Temple Isaiah

In a move threatening the vitality of the Howard County Jewish Community School, Temple Isaiah announced last week that it plans to breakaway to form its own school in September."

The Howard County Hadassah annual Dinner and Bingo Night will be held at 7 p.m. March 17 at Temple Isaiah, 12200 Scaggsville Road in Fulton. In addition to an Italian dinner, the event includes prizes and a silent auction. The cost is $30, $25 for members. For more information, call 301-854-0503.

A consultant for Temple Isaiah says the congregation wants to leave its 21-year-old home at the Meeting House interfaith center in east Columbia's Oakland Mills village.A monthlong survey of 180 congregants concluded there was a broad base of support to raise funds to build a new facility for the Reform congregation, which has about 450 families and roughly 1,100 members.Leaders at Temple Isaiah refused to comment on the results of the survey on the new temple, saying only that they were still in the planning stages.

Temple Isaiah, 12200 Scaggsville Road, Fulton, will commemorate Yom Hashoah, honoring the lives lost to the Holocaust, at 7:15 p.m. Monday. Steven Luckert, curator of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will speak. There will be a Holocaust artifact display provided by Howard County survivors and their families. Those who attend are invited to inscribe their thoughts and feelings in the diaries in the Temple Isaiah lobby. The program is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Howard County, Temple Isaiah, Shalom Aleichem, Oseh Shalom, Columbia Jewish Congregation, Calah Congregation, Beth Shalom, Bet Aviv and Ahavas Israel.

AN "AMERICAN Jewish Musical Odyssey" is coming soon to Columbia's Temple Isaiah.The evening gala March 21 at the Oakland Mills Meeting House begins with hors d'oeuvres at 7: 30 p.m. and a concert at 8: 45 p.m., followed by dessert and coffee.Clarinetist and east Columbia resident Eyal Bor, pianist Immanuela Gruenberg, guitarist (and Columbia resident) Bruce Casteel, bassist Michael Singer, and vocalist Brian Singer will perform classical, Israeli, American stage and Klezmer music.Klezmer music is "like your jazz," Bor says.

Temple Isaiah begins its four-part series of family programs Sunday, with "Search For God" at the Oakland Mills Meeting House, located in the Oakland Mills Village Center.Parents and students will study Jewish texts and topics and discuss Jewish values found in the Torah.Information: 730-8277*Planning for its spring 1994 performance of Mozart's "Solemn Vespers," the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia welcomes interested vocalists to rehearsals which begin Jan.6.Information: 381-0097 or 377-4910.

Congregants at Temple Isaiah have pledged $1.7 million over the next five years to establish a free-standing building and leave their longtime home at the Meeting House interfaith center in east Columbia's Oakland Mills village.For more than 20 years, the 1,100-member congregation has worshiped at the interfaith center, but it has outgrown the space.In February, the congregation hired a consultant to devise a plan to build a free-standing building or buy a building and renovate it. About 80 percent of the congregants voted to leave the interfaith center.

Like any good salesman, Shel Bassel presented his wares to a potential customer.From his bag he took parchment made from fetal calf skin, feather pens, black ink and samples of his work.Bassel impressed members of Columbia's Temple Isaiah, and it wasn't long before he had made another sale.The congregation hired him to write a new Torah scroll, a sacred, hand-written copy of the first five books of the Old Testament.Bassel is a sofer, the Hebrew word for scribe. Through his work he continues a tradition dating back over three thousand years.

For years, Temple Isaiah mastered the art of juggling. Based at the Oakland Mills Meeting House in Columbia, the temple has planned meetings around the schedules of five other congregations there, rented classrooms at Harper's Choice Middle School for its burgeoning religious school and, each week, set out religious objects before Sabbath services. But the hassles are about to end. Members of Columbia's largest Reform Jewish congregation will gather Sunday from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. at a former cornfield on a 22-acre site in Fulton for the groundbreaking for a temple of their own. Building will begin in mid-January, and the temple will be completed in about 15 months.

Temple Isaiah began in 1970, when the Jewish population of Howard County was almost nonexistent. The small congregation was composed of a few young Jews who first met in people's homes. "These Jews were the early pioneers," explains Mark Panoff, the head rabbi of the Columbia synagogue for the past 14 years. Temple Isaiah has come a long way from its early days of services conducted in the homes of its few congregants. Today, it is one of the largest Reform synagogues in the area, with 460 families, 500 children and more than 50 bar and bat mitzvahs a year.

Collecting bikes for the world The social ministry committee of First Evangelical Lutheran Church will collect used bicycles for Bikes for the World from 9 a.m. to noon May 10 on the church parking lot, 3604 Chatham Road, Ellicott City. The bicycles will be sent to people in need around the world. A $10 donation is requested for each bicycle to help with the cost of shipping. Adult and children's bicycles are welcome. Information: 410-465-2977. Beth Shalom to celebrate Israel Beth Shalom Congregation, 8070 Harriet Tubman Lane, Columbia, will hold a celebration after Shabbat services tomorrow in honor of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel.

A 400-year-old Torah, saved from the sands of Iraq, has found its way to a synagogue in western Howard County. The scroll of Hebrew scripture, containing the first five books of the Bible, was found by U.S. soldiers among the ruins of a synagogue in Mosul, Iraq. A Jewish expert in Torahs who leads a worldwide effort to rescue scrolls like this got it out of the country and repaired it. Now, that piece of history has landed in Fulton, housed in an ark at Temple Isaiah. The Reform congregation plans a year of educational events centered on this Torah and the Jews of Arab nations, beginning today with presentations by Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who is a sofer, someone trained in the transcription of Torahs.

Actor, psychologist and poet Michael Fowlin will present a one-man show, You Don't Know Me Until You Know Me, which deals with race, discrimination, violence, personal identity, suicide, gender equity, homophobia and the emotional pain felt by special-education children, at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Reservoir High School auditorium. Parents and students, grades six and older, are invited to the performance. Students must be accompanied by an adult. Information: http:--www.michaelfowlin.com.

Scores of people braved the rain Sunday for a Temple Isaiah "Site-A-Bration" to celebrate the temple's purchase in December of a 22-acre site on Scaggsville Road in southern Howard County. The land, a former strawberry farm, will become Temple Isaiah's campus for worship, learning and community activities. Ground-breaking is anticipated for spring 2002. The Reform Jewish congregation now worships at the Oakland Mills Meeting House in Columbia. Rabbi Mark Panoff emphasizes that the move out of the Meeting House is not a rejection of the Columbia interfaith concept, but a natural evolution.

Prize bundles will be awarded every 15 minutes at Temple Isaiah's first Family Fun Day on Sunday, but the biggest reward of all for participants may be the sense of community the event has fostered. Sponsored by Temple Isaiah Men's Club, the Temple Isaiah Family Fun Day walk/run at Centennial Park is part of an effort to raise funds for artwork for the congregation's soon-to-be built synagogue in southern Howard County. Temple Isaiah now meets at Oakland Mills Interfaith Center. "This is the first time, as I understand it, that the Men's Club of the temple has done anything like this," says Hank Eigles, the event chairman.