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FEBRUARY 2023 PROGRAMS

 

THE TASTE OF JEWISH CULTURE

The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to present The Taste of Jewish Culture series.  Join us for our third program, Crackers, Crepes and Cheese: Jewish Culinary Traditions From Passover to Shavuot, on Wednesday, March 15 at 7:00 pm EDT.

Please visit our event webpage for more details and to register.
The Taste of Jewish Culture details

 

CSP

The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a partner congregation of the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program.  Please join us at an upcoming program!

Jews of Argentina: “They sowed seeds and harvested doctors”

Tuesday, February 28, 3:30 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)

The Argentinean Jewish Community is the sixth largest in the world after Israel, the USA, France, Canada and the UK. The first Jewish communities in Latin America were Sephardic. What happened to those Jews during the Inquisition? Why, if Latin America was part of the Spanish Empire, is the Jewish Community in Argentina 80% Ashkenazi and only 20% Sephardic today? We are going to answer all these questions and many more during the first session of our Virtual Jewish Tour of Argentina. Join us as we “visit” Buenos Aires, a wonderful, cosmopolitan, European-looking city and learn about the first Jewish immigrants (who settled in the rural areas), the Jewish colonies and the Jewish Gauchos.
Claudia Hercman is an Argentinian tour guide and translator. She is also a sculptor and painter, whose main subjects are “Memory” and “Uprooting”, in honor of her four grandparents who emigrated from Poland to Argentina in the 1930s. Claudia was born and raised in Buenos Aires. Twenty years ago, she became bored of translating books with a computer as her only company, so she decided to study tourism and history. She has been conducting City, Art and Jewish tours ever since, and enjoying every single moment of it. And then 2020 arrived, and with it the pandemic, which forced her to go back to spending time with her computer. So she decided to create these virtual lectures as an excuse to be able to talk to people and meet new friends from all over the world.

 

 

The Bedouin and the Hebrew Bible –
Dr. Clinton Bailey, live from Jerusalem, Israel in conversation with Dr. David Mendelsohn

Monday, February 27, 1:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)

Do Jews owe their relationship with the God of the Bible to the Bedouin populating Israel’s Negev? That’s the theory of Israel’s foremost expert on the nomadic people of the Negev, an American Israeli who has spent the last four decades living among the Bedouin and researching them. Clinton Bailey posits that Moses, who fled Egypt into the ancestors of the Bedouin, adopted their way of life and their deity as his own before leading the Jews to freedom.
Dr. Clinton Bailey is a leading authority on Bedouin culture, and has done fieldwork in Sinai and the Negev for the past 50 years. His B.A. is from the Hebrew University; his M.A. and Ph.D from Columbia University. His publications include, Bedouin Poetry (OUP 1991), A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs (YUP, 2004), Bedouin Law (YUP, 2010) and, most recently, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (YUP, 2018). Bailey was born and raised in Buffalo, NY and made Aliya in 1958. In 1994, he was awarded the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award for his efforts to obtain civil rights for Bedouin in Israel.
Dr. David Mendelsohn supervises the entire academic program of Kivunim. His areas of expertise include Islamic Studies, History and Culture of Arabs with Israeli Citizenship, Bedouin Law and the relationship between language and culture in Arabic and Hebrew. His current research examines the influence of Hebrew on the dialects of Arabic spoken in Israel. Mendelsohn also lectures on the history and relationships between Middle East countries and militant organizations. David holds advanced degrees in diverse fields: a Ph.D. Classics / Linguistics, an M.A. in Archaeology / Linguistics and an Honours B.A. in Classical Studies. David is the recipient of one of Canada’s highest academic honors, The Trudeau Prize, and is a world medalist in wrestling. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Ronny and their three children.
Program video

 

Curating Between Hope and Despair:  Creating POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Sunday, February 19, 7:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews aspires to be an agent of transformation that can move an entire society forward. Its mission is to recover the history of Polish Jews and transmit the legacy of the civilization they created to future generations. Winner of the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award, POLIN Museum features a multimedia narrative exhibition dedicated to the thousand-year history of Jewish life. The history of Polish Jews presented at POLIN Museum offers a golden opportunity to recover the historic diversity of Poland and foster dialogue in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect. This talk will take you into the exhibition and behind the scenes to reveal how the exhibition was created. It will conclude by posing several questions. Why was it so important to create this museum, which faces the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and stands on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood? What accounts for its extraordinary success? What impact is it having? How is it addressing current crises? And, last but not least, what makes Jewish museums in Europe more urgent and often more interesting than Jewish museums elsewhere?
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. Her books include Destination Museum: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted and Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt); The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler). She was awarded the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Folklore Society, honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University, the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry, and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Dan David Prize. She has served on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and as Vice-Chair of ICMEMO International Committee of Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.
Program video

 

 

Herzl’s Budapest

Tuesday, February 7, 3:30 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)

Theodore Herzl was born and grew up in Budapest in a rapidly growing Jewish community situated in a rapidly emerging European metropolis. He lived in the heart of the most Jewish part of the city and a stone’s throw from the large Dohany Street Synagogue.  Although he was religiously lax and largely indifferent to religious observance, he came of age in a vibrant world of Jewish ideas, lifestyles, and identities.  In addition, he grew at a time when there was little or no antisemitism in Budapest, and later referred to the city as “an oasis in an antisemitic desert.”  His life in Budapest epitomized ways that living in a big city was simultaneously helpful and detrimental to Jewish identity.  Detrimental because the anonymity of the big city facilitated disaffection and drift away from the Jewish community; helpful because the concentration of several hundred thousand Jews in a compact urban space invigorated Jewish life by providing a large constituency for a variety of Jewish communal institutions.”
Professor Howard Lupovitch is Professor of History and Director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University. He was educated at the University of Michigan, and Columbia University (earning a Ph.D. in History from the latter). Over his career, Prof. Lupovitch has taught at Cornell University, Colby College, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Michigan, where he was also a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. Prof. Lupovitch is the author, most recently, of Transleithanian Paradise: A History of the Jewish Community of Budapest, 1738-1938, and is presently completing a history of the Neolog Movement and researching a new history of the Jews of Detroit.
Program video

 

 

An Overview of Israeli Current Affairs

Sunday, February 5, 1:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)

Join us for an overview of Israeli current affairs from the editor of The Times of Israel — covering everything from the recent elections, to regional challenges, the high-tech economy, and relations with Diaspora Jews and key allies.
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel, the fastest-growing current affairs website in the Jewish world, with an average of some eight million monthly users worldwide and 40 million monthly page views. The Times of Israel, which provides independent, non-partisan coverage of Israel, the region and the Jewish world, also publishes in Hebrew, French, Arabic and Persian. Horovitz was previously editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post (from 2004-2011). Before that, he was editor and publisher of the award-winning newsmagazine The Jerusalem Report. In 2014, he was awarded Bnai Brith’s lifetime achievement journalism award. He has conducted landmark interviews with a succession of Israeli and international figures, including all of Israel’s recent prime ministers, has written from Israel for newspapers around the world, and is a frequent interviewee on CNN, the BBC, Sky, and other TV and radio stations. Horovitz is the author of 2004’s Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism, and 2000’s A Little Too Close to God: The Thrills and Panic of a Life in Israel, both published in the US by Knopf.
Program video

 

COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

Enough is Enough:  A Community Conversation on Antisemitism

Monday, February 13, 7:00 pm EST
(online program presented by CJP)

Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP ) will  host another program in their Bold Conversations series about rising antisemitism in Greater Boston and around the country.  The featured speaker will be Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

 

Israel at 75

Part 4 – Israel Today: The Promise of a New Government – Tuesday, February 7, 7:30 pm EST
Part 5 – What’s in Store for Israel’s Next 75 Years? – Tuesday, March 14, 7:30 pm EDT
(online series presented by the Lappin Foundation)

The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a community partner of the Israel at 75  series, presented by the Lappin Foundation.  In advance of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ido Aharoni, Global Distinguished Professor for International Relations
at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, will look back at influential leaders and take a peek at what may lie ahead.  Everyone is welcome thanks to a generous grant from the Dr. David M. Milch Family Foundation.
Israel at 75 (Event flyer)

 

YAD CHESSED

PURIM

From now until Purim Day (11am on Tuesday, March 7, 2023), our community is partnering with Yad Chessed to raise funds to fulfill the mitzvah of Matanot LaEvyonim (gifts to people in need on Purim Day). If you would like to help people in need buy food on Purim Day, visit
yadchessed.org/purim.   Donations can be made ONLINE HERE.  Please insert “Walnut Street Synagogue” in the “Synagogue/School Affiliation” box.  Checks can be sent in advance of Purim to Yad Chessed at 440 Totten Pond Road, Suite 401, Waltham, MA 02451. Please include “Walnut Street Synagogue” in the memo line of the check.

ABOUT YAD CHESSED

Yad Chessed helps Jewish individuals and families who struggle with financial hardship pay their bills and buy food. As a social services agency rooted in the Jewish values of kindness (chessed) and charity (tzedakah), they are committed to helping those in need navigate a path toward financial stability while preserving their privacy and dignity.  They provide emergency financial assistance, grocery gift cards and compassionate advice for those trying to make ends meet. Hundreds of families and individuals throughout the state rely on Yad Chessed to provide for their essentials, and even at times, a Jewish burial for a loved one.

Members of our community, as well as others in the Jewish community, who need assistance may contact Yad Chessed by phone at 781-487-2693 or by Email at intake@yadchessed.org for a confidential conversation.    Questions can be directed to info@yadchessed.org.  

 

COMMUNITY PROJECTS

CJP Plan to Combat Antisemitism

Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) has developed a five-point plan to combat rising antisemitism in Massachusetts.  They are seeking stories for their mobilization campaign to fight back. If you have experienced antisemitism in any form at any time, join them and say enough is enough!  Stories can be of any length and can be submitted anonymously.
Learn more and submit your story