Forest Hills Minyan
Forest Hills, QueensDan WerlinMETNY Board Member FHM meets every two to three weeks on Saturdays and occasional Fridays. We use a room at theForest Hills Jewish Center (FHJC), which also provides us with siddurim, chumashim, taleisimand a Torah, in addition to set-up and clean-up services by their maintenance staff.Our attendance is in the range of 25-35 on any given week, with a very high degree of consistentattendance. That is, new faces trickle in only gradually, but those that come, come regularly.Demographically, attenders can be characterized in two way: by shul affiliation, and by standarddemographic categories. A plurality of our attenders are also regular shul attenders. Another segment are shul members, but attend our services more often than shul services. A third groupis comprised of people with no known affiliation or are affiliated with a local Orthodoxsynagogue.In more conventional demographic terms, roughly 50-65% of attenders are married couples intheir 30s; some with children. The remainder is composed of couples in their 40s and 50s; thosewith children are high school age or older. There is a sprinkling of single adults in their late 30sand early 40s, and adults 60 and older.The focus of our programming is to provide a smoothly run, lay led service with spiritedcongregational singing. Our target audience is people who are looking for this--we have nodemographic targets. Although that is our specific reason for being, fostering community is alsoessential and we periodically attach lunches and dinners to our services. There is always akiddush.The services themselves are "standard traditional egalitarian." That is, a full traditional servicein which men and women participate equally.The experiences of FHM can may be helpful for other shuls. The magic ingredient has been thehigh level of support we have received from the shul leadership. Both the they and us haveviewed FHM not as competition with the "main service," but as complementary to it. Many people move back and forth, one week with the shul the next week with FHM. And theavailability of quality children's programming has brought people who came first to FHM, tocome back for FHJC. Regular shul members who are deeply embedded in the community buthave been looking for a different type of service, now have both. Although some come only for FHM, we have tried to design programming that takes advantage of and builds upon existingstructures and groups.
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