Palm Beach houses of worship find social media a blessing
By MICHELE DARGAN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, March 10, 2012
 |
...The Orthodox congregations of the Palm Beach Synagogue and Chabad of Northern Palm Beach Island use multiple forms of electronic media to spread the word about their synagogues...
Sites must be up-to-date
Rebbetzin Hindel Levitin of Chabad of Northern Palm Beach Island, said a comprehensive website is a must, particularly being a member of the global Chabad organization and being linked to that site.
“If vacationers are looking for Shabbat services and our website is outdated, they’re just going to move on,” Levitin said.
The Chabad uses Meetup.com, eblasts and Facebook, Levitin said.
“The advantage of Facebook is that other people are promoting your events for you,” Levitin said. “They discuss it among themselves and pass it on to their friends. If you want to draw a young crowd, which we all do, then you have to be on Facebook. It would be nicer if we didn’t have to spend so much time keeping our online presence updated, but the reality is we live in this time. If our website isn’t updated, it’s almost like being nonexistent.”
Chabads ‘embrace’ net
“Chabads have been progressive with use of the Internet in trying to get secular Jews back to the religious lifestyle,” said Heidi Campbell, assistant professor of communications at Texas A&M University. “Since the mid-1990s, Chabads have embraced the Internet because they see it as an outreach to the community.”
Campbell has studied religion and the Internet and the impact new media technologies are having on religious communities since 1997. Campbell is the author of the 2010 book When Religion Meets New Media.
“Religious communities are seeing the importance of an online presence as a way to stay relevant, realizing that people do their information seeking about a lot of things, and especially religion, online,” Campbell said. “The second reason they need to have an online presence is they see the importance of being able to engage with digital culture in order to make their spiritual life as part of their 24/7 life. Religious organizations are understanding that, in a digital world, their devices are a way to bring the important aspect of their life, especially their spiritual lives, into people’s everyday experience...”