From the desk of Rabbi Emra:

It saddens Cantor Roth and myself that I have to write this. There have been an alarming number of cases of fake tickets for this year's High Holy Days services circulating around the congregation. On Rosh Hashanah, we had to turn away hundreds of people at the door, all of them carrying the same fake ticket. G-d only knows why – we offer tickets to all our congregants for 5 dollars. Nevertheless, I thought it'd be helpful to put out this guide to help you recognize a forged ticket.

Barcode: there is no bar code on genuine Temple Beth Emmanuel tickets. We do not have a bar code scanner and thusly, do not need to put a bar code on our tickets. If your ticket has a barcode on the bottom, the side, or anywhere at all, it is not a valid Temple Beth Emmanuel Yom Kippur ticket.

No Two-Tone Hologram: a genuine Yom Kippur service ticket will not have a two-tone hologram of a menorah that lights up when held in the sunlight. We would not waste money on a hologram printer. We would rather spend money on a new bima, or improving our adult Hebrew school classes. Even if we had a hologram printer, a menorah has nothing to do with Yom Kippur. A more likely hologram would be a solemn Jew deep in prayer, and when you hold it to up to the light, he would daven. If your ticket has a two-tone menorah hologram, you have been scammed.

No Silver Foil: any ticket with a high-quality image of Cantor Roth and myself embossed on silver foil is fake. We would never dare suggest to put our faces on the tickets – the High Holy Days are for G-D and not to indulge our egos. I don't even know where we would get silver foil. Do they sell that at a Jo-Ann Fabrics? Maybe next year we will use a silver foil image of the Torah if people are still confused. But we will raise ticket prices to cover our costs.

Heavy Card Stock: tickets printed on a heavy card stock are not genuine. We use the cheapest, flimsiest printer paper imaginable for our tickets, as the physical tickets are mostly a formality to keep the congregation down to a manageable size on our busiest time of the year. Our current tickets can fall apart in a strong breeze – this unfortunately happened to the president of the men's club last year. To see if your ticket is real, try to tear it. If you cannot, it is fake. Please don't rip it too much, as you might rip your genuine ticket to shreds. It feels condescending to say that, but some of you might need me to explicitly state it.

Color: This year's Yom Kippur tickets will be printed on orange paper. If they are tickets for the Minnesota Twins, we cannot accept them. I would say you should go see the Minnesota Twins instead, but it is the playoffs and the Twins were mathematically eliminated in August.