prismatic-bell:

See this building?

Beautiful, isn’t it?

About two thousand families attend temple in this building, including mine. My nieces go to school here. It’s a gorgeous building containing two sanctuaries, a smaller chapel, a preschool-to-grade-5 school with one of the best curricula in the country, and a museum of old Jewish religious artifacts. In fact it’s the largest Conservative Jewish temple in the United States.

It’s in Houston.

(Yes, this is going exactly where you think it’s going.)

It’s currently not inhabitable. I haven’t been able to find a photo of the inside of the building, but, uh.

That’s the cemetery right after the rain stopped, and four days after. Jewish headstones don’t go up until a year after burial, so all of the graves you’re looking at are more than a year old. None of that is raw earth. It’s all water.

If you don’t know this: the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, is on 30 September. One of the holiest, Rosh Hashanah, is on the 21st. So to translate: Christians, assume your church was royally flooded out two weeks before Easter. Muslims, imagine your mosque is destroyed by a massive natural disaster right before Ramadan. You can quickly see why this is a HUGE double blow–and to make it a threepeat offender, the two parts of Houston that flooded the worst were majority-Jewish communities. Now not only is your home destroyed, but your home away from home is, too–and you need money to fix both.

A lot of synagogues in Phoenix, where I am living, have adopted “sister” synagogues in Houston to assist with rebuilding via fundraising efforts. I’ve been following the Phoenix Jewish News closely, but as of right now, Beth Yeshurun seems to be on its own.

So I’m turning to you.

Here is an official update from the temple, as of 30 August 2017, on damage sustained and estimated time of closure.

Here is their Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, with more information on what needs replaced.

This is a screenshot from my check-in conversation with my sister earlier this week. Please note this number is ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE DAY SCHOOL, not the temple itself:

So, yep.

PLEASE REBLOG. IF YOU CAN, PLEASE DONATE. Beth Yeshurun is a scholastic and spiritual home to over five thousand people, and they need our help.

@jewish-privilege, @shiraglassman, @returnofthejudai, @copperbadge, could I trouble the four of you to help get this moving?