We're In Time Magazine...What Does It Mean

Our little minyan, Kol HaKfar, was recently featured in Time Magazine, in a sidebar on home minyanim that accompanied its feature piece on the home church movement.

Zachary Thacher often spends Friday nights at home in his New York City apartment, but not because he's skipping out on Sabbath-eve prayer services. Thacher, 32, is the founder of Kol haKfar, an independent Jewish community that, like a growing number of similar groups around the country, meets in the homes of community participants. Thacher says he started his group--which now has a Friday-eve attendance of about 25--because "having a meaningful, personal service just didn't seem possible in the harsh lighting and monotonous, institutional vibe of a synagogue."

Like Kol haKfar, many of the new communities thriving in cities across the U.S. are run by volunteers--with a healthy representation in their 20s and 30s--and offer religious services organized almost exclusively by e-mail. The groups tend to avoid denominational classification. At Kol haKfar, for instance, some participants use Orthodox prayer books while others follow along using more liberal Reconstructionist texts.

In all fairness to the beleagured Conservative movement, it shuld be noted that the vast majority of us actually use the Conservative text, Sim Shalom. In in all honesty, our a capella, melodic, traditional egalitarian service is a Conservative Friday night service, or what what one should be. But outside of a very few special congregations, you'd be hard pressed to find the intimacy and spirit of our minyan inside the walls of a Conservative shul.