Editor’s Note: Carney delivered a version of these remarks at Toby’s funeral on Sunday, February 4.
You always knew exactly where you stood with our inimitable friend and congregant Toby Stein. My most vivid and lasting memories come from her role as an invaluable if sometimes disquieting truth-teller.
Aileen Grossberg
Thanksgiving is a day for thanks although we Jews often give our thank yous at the New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
So I am taking this opportunity to put the THANKS back into Thanksgiving and express my thanks to people involved in activities that I have a stake in.
So thank you to all the volunteers who help to get food on the table for those weekly kiddushes. Even when I am not directly involved, I thank them. Without our volunteers we would have no bountiful weekly spreads and the fellowship that comes with sharing a meal.
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For the sixth year in a row, the multi-generational Simcha Band played our hearts out at our annual Purim celebration. Setting the lively tone for the Costume Parade and then playing in between chapters of the Megillah, the band added a new dimension to its name “Simcha” Band! When the Megillah readers chanted Haman’s name, the band successfully drowned out his name. Continue reading
Come see “Guys and Graggers” during the Megillah-reading service on Erev Purim, Wednesday, March 23rd.
Based on the hit show “Guys and Dolls”, this shpiel was adapted for Purim by Craig Eichner, produced and edited by Lisa Pendola, and directed by Jennifer Moss. Continue reading
The Bar Mitzvah was poised and prepared. His parents were proud and poignant. The social hall tables were dressed in gold and covered with platters waiting for the hungry congregants to file in after the motzi and Kiddush. All 200 … Continue reading
Psalm 98 tells us, “Sing praise to the Lord with the harp, with trumpets and horns make a joyful noise…”
At our special Spotlight Shabbat on Friday, June 5, the Simcha band did not have any trumpets, horns or harps. We praised God with our alto-saxophones, drums, basses, tenor sax, piano, violin and cello. With our joyous music , the “Simcha Band” lived up to its name. With our musicians from elementary school to middle school, high school, college and in the working world, we lived up to being “multi-generational. “ With Dan Silver joining us for the first time, we were not only multi-generational but were the first mother-son musicians in the band’s five year history.
It’s the Jazz Age of Shushan, when a king throws an endless party, a queen refuses a royal summons, an evil vizier hatches a nefarious plot, our hero and heroine struggle to save their people — and everyone wants to make the front page news! “The Windy Gragger” has all this and more (well, not much more). Set to the music of the Broadway show “Chicago,” this is the Purim story like you’ve never heard it before (unless you’ve seen the rehearsals, in which case you’ve sort of heard it before). Come see the one and only performance of “The Windy Gragger” on Purim evening, March 4, 2015. The Windy Gragger will star (in alphabetical order): Craig Eichner, Yechiel Felder, Talia Fellus, Martin Hochbaum, Ann Lippel, Carney Mimms, Jennifer Moss, Lisa Pendola, Andy Silikovitz.
Here’s a complete Purim Schedule of Events and Services
Full disclosure – I like to read print. I’m on my computer all day long at work reading emails, student papers, journal articles…and I like having books and newspapers in hardcopy.
But it’s time for me to say goodbye to the print version of our monthly newsletter Kol Emunah.
A tidy euphemism denotes
Flotsam of ships of state
Left as a tide of blood recedes
The savage Twentieth
A century of refugees
Displaced millions
The music had caught me. I swayed in time and began to sing along with the musicians, three elderly black men singing in harmony and playing rhythm and blues. The three had propped themselves and their battered instruments against a bench beside the tracks at a midtown stop on the Lexington Avenue subway in Manhattan. My adolescent daughter looked at me with faint embarrassment; I could hear the unspoken “Oh, Dad!”
I was pretty sure Rachel had never heard Stand By Me. I was entirely sure she had never heard her Dad burst into song in a public place.