Congregation Tikvoh Chadoshoh

• President --  Jonathan Tress
• Vice President --  Julie Shifreen
• Recording Secretary --  Judith Hauth
• Finance Director --  Cheryl Wolmer
• Ritual Director --  Jonathan Israel
• Education Director --  Debra Polun
• Membership Director --  Julie Shifreen
• House Director --  Kevin O'Connell
• Social Action Director --  Bob Fishman
• Director of Ways and Means --  Marc Kotler

Rabbi Stephen Landau received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew College Rabbinical School in Boston. Founded by Rabbi Arthur Green as an intentionally non-affiliated, transdenominational rabbinical seminary, the school's intensely spiritual and radically diverse environment was a perfect complement to Rabbi Landau's own lifetime commitment to cross-culturalism and the spiritual life. His teachers hailed from across the spectrum of Jewish life in North America and every denominational affiliation, and included established luminaries such as Arthur Green, David Gordis, Judith Kates and Nehemia Polen, as well as Ebn Leader, Or N. Rose, Jane Kanarek and Jonah Steinberg. Often teaching from the mystical tradition, Rabbi Landau seeks to impart appreciation for Jewish diversity and authenticity in our prayer life, and has enlivened our davening with new melodies from the Ladino and Chasidic traditions. He has served Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and unaffiliated congregations, as well as the innovative liberal mikvah and education center, Mayyim Hayyim, in Boston. Rabbi Landau is helping to lead Tikvoh's current project of synagogue renewal and is bringing post-bnai mitzvah teens into the on-going practice of chanting Torah on shabbat. A westerner originally from Dallas, Texas, Rabbi Landau lived, learned and played for 20 years in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico before relocating to the Northeast.

Click here for Ledger article on Rabbi Landau. Click here for article on Rabbi Landau and Hebrew College Rabbinical School.

In 1938, in the wake of Kristallnacht, our congregation's founding families fled Germany to the Hartford area and, in a spirit of "new hope," organized as Congregation Tikvoh Chadoshoh in 1942. A successful non-affiliated, independent synagogue for most of its first five decades, Tikvoh was ably led by its beloved patriarch, Rabbi Bodenheimer, for fifty-four years. A small and personal, Independent Conservative shul, Tikvoh retains classic elements of old-world traditional practice, and incorporates the new in a fresh way.