Category: Events

Please join us online for the 17th Annual Heidi Urich Annual Lecture co-sponsored by the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Boston and Hebrew College. Rabbi Justin David, Dean of the Rabbinical School, will offer welcoming remarks on behalf of Hebrew College.

This year’s topic, “A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century,” will be delivered by Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Viterbi Family Endowed Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, & Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. When 20th century wars changed the borders around them, the Levys were transformed from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members spread out from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. Whole branches were nearly eradicated in the Holocaust. Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe.

Our Speaker

Prize-winning historian of Sephardic Jewry, Sarah Abrevaya Stein serves as Director of the Leve Center for Jewish Studies, the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author and editor of ten award-winning books including Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (2019) and Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (2022).

Registration

This year’s lecture will be on Zoom and is free.

JGSGB Members
Members of the JGSGB need not register. They will receive the Zoom link automatically on the morning of the program.

Non-members
Click here to receive the Zoom link. If you do not receive an email with the link to the program within 15 minutes, please check your spam folder.

Beyond the news and disturbing images of college campuses riven by conflict, we must also consider the question, “How are the kids doing?” Join Rabbinical School alumni Rabbi Getzel Davis `13, Campus Rabbi for Harvard Hillel, and Rabbi Seth Wax `13, Jewish Chaplain and Williams College Jewish Association advisor at Williams College, in conversation about how Jewish college students are managing during this stressful time and the ways they are being supported.

About the Instructors

Rabbi Getzel Davis `13 received his Bachelor’s Degree from Brandeis University and his rabbinical ordination from Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, where he also received a Masters in Jewish Education. He recently took on the role of Campus Rabbi at Harvard Hillel after serving there  for ten years as a rabbi, educator, and a Harvard University Chaplain. He is also the advisor for the Student Conservative Minyan, teaches regular classes, and counsels students, faculty, and community members. Getzel loves teaching Hebrew College Open Circle Jewish Learning classes and has a certificate in Family Systems Therapy through Therapy Training Boston

Rabbi Seth Wax grew up in the Boston area and has been on a search that has brought him through Jewish communities and Buddhist monasteries to Harvard Divinity School and the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College before coming to Williams College in the summer of 2017. He has a special interest in exploring how to live a meaningful, engaged life that is infused with learning, contemplation, community, and deep interfaith engagement. Before coming to Williams, he was the rabbi at Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights, NY.

Hebrew College’s new Soul Sounds Series brings master Jewish musicians from the Boston area and around the world for intimate musical conversations at Hebrew College. Part concert, part participatory singing, part prayer.

For our first program, we are pleased to welcome musician and prayer artist Yahala Lachmish from Kehillat Zion in Jerusalem.

Meet the Musician: Yahala Lachmish

Yahala Lachmish is a musician, cantor and payytanit, singer, conductor and actress. She holds a B.A in Composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and is co-head of the Sephardic track of the Ashira Tehilot Program for Musicians and Cantors at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem.

Yahala has been on stage since childhood and now performs as a solo artist, in various ensembles (Tandu, Tahrir, Voca Shabbat and more) and with orchestras. She is musical director and co-head of Prayer in Jerusalem’s Zion community, lectures and leads services at Midreshet Beit Prat (previously known as Ein Prat), teaches Biblical trope and leads workshops on piyyutim (Jewish liturgical poems.)

Thank you to our november Event co-sponsors

Join us for an information session to introduce Hebrew College Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership‘s new “Interreligious Leadership Fellows Program: Residential Delegation at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University” tentatively scheduled for September 2-8, 2024.

The Interreligious Leadership Fellows Program is for scholars, practitioners, clergy and lay leaders. At the information session, learn about the colloquium which will be an exchange of knowledge, skills, and experience facilitated by world-class interreligious thought leaders, authors, and practitioners. We will also cover these details:

• Cost
• Dates
• Location
• Virtual pre- and post meetings
• Certificate of attestation

For the next program in Hebrew College Adult Learning’s free, monthly GROW series, we examine storytelling. We hope you will spend an hour with us for this and future programs in our series, to gather, reflect, observe, and wrestle with topics that will deepen your Jewish learning.

Date: March 13, 2024 | 12-1 PM EST/9-10 AM PST | Zoom
Program: Building Resilience through Stories
Instructor: Margie Bogdanow

Research shows that learning and knowing about family history helps build resilience in children of all ages. Judaism is a religion of stories. We tell the same Torah stories over and over and each time they have new meaning with the Passover Seder being the most famous example. As grandparents, sharing our stories is one of the most important things we can do for our grandchildren. Today our stories can be told in many ways, from sitting on a lap to sitting at computers across the world. They can be shared in words, in music and in pictures. Join other grandparents to reflect on our stories, explore the Jewish wisdom around the value of storytelling, and share practical approaches to becoming impactful stewards of our family narrative.

ABOUT OUR INSTRUCTOR

Margie Bogdanow, LICSW, is an educator, coach and consultant working in the Boston area.  Over her many years as a facilitator for Parenting Through a Jewish Lens, Margie demonstrated both her belief that Judaism has wisdom to help us navigate our lives as well as her love of connecting the Jewish and secular worlds.  She is passionate about “educating and supporting adults to make a difference in the lives of young people.” After spending many years as a parent educator, Margie is thrilled to now work as a grandparent educator.  She and her husband Michael now live in Needham to be close to grandchildren.

DEDICATE A SESSION

You can dedicate a GROW session in memory or in honor of a dear one and you and your name will be shared with gratitude in the session. Simply click the link below, fill in the secure form, and indicate in the text box that this is your GROW sponsorship [suggested minimum gift of $180].

>> Dedicate a session

save the dates

Future Free, Monthly GROW Programs

Date: April 10, 2024 | 12-1 PM EST/9-10 AM PST | Zoom
Program: TBD
Instructors: Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld
Join us: Register now