Group Two: Judaism
Clarissa Baquiran, Paramjoat Singh, Michelle Martins
Our group has chosen the Temple Gates of Prayer congregation as our focus. We have had the opportunity to attend a few services so far and were even fortunate enough to be invited to attend a passover seder.
Our first experience at the temple was observing a 3 hour shabbat service. Afterwards we were able to meet with members of the congregation and got to get general feeling of what things were like in the congregation. We were also fortunate enough to sit down and talk to the cantor for a bit as well. He was very helpful in explaining many aspects of Judaism to us.
Our next visitation to the temple was for a passover service. This service was just as long as the shabbat service, but we were able to notice a few differences between the two services. After this service we were able to talk to members of the congregation once again and learn a bit more. We were extremely lucky and were invited over one of the members homes for a passover seder, this was an extremely rewarding experience since we were able to learn a lot more about judaism from Susan Smith (the women who invited us over). She was very open to answering any questions we had and sitting down and talking to her allowed us to learn a lot about what brought her to temple gates of prayer and what keeps her here even when the Jewish community in that area seems to be getting smaller than it was in the past.
The people at Temple Gates of Prayer have been very open to helping us and answering any of our questions and we plan on going back a few more times in the upcoming week to get the opportunity to observe a morning service and get to talk to even more members of the congregation.
temporary site plan (we may add a few more things):
-general information
-important people
-people we talked to
-events observed
-the greater community…how the temple fits in with the larger Flushing community
