Dear Romemu Community,
You may have noticed more and more activity around our Romemu Center building, across the street from the West End Presbyterian Church. For good reason. Starting today, the Romemu Yeshiva and parts of our Shabbat programming will begin to take place in the new building and continue throughout the summer. In July, all are welcome to join the Yeshiva on Tuesday evenings from 7-9pm for “Open
Beit Midrash” and evening prayers, and on Wednesday mornings for prayer, meditation and learning from 7:30-9:30am. We'll also start having Friday night "
Oneg
Shabbat" celebrations and Saturday morning prayer services in the new building. Nota bien that Friday night services themselves will still be in the Church.
This is a “soft launch,” or “pre-game”, for moving into our new space. As I reported in my last communication, we’re planning a modest renovation in the fall before fully moving all our programs and offices into the building by January 2020. The Romemu Campus Steering Committee, under the leadership of Board Members Robin Bernstein, Hali Weiss and Allegra Kochman, is still finalizing the specs for the renovation, discussing some options with the contractor, and thinking through IT, security, community relations and other issues while we work to complete the financing required to begin the work in the September timeframe.
In the meantime, Romemu staff members Rachel Colberg-Parseghian and Sarah Chandler have done a hero’s job of installing basic security features, WIFI, A/C, cleaning, decorating and temporarily furnishing the rooms needed in the Romemu Center for participants to feel at home and comfortable for the summer.
We hope you will take the chance to join us in this pre-renovation phase in the life of our new building. We’d also like to share the excitement as we move forward, so if you have some skills with a camera and would be willing to volunteer to shoot and edit some footage to document our progress,
please let me know.
Hope to see you at Romemu this summer – now appearing on both sides of West 105th street at Amsterdam!
With blessings,
