Mission & Vision
Temple Beth-El is a Center for Jewish Living for its members and for the general community.
About
With 400 member units, we are:
- Leaders in our movement with innovative and enriching programming and worship
- Professionally staffed to meet the spiritual, pastoral, and educational needs of every segment of the membership.
- A thriving, active, egalitarian Conservative Jewish community.
- Socially responsible through a broad range of programs and through fair and honest management of our internal business affairs.
- Fiscally responsible.
- Focused on Chesed, lovingkindness, to our members and to our community through programs and services that connect the congregation to its members who may no longer be able to leave their homes often or without assistance.
- Focused on developing leaders within our membership to sustain the congregation through each generation.
- Supported and protected financially by the Temple Beth-El Foundation, whose Board of Directors actively works to strengthen the congregation’s endowment.
- Housed in an historic and inspirational facility that has adapted to our changing needs.
- Dedicated to a rolling strategic annually-reviewed long-range planning process to ensure a second century as robust as the first.
Temple Beth-El History
Founded in Birmingham in December of 1907 as Congregation Beth-El and originally housed on the North Side of Birmingham, Temple Beth-El has grown in strength and spirit for a century, each generation not only nurturing its own needs but providing careful stewardship to carry Beth-El forward into the hands of those of us who would one day make Temple Beth-El our synagogue home.
For generations of Jews in the South, Temple Beth-El has provided a home. Through the Great Depression, World Wars, Birmingham’s civil rights struggles, and the founding of the State of Israel, Temple Beth-El’s members stood together and experienced history and life as a community.
Today, Temple Beth-El, housed in its historic 1926 Highland Avenue facility, provides a spiritual, social and educational center for its congregants and for the Jewish community. The congregation works to create a vibrant, warm, caring community within itself and reaches out in partnership with the broader community of which we are a part. Investing in outstanding staff and updated facilities to support this vision, our congregation strives to be socially responsible and fiscally sound.
As a congregation, we are blessed with dynamic clergy as well as committed professional staff and lay leadership. Many visitors to our community say that our congregation and our building emanate a friendly and welcoming environment. And many people share with us that our congregation feels warm, our worship engaging, and our programming meaningful, and our building’s exterior as well as its sanctuaries and meeting spaces inspirational. Our educational opportunities for adults continue to grow in variety and in participation, and our children have brought us tremendous naches as they are reading Torah and participating in our minyan and in Shabbat services at the highest level.