Job Opening: Executive Director
July 20, 2010
The application process for this position has closed.
Executive Director (Portland)
FTE: Full Time
Salary: Range 42,000 – $50,000
Job Summary
Havurah Shalom is a vibrant, diverse, participatory Jewish community of 350 families, steeped in Jewish values, promoting spirituality, learning and acts of social responsibility. We are seeking a full time Executive Director. Primary duties include working as a staff liaison to the steering and finance committees and working closely with Havurah’s Rabbi, Educator and office staff. Management responsibilities include day-to-day operation of the congregation, including hiring and managing direct staff reports, overseeing personnel policies, building-related activities, financial management, e-mail marketing, technical infrastructure and content managed website. The Executive Director participates in appropriate community initiatives and activities, organizes and maintains internal and external publicity and advertising. This position also oversees communications, and Havurah’s cemetery policies and procedures. Program and religious support is provided by this position to insure the logistical aspects of preparing for religious and holiday services are complete.
Job Qualifications
- A bachelor’s degree required, with 3+ years of administrative experience.
- Demonstrated ability to manage people, facilities, and financial responsibilities.
- Strong organizational skills.
- Experience with, and passion for, working with the Jewish community.
- Self-starter with proven ability to work with a diversity of people and responsibilities.
- Experience in donor relations preferred.
- Knowledge of the local Jewish Community and congregations preferred.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, appreciation for ethnic, racial and sexual diversity, strong cultural competence and sensitivity in working with diverse populations.
- IT knowledge that would include Microsoft Office
- Good sense of humor!
Health and vacation benefits included.
Havurah Shalom is an equal opportunity employer.
Location: Multnomah County
Compensation based on experience and qualifications
This a full time job
Principals only. Recruiters please don’t contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job.
Thinking About Summer
July 1, 2010
by Rabbi Joey
Summer means a lot of things for the Jews. For one thing, it’s the traditional period during which Hebrew School teachers quit oppressing me and my friends. The hallways darkened and the final chalk conjugations of early May yielded to half-hearted reminders that people ate dairy at Shavuos. Mr. Gomborow and Mr. Shindler, immigrant classroom managers from European firestorms, removed their suit-jackets and wiped their brows. They despised these American kids, dropped off by mothers in curlers, who motored their wide gas-guzzling coupes like big fish in an aquarium. They were nothing but grief. It was the end of an era, and no one seemed to be paying attention. Even they, angry prophets bewailing their lonely fate in America, rented apartments at the beach only blocks away from where the graduates of Jewish learning academies lay on towels, got tans, and gawked at adolescent girls in bathing suits, while they listened to The Ventures and the Everly Brothers on transistor radios. Better to get some air by the sea than to get swallowed up by the beastly heat in the old synagogues.
Shavuot meant the way out, rather than the way in. Standing on Sinai in the mid-twentieth century, Moses would be disappointed when he’d come down. There would be few hangers on by the time we were in the thick of the sixties. When I somehow landed at a Jewish summer camp in 1963, I learned about the Torah portion dedicated to a foreign sorcerer who attempted to curse the Israelites in the desert, and instead ended up intoning Mah Tovu. I had never heard of Balaam, and the Hebrew School principal turned head counselor momentarily charmed me with this July lullaby. It would be a whole three years later, until I read passages from Elie Wiesel’s Night, and endured for the very first time the poignant communal mourning of millions hitherto unspoken of. A year later, during the summer of love, we all thought we saw a cameo appearance of the Holy One. That’s when our quaking for encircled Jerusalem turned into a liberation we cast in biblical terms. Summertime, until now the lacuna in a truncated American Jewish experience, redeemed the embers of a fire that had all but gone out.
There were the moods of summer too, the heartbreaks, the sizzling asphalt that gave rise to hallucinatory wiggles in the lower atmosphere and made teenagers wonder. We read Kerouac and Camus and fancied ourselves as potential solitary victims, alternately, heroes. We watched the film Z, we sang along to the theme song of Easy Rider. There were a host of chemical inducements to pry open the gap between the rest of the year when we were ostensibly geared to achievement and the hypocrisies and corruptions we perceived on the other side of the time off we called vacation. The life we had been assured was a good one seemed vacant.
All along we learned what we could about love. We now admit that men and women love differently, or at least, asymmetrically, but who knew these things then? This meant that I had to find out what I could away from home, unloved unconditionally, or loved on condition that each of us, apart and together, might construct a path out of the desert towards truth-telling. In this sense, the summer went on for years. The Torah being given in slow motion… Years later, a teacher myself, I began to take up the challenge of this patient time, in terms of the catch-phrase from Song of Songs: “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.” I became familiar with the tradition that the initials of these words spell out the name of the summer month in the Jewish calendar that precedes Rosh Hashanah. In spiritual terms, I fathomed that recognizing one’s solitude and inevitable sadness, coming to terms with our limits and our lies, can be viewed as a way forward too. For it’s only this kind of awareness that can ultimately serve us.
If we are to plant on feet on the ground and hear the divine voice, it must come about as a result of some legitimate grieving. All those years of growing up and coming forth from a land where everything was a given, required an ecstatic level of being the truth. The summer’s heat can hold us to account. I wouldn’t have it any other way.