During the High Holidays, I asked each and every one of you to take a pledge card, and to make a commitment to Temple Israel.
I did so because our reality today looks much different than it has in past years.
Our dues and membership levels only cover 26.6% of our operating budget.
We have an Endowment Account, but we are only permitted to use 4% of a 3 year average of a handful of them for expenses. That comes out to about 12.5% of our annual budget.
We have a Cemetery Fund, but it was set up pursuant to a Trust decades ago for the perpetual care of the cemeteries under Temple Israel’s control. We cannot use it for any other purpose. Cleaning the headstones, which we did a few years ago, and removing fallen trees and branches due to storm damage, are where some of these funds go.
We have an Operating Account, and that’s what the Temple draws from to make up the remaining 60.9, or 61%, of the budget.
However, we cannot continue to do that indefinitely without other unwanted outcomes. Namely: depleting our Operating Account.
Quite simply, today’s expenses are outpacing our revenue.
Just security alone, which we must have, is slowly becoming a bigger piece of our budget.
Each day we are in services, we have police protection. We increase it for special events, but we have at least one officer every Shabbat. Look no further than the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh in 2018 which claimed the lives of 11 people one Shabbat morning, or to the shooing that happened Yom Kippur Day outside a Canadian Synagogue in Ontario to see why this expense, which we have not passed on to you, is necessary.
The Board of Trustees is doing its part by looking at ways to decrease our expenses and increase our revenue.
But we cannot do it alone.
We need all of you to help us keep this Synagogue going.
We want to be able to provide the same level of services and programs every day, not just for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
We are here every Shabbat, and we’d like it to stay that way.
If you want future generations to have a place at Temple Israel, we need to act now.
Together, we will keep Temple Israel alive and financially well for generations to come.
