Hi, everyone. 

I write to share with you a “Summer Update” as Young Israel of Orange County moves into the post-July 4 period, into The Nine Days of Av, and, with G-d’s help, onto great new things.

Here is what seems to have happened.

We seem to have “found our voice,” our unique identity and purpose, as we now have entered our third year.  Shul life is deeply exciting, as we welcome into our congregational community new people, one by one. Really exciting people, idealistic, brimming with a love of Judaism and eagerness to grow in Torah, in davening knowledge, in Jewish identity.  We have emerged uniquely as a “Boutique Shul,” capable of acting rapidly and meaningfully to shape and serve the unique spiritual needs and quests of each new individual or family who comes into our lives.  As a smaller, more intimate congregational community, we can more readily personalize the “fit” because of the way our congregation has coalesced as a loving, accepting, and  welcoming community of families and individuals.

When we began a bit more than two years ago, several people joined together for several reasons in founding our shul.  Many of those reasons, but not all, were compatible.  That is how shuls get founded. It was a moment of flurried activity and emotion.  Some joined for Reason “A” and some for Reason “B.” For some, it was personal, and for others it was ideological or spiritual. Irvine is a city with Jewish memories.  And so we 60 families and households began our journey.  With a smile and a prayer.

We were not certain where we would daven, where we would land.  Would we buy a building, or maybe invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a construction effort?  Would we be at a community room, rent space at a medical office?  As with Parshat Mas’ei, we traveled.  Oh, boy, did we travel!  We were in the Rancho San Joaquin Community Room, with the sweet percussion of the treadmill in the adjacent gym, and then their management changed their business plan and vision of a Community Room, so we moved to the Legacy Vista Verde School.  That facility offered us some real pluses, but also posed some real challenges – like, when the maintenance crew forgot that, “Oh yeah, you guys rent it on Friday nights, too!  Oh, yeah.” Or . . .  “What?  Today is Yom Kippur? Aw, Geez! We thought it was next week! Uh, we'll have someone there in less than an hour or two to open up.  Geez! It's this week!”

We tried other community rooms. And then, eighteen months ago, we found the Back Bay Conference Center, refurbished and beautified atop Irvine Lanes. On the one hand, it was “the gorgeous conference center above the bowling alley” – and, yet, having been transformed into a beautiful center, it conveyed anything but a bowling alley – even though it proved right up our alley and afforded us a place to daven that is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. . . .

We had no Torah.  And then the Schlosberg Family brought a Torah into our world.  And thereafter the Sebag Family.  And a third wonderful and kind source provided us a third Torah on long-term loan for those special Three-Torah Shabbatot.  And my family brought a fourth Torah into the community, in memory of my Mom and Dad – my Mom having lived long enough to see and celebrate our shul’s successful emergence from what had been.

We had to buy Siddur and Chumash books and chairs and tallitot (“talleisim”) and all the things that a shul needs.  Soon we had everything – everything – but we also had an imposing $63,000 one-time start-up debt that we had to overcome.  And – maybe the most amazing part of our first two years – our "Little Shul That Could" raised the $63,000 in eight months and retired that debt.  Pffft! With lots of contributions, including some particularly kind private donations, given by some of our community’s many kind-hearted and generous souls, our shul closed its second year debt-free.  And, hey, this has been happening during a recession that is forcing other temples to close and to merge! 

So what has been and is our secret, as our initial congregational community of 60 households slowly has grown to more than 80 engaged and supportive households in a bit more than two years?

I think a major part of it has been that we have actualized our dream of a spiritual haven, free from the bane of "shul politics" and all the "political intrigue" that cause people to recoil from "organized religion." We not only have committed publicly to end a tradition in Irvine Orthodoxy of mixing a House of G-d with a sociological turmoil center, but we have lived that commitment for real. We comfortably share balabatim with the other shuls and temples: someone davens there at one service, at us on another few services, and alternates openly, understanding that Irvine slowly is becoming – normal.  We now are a Three-Shul Town. Just like Orthodox communities everywhere else, where rabbis of one shul are not afraid to be seen in public with rabbis of another, where people of different shuls dance together at weddings, and – one day in the future – when a Shavuot evening will be comprised of a community-wide event at which shiurim will be offered, ad seriatim, under one roof by rabbonim of all the shuls in town, neither frightened by “turf” nor by laity who define their Judaism by “turf.”

For Torah Jews who define their religious identities by their love of G-d and fealty to the Torah, the only "turf" that matters is the Land of Eretz Israel.

So, with the founding and growth of Young Israel of Orange County,  life has become healthier for us, all of us, in Jewish Irvine and Jewish O.C.  Even as we at YIOC have begun to grow in an interesting, even fascinating way.  We have emerged, it turns out, as a “Boutique Shul.”  Go figure – a Boutique Shul.

Have you ever gone to a doctor who has a “boutique” medical practice?  She has fewer patients, but gives more time and attention to each one?  Or to a “boutique” law firm?  They may not be worldwide famous, like the ones where I had practiced, but you know you get the partner’s attention and not relegated to some junior associate who is here today, gone tomorrow.  Well, that is what we have become.

The Boutique Orthodox Shul of Orange County.

Even as the numbers of families and households in our congregational community compare favorably, after only two years, with the membership numbers that our sister Orthodox shuls of Irvine have aggregated respectively over each of their 20-plus years – may we all succeed and continue growing! – and even though we have no building,  enjoying only two years of what Corporate America calls “corporate goodwill,”  we somehow seem to have accumulated enormous oodles of another kind of good will – a will that is good.  Word spreads.  By mouth.  By phone. By texting.  By internet. Word spreads.

As we entered into our second year we were making minyan dependably on Friday nights and Shabbat mornings. This year we have expanded into Shabbat afternoons and Sunday mornings. Our minyanim ("minyans") have been augmented by newcomers who have seen what YIOC is, who we are, what we stand for, and how a person feels after spending time with us. No one in our shul ever has a bad word to speak.  No arguments. No criticisms. Just a safe place, spiritually safe and welcoming, to grow Jewishly. It is an amazing thing. 

And that is a commitment we have kept to all of our families, all of our members and supporters and friends: we may not have a structural edifice of our own or the biggest membership roster, but we have the greatest, warmest concentration of wonderful people anywhere. A spiritual sanctuary.

At YIOC newcomers become engaged. Our Chumash/Rashi/Halakhah class has grown steadily . . . from four regulars to six to eight regulars to ten regulars . . . to the point that our class now attracts some 20 people every Tuesday night.  Imagine – twenty people learning real Torah, with m’forshim commentaries and hashkafah perspective, on a weeknight for more than ninety minutes every single week – in Orange County!  “The Real Housewives of Orange County”?  Howzabout “The Real Torah Students of Orange County”?  Likewise, our weekly Monday night Hebrew Reading and Siddur Navigation class is about to launch its Second Year.  And we have resumed Gemara every Shabbat afternoon.  

Our davening is robust; you just feel it. We have been joined by people whose Jewish affiliation is accelerating – people on a journey to grow, finding our Boutique Shul a wonderful venue for themselves to explore Torah Judaism at a pace they enjoy, personalized for them, with a Rav and Rebbetzin who could not be more thrilled to be serving people whose involvement can be measured by their passion and their kindness.  

YIOC has brought families together, parents and children who had not talked for years, siblings who were at internecine war. We have become an address for people who searched and explored one after another temple in Orange County but could not find quite-the-right fit.  Until they found us. We are “boutique” enough that we can personalize a “fit,” even as we are grounded in fundamental Orthodox halakhah and core Young Israel principles.

We find the most wonderful people -- because they find us, a shul with no building, no staff.  Yet, somehow, wonderful people keep finding us. We have reached and touched real Jews, talented and smart and fun and insightful, who have fallen between the cracks and below the radar of other temples of Orange County.  In many cases, they have gone to several such places first, before searching again, ultimately finding us at Young Israel.

We do not kid ourselves.  Our size is modest.  Yet we have become an incredibly important shul, a critical part of Irvine's and Orange County's religious Jewish landscape – not with a big structure, but fulfilling the spiritual aspirations and needs of a great many lives of really good people, people who work really hard for a living, people who care and have given all their young or full lives, but now come for a shul that can give them what they need for a shul ideally to offer them – a path to grow, a road back, a home and Jewish haven. 

With our shul having identified the people in our midst who are the kindest and most generous and capable donors, the kindest and most generous and capable daveners and minyan-goers, the kindest and most generous and capable volunteers, we count ourselves deeply blessed to have so many different heroes in our shul who each play their respective roles. Ellen and I look forward to another year of opening our Shabbat home for more Shabbat meals with more families and individuals. We look to opening our Friday evening home for Shabbat dinners in an even expanded way in the year to come, much as we plan expanding other aspects of  engaging our teens and younger kids in the coming year.

May we all remember Jerusalem and merit seeing the speedy rebuilding of Jerusalem, with the Temple restored on its proper site speedily in our days.  May we see the days of Jerusalem’s consolation speedily in our days.

 -- Rabbi Dov Fischer

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