Conference is just around the corner and we are very excited about all of the wonderful delegate sessions and other items on the agenda! If you haven't yet registered you are not too late as the deadline has been extended to May 9, 2019! The brochure with registration information can be found below. We hope to see you there!

 

If you are unable to attend conference, do not forget the wide array of services available to you and your Sisterhood from Women's League. Be sure that your sisterhood is getting all that it can from Women's League. Put your per capita to work for your sisterhood by scheduling a Consulting Services Workshop. Our workshops are geared to invigorate and strengthen sisterhood. These workshops are designed to sharpen skills, motivate members and create new leadership. Workshops cover many topics geared to the needs of every sisterhood, membership/ sisterhood image, leadership, team building, strategic planning/goal setting, communication/social media, sisterhood synagogue relations and sisterhood challenges. Choose any topic or let us know what your needs are. Need a quick fix, a consultant can contact you via Zoom or conference call. You can register for a workshop on the Women's League website, or by contacting Meryl Balaban mbalaban@wlcj.org or Sandy Berenbaum sberenbaum@wlcj.org. If a sisterhood president would like a mentor, we would be happy to provide one. It's the best gift you can give to your sisterhood. We look forward to working with you.

 

And don't forget all of the other offerings available from Womens League. As always these are detailed below.

 

Wishing you all a meaningful and most importantly, peaceful, Shabbat!

 

L'Shalom

Joan

 

Networking to engage,
enrich and empower
Conservative Jewish Women    

 

Shabbat Message:

"Yom Hashoah: Missing My Grandmas"

By Vivian Leber, WLCJ VP and Books Chair

 

This year, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) is observed on May 2. In Israel, the entire country comes to a standstill in reflection, and thousands of commemorative events are held around the world.

 

I have had an evolving personal relationship to the Holocaust. As a child, growing up in Queens, NY, I accepted having no grandparents. Until age 6, I had assumed that the sweet white-haired lady who spoke German and sometimes stayed with us was my grandma, so I called her "grandma." Once, in a pique after she and my mother had a territorial dispute over kitchen rights, my mother blurted out, "She's not your grandma, she's your great-aunt." Hilde was the only survivor on my mother's side from the older generation who had escaped Nazi Germany with her son. On my father's side, too, there was a single great-aunt who had emigrated early enough.

 

My parents rarely spoke of their losses and, for the most part, as children do, I accepted my world as it came. When I was a teen and young adult, my parents opened up more. I learned some details about the downward vortex their families had entered, around 1932, which culminated in one grandfather's suicide, the other's death from illness in Camp Gurs in Nazi-occupied France, and my two grandmothers' separate train rides to death in 1944. Still, it was all so long ago and I was having a busy life in my 20s. As it happens, I share my Grandma Paula's facial features, and so does one of my daughters. Paula's photo rests in my wall cabinet; as a young mother, frozen in time, she looks serene. White-haired Grandma Flora, also in my cabinet, was age 62 and alone when she was killed, after her 7 children had fled to pre-state Israel or to London.

 

Today, I've learned more of the broader history by reading and through Yom HaShoah commemorations and, along the way, have acquired a heightened ache for my unknowable grandparents. BQLI Region of Women's League held an event last fall, including a journal in which members shared loving stories of their grandmothers and their profound influence. My page was missing.  My husband also grew up with no grandparents-and his parents were survivors, caught in both Hitler's and Stalin's webs.

 

So why, only once I had passed age 50, did I begin to reflect on the past and yearn for its lost memories? I think that's a time of life when many of us are perched on a fulcrum, trying to integrate past, present, and future. In my sixth decade, I lost my parents, another pivot point that altered my sense of the swift current of time.

 

There is a virtual organization, Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, where news and insights are shared among the "third generation." But will their descendants and my own children and grandchildren feel any connection to the ethereal memory of great-grandparents?

 

These musings may appear self-indulgent. Why does it matter that I feel the absence of grandparents in my life more now than as a child? Perhaps it matters because it lifts the veil on our fading memory of real people whose genes we carry, a memory that I want my children and grandchildren to hold onto, if only through participation in Yom HaShoah, and their own absolute moral compass in relation to the ongoing echoes of genocide and ethnicity/religion-based violence in the world.

 

I'll end with two quotes from Elie Wiesel:

"I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead, and anyone who does not remember betrays them again." 

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."

 

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WWOT - Weekly Words of Torah

Parashat Aharei Mot

To inspire, guide, engage, enrich, and empower
Conservative Jewish Women
By Rabbi Ellen S. Wolintz-Fields, Executive Director, Women's League For Conservative Judaism

 

The Torah Reading for this week, Parashat Aharei Mot, is the same Torah reading read on Yom Kippur morning, which discusses God telling Moses that Aaron can only enter the Holy of Holies once a year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, a day which atones for all the sins of the Israelites. On that day, Yom Kippur, when the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies, he will wear plain linen robes, and he will pray that the sins of the entire Israelite community are atoned for and forgiven.

 

The High Priest takes two malegoats and, by lot, marks one for God, and one for Azazel, which has been known to be called the scapegoat. The High Priest then slaughters the goat marked for God as a sin offering and uses its blood to cleanse the Tent of Meeting, the altar, and the Holy of Holies of the sins of the people. Then, the High Priest is to confess all the sins of the Israelites over the goat of Azazel, the scapegoat, and the goat is to be sent off into the wilderness. And so, the goat escapes.

 

The goat that escaped, the Azazel, bore the sins of others, and received the term scapegoat. Until today, the term "scapegoat" refers to someone who is made to bear the blame for another person's bad actions or for bad events that happen to another person. It is often much easier to blame someone else when something does not go right. However, it is actually more helpful and educational to look at a situation and see what can be learned: Why did the situation go wrong, and how can it be made better next time? Assessment and Evaluation, and taking responsibility, improve a situation, a relationship, and an organization. Nobody should ever be made to feel like the scapegoat.

 

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Order Your 2019-2020/5780 Calendar Diary TODAY!

The next edition of our Women's League Calendar Diary is now available for individual orders!

Purchase your copy here for $10! 

5780 Calendar Diary features:

• Shabbat and holiday listings
• Candle lighting times in cities in the United States, Canada, and Israel
• Prayers and berakhot
• Locations of sisterhoods in North America and Kehillot in Israel
• Original writing and artwork from our sisterhood members
• Chesed project ideas from Rabbi Ellen S. Wolintz-Fields

 

 

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Introduction to Mishnah Berakhot

Chapter One: Shema - Listen with Rabbi Gail Labovitz

 

Looking for ways to immerse yourself in Jewish study and text? Women's League for Conservative Judaism has just started a new program to enhance, enrich, and engage our Conservative Jewish Women in the 21st Century:

 

Listen, Pray, Think: A Journey through Mishnah Berakhot 

,
an 18-month study of the entire Tractate Masechet of

Mishnah Berakhot.

 

Individual and sisterhood members can register for this session here! 

 

The next session will be Chapter One: Shema - Listen with Rabbi Gail Labovitz on Monday, May 13, at 8:00 p.m., Eastern time.  Call-in information will be sent upon registering - Please refrain from joining the call until FIFTEEN MINUTES before the session. This program is open to REGISTERED individual Women's League and sisterhood members ONLY.  Not a member yet? Become an Individual Member here!  Make sure to register for all individual sessions in order to take the full course.

 

For more information or questions, please contact Rabbi Ellen S. Wolintz-Fields at ewolintz-fields@wlcj.org.

 

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Study with Scholars: Dr. Pamela Nadell

 

Join Women's League for the exclusive opportunity to learn from prominent Jewish scholars. These sessions will be held via Zoom online conference calls. Questions? Contact Program Coordinator 

Barbara Ezring at bezring@wlcj.org

 

On Tuesday, May 21, at 8:30 p.m., Eastern time, join Women's League for a session with Dr. Pamela S. Nadell, author of America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today. The book is currently available in digital and hardcover formats. Register for this session here! 

 

 

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Sign Up Now for Distance Workshops!

The next two Distance Workshops are  Wednesday, May 22, "Meeting your Sisterhood's Financial Needs (also of interest to Region Financial Teams)" and "Sisterhood 101" on Tuesday, June 18, both at 8:30 p.m., Eastern time.

REGISTER FOR BOTH HERE! 

 

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Save the Date!

WLCJ Convention 2020

Sisters Journeying Together

Sunday, July 12 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Hyatt Regency Schaumburg in Schaumburg, Illinois

(Suburban Chicago)

Keep checking www.wlcj.org for more details.

We look forward to seeing you there!