The FOURTH Community Moral Minyan is scheduled for Sunday, October 14, at 4:30 pm outside the ICE Detention Center in Aurora.

The idea of beginning these Moral Minyanim began on a Shabbat afternoon in the summer when Bonai’s Rabbi Marc Soloway introduced two congregants during the Kiddush lunch. The congregants (one an attorney and the other a pediatrician) had both been expressing to Rabbi Marc their desperation to do something to speak out against what was then the beginning of the unconscionable government policy of separating refugee children from their parents at our southern borders. Both congregants worked professionally in fields relating to child protection and both (not coincidentally) were grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

We have had three successful minyanim on weekday afternoons and braved rush hour traffic to participate but now are moving our event to a Sunday afternoon in an attempt to encourage even greater participation.

We will pray, sing, sound the Shofar and share thoughts in a gathering of our Jewish community and friends. There will be carpooling from the Boulder JCC parking lot at 3:00 pm.

We are continuing with Moral Minyan 4 because as Dr. Naomi Feinman recently put it “nearly 500 children are still separated from their families and it is not clear when or whether they will ever be reunited with their families.” We want to show that these children have not been forgotten. Or, as Bonai member Rhonda Horwitz Romano put it after participating in all three of the first moral minyanim “We must continue to speak out and act out and do everything we can to reunite families in a peaceful world.”

As I see it, we have to do something in the face of a continuing horror that is happening in our name. We have to stand up as Jews who believe in social justice.   We have to stand up as children and grandchildren of refugees and Holocaust survivors and say “not in our name.”

We will be joined at Moral Minyan 4 by Rabbi Rachel Kobrin of Congregation Rodef Shalom in Denver and Morgan Caroll, Chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, and a former Colorado State Senate Majority Leader. Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, the founding Rabbi of Congregation Nevei Kodesh in Boulder, will lead the service. The event is co-sponsored by Bend the Arc.

I am writing to ask you to join us in making this our biggest event yet. Please share this information with your own group of ten friends and try to bring a full car to the event. Please print 25 copies of the attached poster and hand them out to your neighbors and friends. Please join us at Moral Minyan 4. ICE DETENTION CENTER. Sunday, October 14, 2018, at 4:30 pm.

For more information and to see video of  our past events please join the Facebook group Moral Minyan Colorado https://www.facebook.com/groups/237362573573815/?ref=br_rs