News from Middle Tennessee's Jewish Community |
Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024
Welcome to the Observer's monthly Newcomer Column! Every month, we will be featuring one of our Nashville Jewish Newcomers so you can get to know them and their dynamic, engaging stories. One of my favorite parts of my job as the Federation's Newcomer Engagement Associate is connecting with the newcomers and bringing them into Nashville's Jewish community through our Newcomer Shabbat dinners, Newcomer Welcome Receptions, and connecting them with community members and organizations who can help them feel like they belong here. We hope you enjoy reading these and give every newcomer you meet a smile and a warm Nashville welcome!
Sharon Benus, Gordon JCC Adult and Community Wide Programs Director
Recently, Observer editor Barbara Dab and I were interviewed by a local television station to discuss the rise in antisemitic activity locally and around the country. Dedicating an entire hour to this topic is an indication of how serious and far reaching this situation has become, and the concern it has caused not only to us in the Jewish community, but also to our friends and neighbors. When the hour program was over, we had only scratched the surface of what is happening and how we are responding.
Art on the West Side Returns April 15-16 at the JCC
It feels like Germany in the 1930s again. But this time it's in Nashville and it's 2023.
To celebrate Israel’s upcoming 75th anniversary, executive members of the Jewish Agency for Israel hosted a webinar Feb. 26 to discuss the agency, the Jewish people, and the commitment to advance pluralism in Israel.
On April 23, 2023, West End Synagogue will celebrate Israel's 75th Birthday with a concert by a multi-generational band - Dor L'Dor - from Knoxville that bills itself as "Not Your Father's Klezmer Band." The band is making its Nashville concert debut.
Nonprofit organization provides community for breast cancer survivors who meet in Gordon JCC
Students from the Jewish Middle School and Akiva School joined together in mid-March to take part in a local adaptation of The Butterfly Project, a national campaign to fuse arts education with Holocaust study as a means of cultivating empathy and social responsibility in children. The Butterfly Project began in 2006 at the San Diego Jewish Academy as a way of memorializing the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust. Inspired by “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” a collection of poems, letters, and drawings by children imprisoned at the Terezin Concentration Camp, the program hopes to have contemporary children from around the globe create and install 1.5 million ceramic butterflies in memory of those lost children.
As Passover is just days away, I want to take a few minutes and share some reflections. This year has been both challenging and rewarding in ways I could not have foreseen when we last opened our Haggadahs.
In Israel, Leslie Kirby, President of Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville, shares concern for divisions that judicial reform debate is causing in Israel & among Jews worldwide
