From November, 2018 till the beginning of 2024, I did the weekly newsletter for Golf Manor Synagogue (“GMS”). The design took its cues from the existing newsletter, as well as the typography in its long-standing logo. I added a simple drawing of the stained-glass ner tamid from the synagogue’s main sanctuary as a structural element. Here are an image of the Bulletin’s previous design and three examples of the redesigned newsletter.
Years ago, a friend and former coworker started agitating for a locally produced parasha sheet – a weekly, one- or two-page publication with insights into the weekly Torah reading and religious holidays. The Kollel wasn’t ready to take the project on, so he arranged for a local synagogue to distribute it. I was already producing the synagogue’s newsletter, and I ended up also doing “CZE Torah,” as it was called, in my “spare” time – which was barely enough for me to scan the material for glaring typos.
At the beginning of 2013, the parasha sheet finally became a Kollel project. It was renamed Cincinnati Torah, aka Torah miCincy (a Hebrew pun). The weekly was also given an additional raison d’être: coverage of the Kollel’s activities and programming. The quality of the layout improved, and I started editing the content in earnest. I was able to make more contributions as a writer now, which I enjoyed, but the tradeoff was that I also ended up becoming the guy who had to ask other people to write pieces for the sheet.
In 2016, the Kollel expanded both its staff and its programming. The parasha sheet got a minor facelift, and Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Crystal took over as what I call “Contributing Managing Editor,” overseeing the creation of more varied content and soliciting contributions (written contributions, that is; another staff member took charge of finding sponsors). I continued in my role as “Contributing Production Editor,” doing the design and layout, editing the content, and writing the occasional piece, until April, 2018, shortly after I left my post at the Kollel .
There’s an archive of several years’ worth of parasha sheets at cincykollel.org, but here are several issues from the most recent iteration of the parasha sheet, including three for which I did some of the writing.
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Here are three earlier issues with content I wrote.
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And, finally, here are some badges I created, to identify special or seasonal content that spanned a series of issues.
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From May, 2009, to April, 2017, I produced the weekly newsletter for Congregation Zichron Eliezer (“CZE,” the synagogue formerly known as Kneseth Israel, or “KI”). It was a labor of love – a weekly exercise in copy-fitting, copy-editing (I often joked that condensing everyone’s announcements to fit on the page was good training for a career on Twitter) and information presentation.
Here are four examples which show how the layout evolved over time. My primary goals were to make the most of the space on the page, and to make it easy for the reader to find the information he/she needed. The masthead and the schedule moved around a bit. The sponsorship panel and the section headings became more streamlined and clean. Classes which repeated every week, with little variation, were removed from the “Torah” announcement space and placed in their own sidebar. I added a 36-hour weather forecast to the footer. Weekly features, like the “Kovaya Makom” announcement, were added (and, in some cases, removed). At some point, the newsletter also expanded to two pages (one sheet, front and back).
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Here are some more sample issues, with special features, all from the last year I worked on the newsletter.
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And here are some holiday editions, with extended schedules and seasonal themes. The four Purim Editions were supplements to the regular newsletter. As you an see, the usual rules didn’t apply on Purim; I only wish I’d had some sulfated castor oil to sprinkle on the faux mimeographs, so they’d smell like the real thing!
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