High Holy Days local news coverage: 2009.  2008.

Congregation Beth Shalom is a community synagogue, a pluralistic, inclusive, egalitarian, and unaffiliated blending of all of the Jewish movements.

Our members include Jews from throughout the area, including NIU students through NIU Hillel. Our 75 households include retailers, lawyers, professors, social workers, doctors, teachers and farmers.

The congregation appreciates everyone's strengths and talents and provides Sabbath and holiday services, religious school, bar and bat mitzvah training, adult education, a choir, social programs, and social-action programs. We do circumcisions, baby namings, weddings, and funerals.

We were members of UAHC, now URJ, the Reform movement, for 15 years until 15 years ago. We continue some Reform attitudes, such as encouraging the participation of interfaith families. We are now an unaffiliated "community synagogue."

Our services are in Hebrew and English, with transliterations and interpretive readings. Our Friday night siddur is from a Boston havurah. Our Saturday morning siddur combines sections taken from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist prayer books. Our High Holy Days mahzor is from the Conservative movement.

We have conducted services and activities in DeKalb and Sycamore since the 1920s, many in the last 60 years in cooperation with the Hillel student group at Northern Illinois University. We share our building, the Northern Illinois Jewish Community Center, with NIU Hillel.

Our dues, which include the High Holy Days, are on a sliding scale based on household income, with an allowance for a token payment, ranging from $260 to $1,200. There is no building fund. Non-student non-members attending the High Holy Days are asked to contribute -- in muliples of chai -- say $36, $54, $72, or $90 each.