​​Thursday   October 15: Spiritual Leader of The Magen David Sephardic Congregation Rabbi Dr. Mitchell Serels

Rabbi Serels operates primarily under Syrian/Aleppo (Aram Soba) traditions using the Kol Yakob Siddur, while welcoming a diverse melting pot of Moroccan, Iraqi, Persian, Yemenite, and Ashkenazi customs and melodies. Will join us to share our like and different traditions and cultures.

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Monday, October 19: Elliot Forchheimer, CEO of the Westchester Jewish Council (WJC).

Elliott brings a wealth of experience in the nonprofit sector. As the leader of WJC, he ensures connections among Jewish organizations and builds relationships with other faith and ethnic groups.

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Thursday, October 22: October is National Pizza Month

Please join Eugene Pisacreta, owner of Piazza Pizzeria, to learn about pizza and enjoy his talents as a pizza maker.

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Monday, October 26: Louise G. Challop, Coordinator, Livable Communities, Central Region, Westchester Jewish Community Services and Westchester County Department of Senior Programs and Services

A retired educator, Louise changed careers and began working in senior programming. Her interest grew while she and her brother shared caregiving duties for their mother. During that time, she became aware of the needs and concerns of seniors and their caregivers and recognized how crucial it is to advocate for them. She then began working at Westchester Jewish Community Services as the Central Region Livable Communities Coordinator. Livable Communities is a joint endeavor of Westchester County's Department of Senior Programs and Services, AARP, local municipalities, and several agencies that serve seniors in Westchester.

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Thursday, October 29: SAJE Book Club with Barb Tankel: The World to Come by Dara Horn

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In The World to Come, Dara Horn has deft­ly inter­wo­ven the sto­ry of a stolen paint­ing with the sto­ry of a Jew­ish fam­i­ly. Ben­jamin Ziskind, a for­mer child prodi­gy who writes ques­tions for a TV quiz show, is new­ly divorced and still mourn­ing the recent death of his moth­er. The nov­el begins with Benjamin’s theft of a small Cha­gall paint­ing from a New York muse­um and then moves to Sovi­et Rus­sia in the 1920s where his fa­ther Boris receives art instruc­tion from Cha­gall at a school for orphaned Jew­ish boys. There we meet the Yid­dish writer Der Nis­ter, whose spir­it informs this novel.

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Horn is a schol­ar of Hebrew and Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture. Ear­ly in the sto­ry, Ben­jamin, who speaks Yid­dish, thinks to him­self that the lan­guage is unique in hav­ing “a world of the dead built into it, a true fear of heaven…an absolute trust that the oth­er world is not sep­a­rate from this one…” The words apt­ly describe the nov­el itself, which is both brave­ly expres­sive of faith and vivid­ly evoca­tive of Jew­ish life in Europe and Rus­sia. Ben’s Russ­ian-born moth­er, Ros­alie, an author and illus­tra­tor of children’s books, had pub­lished a book of Yid­dish folk tales.

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The tales con­sti­tute the shared her­itage of the Ziskind fam­i­ly. Horn devotes much atten­tion to por­tray­ing each fam­i­ly mem­ber, in sep­a­rate flash­backs, in child­hood. Each is revealed as var­i­ous­ly curi­ous, imag­i­na­tive, fear­ful, need­ing love, need­ing to make sense of the world. Folk­tales embed­ded in the text dra­ma­tize these essen­tial con­cerns in sim­ple and sym­bol­ic form.

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Sev­er­al brief chap­ters reveal the obscure life of Der Nis­ter. In abject pover­ty and obsessed with his art, strick­en by the death of his beloved daugh­ter, the author’s life unfolds in trag­ic coun­ter­point to the bril­liant suc­cess of his com­pa­tri­ot Cha­gall. These chap­ters add depth to the nov­el. Foot­notes attribut­ing the folk­tales and his­tor­i­cal notes at the end of the text sat­is­fy the reader’s questions.