At our Sunday morning minyan, led by Men’s Club, and breakfast, prepared by Men’s Club, several of our regulars are children who come every week with their fathers. Mothers bringing their children for bar/bat mitzvah instruction and women who arrive early for meetings know they’re welcome to join us while they wait. On Mother’s Day we encourage the women of the congregation to be our guests of honor, and join their husbands and children for breakfast.

We erect the sukkah every year, dress the torahs in their high-holiday finery, and serve as ushers at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services.

We present siddurim to each bar and bat mitzvah and distribute Yom Hashoah candles. When it was time to replace the congregation’s worn-out weekday siddurim we provided the new prayer books.

Nothing brings the community together like food, and Men’s Club’s two international family dinners each year offer creative cuisine at bargain prices. Our Pasta Fa Shul spaghetti dinners and Cinco de Mayo Mexican dinners are popular institutions in the Old Bridge Jewish community. The preludes to our first meeting of the year and to annual elections are barbecues.

Each year on graduation day at Old Bridge High School the winner of our Scholarship Essay Competition is announced. Men’s Club awards a $300 cash prize for the best essay, written on a topic selected by Men’s Club, submitted by a graduating senior who is a member of our Beth Ohr family.

Men’s Club is not a fund-raising organization but, when we have a surplus, we are happy to apply it to meeting the needs of the congregation. The tie between Men’s Club and Congregation is a close one; so close that the most recent three Men’s Club presidents have also served as Congregation President.

Our organization is affiliated with the Northern New Jersey Region of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs.

For further information about Men’s Club please contact Allen Appel, via e-mail at AllenAppel@aol.com.

Men’s Club Prepares Commemorative Collector’s Issue

The Beth Ohr Men’s Club has prepared and sent to every member commemorative First Day Covers of two U.S. postage stamps – The 1999 Chanukah stamp and the 2001 Thanksgiving Day stamp.

A first day cover is a special envelope with artwork describing the stamp that is mailed on the first day a new stamp is issued. Philatelists worldwide collect these issues. The design on the envelope is referred to as a cachet.

Ed Mendlowitz, an award winning collector of first day covers and a renowned publisher of such items since 1958, initiated the project. The artist designing the unique cachet was Seymour Nussenbaum. Seymour is well known in the first day cover field and has one of the largest collections of Judaica. Many of our members asked Seymour to autograph their covers for their collection.

The covers were sent with the compliments of The Men’s Club with a request that if the member was not a stamp collector they should give it to someone they knew who was a collector.