Tonight at 8.30pm, the Barkai Award ceremony will be carried live on Arutz Sheva by special broadcast.
Following hundreds of inquiries and recommendations that reached the Barkai Rabbis Organizatiojn, the prestigious Barkai Award Ceremony will be held this evening (Monday, 20:30). This year the award focuses on community initiatives and activities during the coronavirus crisis.
Due to Health Ministry restrictions, the event planned to be held by the Barkai Organization has been canceled, and instead this evening the special program will be broadcast at 20:30 on the Arutz Sheva website, in which the names of the Barkai Award winners will be broadcast. The event will also include the graduation ceremony of the fourth cycle of the rabbinical training program that the organization leads.
Barkai rabbis undergo training of over 600 hours spread over two years of study, and include classes in halakhic subjects as well as in social and community areas. This, so that the rabbis who participate in the program can be more supportive and attentive to their community's needs. In addition, seminars and mini-courses in the organization are also given to the rabbis' wives who fully participate in the work.
Barkai was founded more than eight years ago and comprises 75 communities spread throughout the country, alongside hundreds of Jewish communities throughout the world. The organization believes that the communities in Israel can be structured differently in order to grow and become a focus of resilience, support, and renewal.
Barkai Chief Rabbi David Fine: "We need rabbis, gabbais, and other people to make the synagogues better. This is our goal in the Barkai organization to make communities more caring, more supportive, and better."
His colleague, Rabbi Shlomo Sobol, adds: "While we wanted to give the awards in as grand a ceremony as ever, we're glad we didn't give up and found another suitable alternative so that we can still hold the event and honor the award winners as well as the rabbis who have completed our training program."