

As I like acronyms I divided my presentation into four areas, one for each letter of the word “Life”: Learning, Information, Family, Entertainment. The slideshow contains 36 slides, including 20 screenshots and a cover page. You can download the presentation in PPT (5.7 MB) or PDF (2.8 MB) format. The handout has all the URLs (web addresses) mentioned in the presentation, but is much smaller. Its PDF version (38 kb) is best for printing on a double sided, letter size paper for folding, while the DOC/Word version (45 kb) works well on screen.

We had a good exchange and comments from the participants during the hour long session. When I mentioned that Congregation Beth Ami has a Facebook profile, with 105 “friends” right now, a participant raised the idea to create a LinkedIn group for Congregation Beth Ami. He is following up on that so it might come to reality. (LinkedIn is a social network site for professionals, focusing on career development and professional networks.) Another participant mentioned her own site: SacredHome.com. The site combines beauty and functionality, so I recommend it.

Our first planned event, a discussion with the older students of the religious school got postponed because of logistical reasons. The second one, story time with the second graders, started a little bit later than planned, because of their folk dancing class. The nine children and one madricha arrived to the library a few minutes after 11 AM and we read “It Could Always Be Worse” by Margot Zemach. They enjoyed the story and were active in the discussion about it, providing ideas how a situation could be worse or how the problem in the opening pages of the book could be solved.  Six of the children borrowed books after the reading, one for each. We had four more visitors in the library till we closed at 12.30, not counting the teachers, all of them parents. Two of them borrowed a book each.

At 1 PM USY started its first social action/Tikkun Olam event of the year in the large classroom of the campus, they made brown bag lunches for the Kid Street Learning Center. At 2 PM, I joined them and lead a discussion under the title of “Is Facebook God?” Fortunately, as I suspected, they were all on Facebook so I didn’t have to introduce it to them. We took Maimonides 13 attributes of God and attempted to compare it to Facebook or at least discover connections to it. Most of the nine teens and their group leader seemed to enjoy the conversation which lasted about 45 minutes. At the end they were all keen to take home a copy of the handout (PDF, 105 kb) that listed the attributes and provided one Facebook related idea and a suggestion for each. Rick Concoff, the Chaverim director, also joined us for most of event. Here they are the happy teens, after the discussion, and before I left so they could go on to start planning their next event.

To close the day we had an other presentation at 7 PM, this time on “Jewish Learning Online“. We started a few minutes late as setting up the projector and copying the handouts took slightly longer than expected. The slide presentation (PDF, 1 MB) consisted of  18 slides, including the cover and 7 screenshots of websites. The handout (PDF, 65 kb)  included all the URLs mentioned in the slideshow. The five people who showed up shared some of their favorite sites, particularly in the area that the presentation didn’t even attempt to cover: culture.

The day in numbers:

• 28 patrons (9 children, 1 madrich, 7 teens, 2 teen leaders, 4 parents, 5 adults)
• 8 borrowed items
• 3 events

A presentation on Sunday, November 7, 2010, 7 PM to 9:00PM,
on the Global Day of Jewish Learning about

the history of Jewish online learning resources
the forms, methods and places to learn Judaism online

followed by

a discussion and a communal sharing of further resources.

You are guaranteed to take home a list of
useful and inspiring ideas and web addresses (URLs).

PDF flyer of the event.

Event page on Facebook and on Librarything.com

A presentation and discussion
on Sunday, November 7, 2010, 2 PM to 4:00PM,
on the Global Day of Jewish Learning
for and with Jewish teenagers about

• The implications of Facebook and God being omnipresent.
• How Facebook (and the web) is forming our religious life.
• If and how it helps a sense of community.

PDF Flyer of the event.

Event page on Facebook and on Librarything.com

2010

• November 3: The Believers, by Zoe Heller
• December 1: Nothing Sacred, by Douglas Rushkoff

2011

• January 5: Ten Green Bottles, by Vivian J. Kaplan
• February 2: Natasha, & other stories, by David Bezmozgis
• March 2: Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain
• April 6: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin
• May 4: Prophet’s Wife, by Milton Steinberg
• June 1: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
• July 6: Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, by Kai Bird

• Mary Lowenthal Felstiner: Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis
• Toobin Jeffrey: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
• Rodger Kamenetz: Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka (to be published in October 2010)
• Mitchell Kaplan: By Fire, By Water
• Greg Mortenson: Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Rachel Shukert: Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour
• Burton L. Visotzky: A Delightful Compendium of Consolation: A Fabulous Tale of Romance, Adventure and Faith in the Medieval Mediterranean

The following books got top votes and nine of them will make it to the bookclub’s program. The following table includes information about two additional criteria for our selection: whether the book is available in paperback and whether the public library has a copy of it or not.