Hanukkah is a time to celebrate light and miracles. What better way than to recognize this time than with Yiddish Hanukkah tunes?
Come light, sing, and drink together at Hebrew College’s partner organization, Lehrhaus. We’ll sing Yiddish Hanuke fare–tunes both obscure and well-trodden. Taught by Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, Rosh Tefillah and Artist-in-Residence at Hebrew College in Newton.
During this time of grief and heartbreak, we will gather as a community on Zoom to kindle the lights of Hanukkah together, seeking comfort, strength, and hope in each other’s presence and in our shared sense of purpose. Hanukkah reminds us that we are all lamplighters; for a few minutes each weeknight of Hanukkah, join us as come together to dispel the darkness and shine a little more light into our world.
6 Weeknights. 6 Kavanot for light in a time of darkness.
5-5:10 p.m. EST | Zoom | View previous candlelightings
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld welcomes beloved friend and colleague Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, founder and spiritual leader of Zion: An Eretz Yisraeli congregation in Jerusalem, to kindle the lights of the fifth night of Hanukkah.
Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum is co-founder of the Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis, a joint project of the HaMidrasha Educational Center for Israeli Judaism and the Shalom Hartman Institute. She is also the founder of Kehilat Zion in Jerusalem. Her work spans and links tradition and innovation, working toward Jewish spiritual and ethical renaissance. She devotes much of her energy to the renewal of community life in Israel and the struggle for human rights.
She has served as rabbi of Congregation Magen Avraham in the Negev; as a congregational rabbi in the New York suburbs alongside Rabbi Gordon Tucker; and as Assistant Dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem.
In 2010 she was named by The Forward as one of the five most influential female religious leaders in Israel for her work promoting pluralism and Jewish freedom.
During this time of grief and heartbreak, we will gather as a community on Zoom to kindle the lights of Hanukkah together, seeking comfort, strength, and hope in each other’s presence and in our shared sense of purpose. Hanukkah reminds us that we are all lamplighters; for a few minutes each weeknight of Hanukkah, join us as come together to dispel the darkness and shine a little more light into our world.
6 Weeknights. 6 Kavanot for light in a time of darkness.
5-5:10 p.m. EST | Zoom| View previous candlelightings
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld welcomes guest Yosef Abramowitz, president and CEO of Energiya Global Capital, to talk about the future of solar energy in Israel and Gaza.
Rabbi Anisfeld became president of Hebrew College in July 2018 after being appointed president-elect in fall of 2017 and serving as acting president from January-June 2018. Rabbi Anisfeld first came to Hebrew College in 2003 as an adjunct faculty member of the Rabbinical School and then served as Dean of Students from 2005-2006. She served the next eleven years as Dean of the Rabbinical School (2006-2017).
Rabbi Anisfeld graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1990 and subsequently spent 15 years working in pluralistic settings as a Hillel rabbi at Tufts University, Yale University, and Harvard University. She has been a regular summer faculty member for the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel since 1993 and is co-editor of two volumes of women’s writings on Passover, The Women’s Seder Sourcebook: Rituals and Readings for Use at the Passover Seder and The Women’s Passover Companion: Women’s Reflections on the Festival of Freedom. From 2011 to 2013, she was named to Newsweek’s list of Top 50 Influential Rabbis in America. In 2015, Rabbi Anisfeld was named one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by The Jerusalem Post. She writes and teaches widely, weaving together Torah, rabbinic commentary, and contemporary poetry and literature in her wise and compassionate approach to the complexities of the human experience and the search for healing and hope in a beautiful but fractured world.
During this time of grief and heartbreak, we will gather as a community on Zoom to kindle the lights of Hanukkah together, seeking comfort, strength, and hope in each other’s presence and in our shared sense of purpose. Hanukkah reminds us that we are all lamplighters; for a few minutes each weeknight of Hanukkah, join us as come together to dispel the darkness and shine a little more light into our world.
6 Weeknights. 6 Kavanot for light in a time of darkness.
5-5:10 p.m. EST | Zoom | View previous candlelightings
Rabba Claudia Marbach will lead candle lighting for the seventh night of Hanukkah with her students from Hebrew College’s Teen Beit Midrash.
Rabba Marbach has been the Director of Teen Beit Midrash of Hebrew College, a Talmud focussed after-school program for teens with both local and national cohorts since 2019. She teaches a weekly Daf Yomi class for women and writes a weekly d’var Torah blog. Rabba Claudia is a founder of the partnership minyan, Yedid Nefesh, in Newton, MA and a pop-up beit midrash for women in Boston, called One Night Shtender. Before Yeshivat Maharat, Rabba Claudia developed and taught the Rabbinics curriculum at JCDS Boston, a pluralistic Jewish Day School, for fifteen years. She has participated in interfaith dialogue, supervises teachers at Jewish day schools through Pedagogy of Partnership and teaches in the Hebrew College Rabbinical School. Rabba Claudia received her BA in English from Barnard College, JD from Boston University in addition to ordination from Yeshivat Maharat. She studied at Michlala, Drisha and Pardes and completed two units of chaplaincy training at Hebrew Senior Life in Dedham, MA.
During this time of grief and heartbreak, we will gather as a community on Zoom to kindle the lights of Hanukkah together, seeking comfort, strength, and hope in each other’s presence and in our shared sense of purpose. Hanukkah reminds us that we are all lamplighters; for a few minutes each weeknight of Hanukkah, join us as come together to dispel the darkness and shine a little more light into our world.
6 Weeknights. 6 Kavanot for light in a time of darkness.
5-5:10 p.m. EST | Zoom
tonight’s HOST:Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer `14, Rosh Tefilah & Artist-in-Residence, will lead us in a few moments of soulful song as we gather to light for the fourth night of Hanukkah.
Jessica Kate Meyer is a prayer leader, storyteller, vocalist, and rabbi, who served as rabbi-hazzan at Romemu in NYC, and most recently, at The Kitchen in San Francisco. She has studied sacred Jewish music with masters from Ashkenazi and Mizrahi traditions and has performed as a vocalist with ensembles in the United States and Israel. In a previous life, Jessica appeared in film, theater, and television projects in Europe and the United States: most notably, as a principal role in the Oscar-winning film, The Pianist.
During this time of grief and heartbreak, we will gather as a community on Zoom to kindle the lights of Hanukkah together, seeking comfort, strength, and hope in each other’s presence and in our shared sense of purpose. Hanukkah reminds us that we are all lamplighters; for a few minutes each weeknight of Hanukkah, join us as come together to dispel the darkness and shine a little more light into our world.
6 Weeknights. 6 Kavanot for light in a time of darkness.
5-5:10 p.m. EST | Zoom | View previous candlelightings
Dr. Susie Tanchel, Hebrew College Vice President, and Rabbi Sam Pollak, Director of Congregational Learning at Kerem Shalom in Concord, MA, will reflect on the hope they find through teaching as we kindle the lights of the sixth night of Hanukkah.
Dr. Susie Tanchel joined Hebrew College in the summer of 2020, after serving as the head of school at JCDS, Boston’s Jewish Community Day School.
During her nine-year tenure at JCDS, Tanchel was an accomplished and deeply beloved leader, guiding the school to preeminence as a national model of excellence in pluralistic Jewish education, and creatively embodying its abiding commitments to community, centrality of Hebrew language, and teaching the whole child.
She was a recipient of the 2018 Covenant Award for Jewish Educators.
Rabbi Sam Pollack, who joined Kerem Shalom in July 2020, received a BA in philosophy and comparative religion, at The Ohio State University, where he held leadership positions at Hillel and sang in a Jewish a cappella group. He attended Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion where he received a MA in Hebrew Letters and was ordained as a rabbi in 2017.
He most recently served for three years as one of the rabbis at The Community Synagogue in Port Washington, New York, where his responsibilities included teaching religious school classes and Torah study; leading early childhood classes; establishing an adult education initiative; creating a group to guide interfaith families; serving on a newly formed inclusion committee; and officiating life cycle events. During his rabbinic studies, Sam worked at a number of small congregations in the Midwest.
“I am thrilled to be joining the Kerem Shalom community, and I am inspired by how the congregation and the Hebrew School emphasize joyful, inclusive Jewish life,” shares Rabbi Sam. “I look forward to meeting everyone and working toward that vision together.
He was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and lives in the Greater Boston area with his husband, Rabbi Ari Abelman, who grew up in Lexington, MA.
