ShalomCloud’s Solution for Synagogue Honors: Streamlining Aliyot and High Holiday Management

Managing ritual honors—from the weekly recitation of Yahrzeits to the complex assignment of Aliyot during the High Holy Days—is a core task for synagogue administrators. Based on features detailed on its blog, ShalomCloud provides dedicated software capabilities designed to streamline the entire process of organizing, assigning, and communicating these honors.

Here is an overview of what ShalomCloud offers in the way of Aliyot and High Holiday honors management.

Dedicated High Holiday Honors (Aliyot) Capability

ShalomCloud offers a specialized Aliyot/Honors capability built to handle the unique demands of the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur). This feature significantly simplifies the annual preparation cycle for these sacred days:

• Year-to-Year Setup Convenience: A key feature allows administrators to copy honors records from a prior year into the current year. This is a crucial time-saver, enabling staff to quickly set the foundation for the upcoming holidays. Users can choose to copy both the honors (e.g., Erev Rosh Hashanah, Kol Nidre service titles) and the honorees, or copy only the honors structure and start fresh with nominations.
• The Full Honors Round Trip: The platform supports the entire workflow for assigning honors, including:
  • Setting up the specific honors and services.
  • Offering or nominating congregants for each honor.
  • Managing follow-up communications for those who have not yet responded to an honor request.
  • Sending reminders for accepted honors to ensure honorees are prepared for their service time.

  

The Bimah List: Streamlining Weekly Yahrzeit Honors

Beyond the High Holidays, ShalomCloud’s system addresses the ongoing need for managing weekly Torah and remembrance honors through its Bimah List functionality. This feature focuses on generating ready-made, customizable lists of Yahrzeits to be read from the Bimah during Shabbat or daily services.

• Ready-Made Lists: The software is designed to produce a list explicitly formatted and ready to be read from the Bimah, saving staff the time typically spent manually compiling and formatting these weekly announcements.
• Customizable Grouping: When generating the list, users have options to:
  • Sort by Hebrew date or Gregorian date.
  • Filter by Yahrzeit date range.
  • Group the list by day or by week, depending on the frequency of the congregation’s services (e.g., daily Minyan vs. weekly Shabbat services).
  • Include or exclude the relationship of the observer to the deceased on the final printed list.

Consolidated Bimah List: Handling Mixed Date Practices

To serve congregations with varied memorial practices, ShalomCloud introduced the Consolidated Bimah List feature. This enhancement addresses the challenge of managing members who track Yahrzeits using either the Hebrew date or the Gregorian date.

• Combination Functionality: The system features a “Combination Bimah List” button that merges the Hebrew date lines with the Gregorian date lines, yielding one, unified list.
• Flexible Sorting: This combined list can be optionally sorted by the dates the Yahrzeits occur, ensuring a coherent and ritual-appropriate sequence of names for the observer reading.

By integrating these features, ShalomCloud centralizes the critical tasks of ritual and honor management, allowing synagogue staff to focus on the congregational experience rather than manual data compilation and communication.