Sure. It's nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Around the turn of the century, maybe 1889 or 1898, 1899 families from two small towns in Lithuania, um found themselves or came to Bellingham, Washington, a small city in the very upper northwest corner of the United States. Probably to escape persecution in Lithuania and to take advantage of the Klondike Gold Rush, which was occurring at that time. So Bellingham was a booming, booming community, on the route to Alaska. And these were Orthodox Jews. And there were not very many of them. And they were really the first Jews, probably in Bellingham. A few years later, families from Germany also arrived in Bellingham, and also Orthodox, but practicing a different kind of Judaism probably than the Lithuanian Jews. But they were the only Jews in town. So they got together and they started to have services. Eventually, the families grew, more Jews arrived, and they became more organized in their services around I think 1906, 1910, they actually sort of formalized the relationship. They rented a space and Congregation Beth Israel came into being eventually. And then they would have, like, itinerant rabbis would just sort of come through town and they would take advantage of that. And eventually, they bought a building on Broadway Street in Bellingham, and that became our home for Congregation Beth Israel. And families continued to grow. We would get a permanent rabbi. Then the depression hit, and Bellingham was hit hard by the depression. Families left. Jewish activity dwindled, and in the 1950s, families started to go into Bellingham again. The congregation grew, and a cantor from Vancouver, British Columbia, came down and essentially became a rabbi for like 30 years. And that was Rabbi Fred Gardner, and to make a long story short, more and more Jews arrived in Bellingham. We definitely outgrew the small shul on Broadway Street, and plans were devised to create a new synagogue and a new campus. We grew from a congregation of 60 families, and now we have a congregation of over 250 Family units, which is pretty incredible, and so three years ago, about three years ago, we moved into a brand new synagogue. It's on a campus with acreage, and it's really quite fabulous. And it was an amazing event that accomplishment for a community of our size, thanks to very generous individual donors and a lot of hard work and planning. Anyhow, so that's the story of how we came to be where we are. I just want to emphasize that our community really is the only show in town. We have a variety of different types of practicing Jewish people. We were originally Orthodox. Finally, Rabbi Gardner said to the women up on the balcony to come on down to the main floor. And so our practice became more conservative, but really the practice that we and we never, uh, are formally affiliated with the conservative movement and the practice of the vast majority of the Jews in Skagit and Whatcom County who attend Congregation Beth Israel is Reform. And the congregation came to grips with that when we needed to find a new rabbi, when we, formally affiliated with the Reform Movement and had the assistance of the Reform Movement to find us our current rabbi, Rabbi Samuels, who has just been fabulous. So we believe that the reform, our reform practice, can encompass everybody's ritual practice, we have a conservative minyan on Saturday mornings and most of our services are conducted in Hebrew, and so our inclusiveness is really the foundation stone of our congregation.
