Welcome to Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives

B’rukhim ha-baim!  Welcome to Kolot Chayeinu’s website!  Kolot Chayeinu is a community that grew from a home-based havurah with a dream of a cafe for conversation, learning, and even prayer and this website is our modern-day cafe.  We are vibrant and growing community totaling upwards of 700 children and adults from all over Brooklyn; we gather in Park Slope for worship, holiday celebrations, adult learning and our Children's Learning Program and build community across Brooklyn!  As our mission statement says, we are curious seekers, and we are excited that throughthis new website -- our virtual Mishkan -- we are now able to offer new value to our members and introductions to first time visitors.  

Here you will find information of all kinds: on our services, adult classes, social justice work, our staff, our Children's Learning Program, opportunities to volunteer or donate, membership info, our mission statement, and more.  We have divrei Torah from clergy and members,  stories, poems and blessings from our storytellers,  links of interest in the Jewish and larger worlds, and soon we hope to have music from our Cantor.  The site is a work in process, as it always should be.

Jonathan Rosen, in The Talmud and the Internet, wrote, “I have often thought, contemplating a page of Talmud, that it bears a certain uncanny resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations.”

I hope that the doorway into this new site will enable you to pass into, if not an infinity, a treasure trove of text and conversation.  Come on in, grab a chair, enter the discussion.

 ---Rabbi Ellen Lippmann