Singing in the Round. The Power of Communal Prayer
In this session, they will teach people how to use connection with each other in the Kol T’tilkah style. This technique uses energy and melody to create a prayer circle that transcends to a spiritual world.

Crafting Our Stories: Postcards of Hope and Identity - This is a double-block session
Facilitated by Art Therapists Tzafi Weinberg and Michaela Kaplan along with student Art Therapist Mishelle Aminov Kosonovsky, this 2 hour workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to contemplate their Jewish identity and how it has been effected since the events of October 7th. As individuals and as members of a larger community, we have all experienced great sadness, stress, and anger over the past year. Therefore the aim of this workshop is to come together in art making to draw attention to our strengths, our connections, and to hope. Each participant will create two collaged postcards, one related to their individual Jewish identity and a second related to community. We will then place all of our images together to represent the beautiful diversity and strength of the Jewish people. We hope that art making will bring release and catharsis to participants and that creating and processing together will strengthen community bonds. In our art therapy workshop, participants are welcomed to express themselves freely within a secure and supportive environment. No prior artistic skills are needed; everyone’s creations are valued.

Jewish texts – Biblical, medieval and modern – over and over mention gardens. We will explore the continuing influence of the Garden of Eden and the gardens of the Song of Songs on Jewish writing. Listening to poetry, song, story and text, we will look at the ways the image of the garden suggests themes of beauty, loss and love.

No Words: Poetry After Oct. 7
In this session we will sample Israeli poetry written in the months following October 7, 2023: the breach and brutality at Israel’s southern border on Shabbat Simhat Torah. The poems are collected from personal websites and blogs of poets and of people who do not usually consider themselves artists. All are individuals who, at first, have no words to convey their shock, grief, and sleeplessness, yet somehow find forms and formats to register their visceral screaming, and express outrage, tears, critiques, as well as bitter ironies that they observe in the aftermath. The poems will be distributed in Hebrew with the presenter's English translation. We'll read in both languages and discuss in English.

Join Cantorial Soloist and Composer Janet Pelletier Goetze and Jewish Learning Coordinator and Educator Sherry Wolfe Elazar on a musical journey exploring contemporary musical settings of traditional Jewish prayers by Jewish women composers.

Becoming the Messiah: The Life and Times of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. One man is most recognized for the movement’s success: the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah. While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendencies. So it is not surprising that Schneerson’s messianic fervor made him one of the most controversial rabbinic leaders of the twentieth century. Ezra Glinter provides the first biography of Schneerson to combine a nonpartisan view of his life, work, and impact with an insider’s understanding of the ideology that drove him and that continues to inspire the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today.