Dear Friends:

As you and your loved ones gather at Passover to celebrate our people’s survival and the blessings of freedom, our first-year students are in the Former Soviet Union, where they are touching the lives of Jews of all generations.

For the tenth consecutive year, our students are conducting seders and teaching throughout Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, in partnership with the World Union for Progressive Judaism. They are ensuring that a vibrant Judaism takes hold where generations were once deprived of their Jewish heritage.

These future leaders of the Reform Movement will be bringing their experiences to your community next year, when they serve student pulpits and internships throughout North America. The stories of their journey to the FSU will serve as a powerful reminder of the Haggadah’s abiding message: in each generation, one must see oneself as having come out of Egypt.

The survival of Jewish identity, faith, ethics, and culture in our own time depends on the emerging leaders we are educating at the College-Institute.

Thank you for supporting their studies and helping them realize our shared hopes for the future.

With heartfelt wishes for a Pesach blessed with joy and peace,

Rabbi David Ellenson, Ph.D.,
President

Irwin Engelman,
Chairman, HUC-JIR Board of Governors

We invite you to learn more about our rabbinical, cantorial, education, Jewish nonprofit management, and doctoral programs at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Please support our students by contributing to the 2011-12 Annual Fund Campaign by June 30.

Image from The Open Door: A Passover Haggadah, drawings by Ruth Weisberg, edited by Sue Levi Elwell, CCAR Press, 2002.