For the second year running, the TI congregant has won the District 36 Toastmasters International Speech Evaluation Contest. His conquest of all comers took place in the district round of the organization's annual speech and evaluation competition May 21 at the Hilton in Silver Spring.

Jeff was judged the best evaluator out of about 875 competitors who began in this year's knockout series of competitions back in February. There are 175 Toastmaster clubs in the Washington district. This establishes him as the pre-eminent speech evaluator in the Washington area for 2006.

Interviewed afterwards, Jeff was very pleased with his performance.

A financial planner with Metlife Resources, Jeff and his four competitors, all of whom had won contests at clubs across the Washington region, were asked as part of the competition to publicly evaluate the speech of a woman of native American descent whose revisionist historical speech criticized Christopher Columbus. Jeff handled his praise of and criticism of the speech with respect and aplomb, according to John Melmed, who serves as coordinator of the TI club known as Hopeful Talkers.

"Tikvat Israel's Toastmasters club is proud to have Jeff as one of the club's members," Melmed said.

Apart from the club's regular bimonthly sessions, the next series of competitions will be the humorous speech contest and extemporaneous speech contest, which will be held in September. In the same month, Hopeful Talkers members will begin the popular eight-session program for TI children preparing for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah, teaching them how to speak in front of the congregation and how to deal with nervousness.

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	Tikvat Israel Congregation 2200 Baltimore Road · Rockville, Maryland 20851 Phone: (301) 762-7338 · Fax: (301) 424-4399 · Send us an email!
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