The GAYLE A. HOOVER MEMORIAL FUND FOR ADULT LEARNING provides a model for delivering quality programming to small and medium-sized congregations throughout North America. Its “test case” is Canada’s 30,000+ Reform Jews, spread across the continent, some of them in remote areas with no synagogue to serve them. The fund creates a national faculty of rabbis, cantors, chefs, artists, and professors of Jewish Studies from across Canada; and a Zoom platform by which a diverse and intensive set of classes and programs can be offered from coast to coast — not just to synagogues, but even to out-of-the-way Jewish communities where no synagogue yet exists. In this way, anyone in Canada can learn from experts they might otherwise never encounter.
The fund will also mount an annual weekend retreat for members of participating communities to meet one another in person, thereby creating a “community of communities” that directly addresses the sense of Jewish isolation that is so much a part of small community life.
The program has been enthusiastically welcomed by rabbis and officially adopted by the Reform Jewish Community of Canada, the Canadian arm of the Union for Reform Judaism. Once up and running, the Canadian “model” will be replicable anywhere in the world.
The fund was named for Gayle A. Hoover, whose Judaism was shaped in a small Jewish community in Canada; and designed in large part by her widower, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, who knows what a gift a program like this can be, and who wishes Gayle could have lived to see it.
Your support honors Gayle’s memory and Larry’s vision; and demonstrates a commitment to North American Judaism.
To contribute:
