Just as healthy foods nourish us through the blood stream, so Jewish meditation nourishes our “soul stream.” Meditation can be transformative, taking us from the intellectual awareness of ourselves to a deeper spiritual practice that links us to Judaism in the most profound way. Each mitzvah, holy day and cycle of life has its own rhythm, nuance, taste and character. Jewish meditation is a practice of infusing their essence into our daily spiritual lives.

Ready to give it a try? Join us via Zoom (every Sunday from 2:30pm – 4pm. No previous meditation experience necessary.  This opportunity is free and open to all. Please contact Linda Wolf at linda@networktype.com for the online meeting information.

The Down Home Exhibit
The Down Home Exhibit is a traveling museum experience produced by Jewish Heritage of North Carolina.
The exhibit takes an experiential, values-oriented approach in telling the narrative of Jewish life in North Carolina. This traveling museum exhibition documented 400 years of Jewish presence. From its debut at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh in 2011, it traveled to the Cape Fear Museum in Wilmington, the Greensboro Historical Museum, and the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. The exhibit will now call Beth Israel home for the month of July.
An opening night reception will be held on Wednesday evening July 6th at 7:30pm and will feature historians Leonard Rogoff and Asheville’s own Sharon Fahrer.  Leonard is the president and lead historian for Jewish Heritage of North Carolina and is the author of Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina. Both Leonard and Sharon are experienced experts on Jewish Life in the South.
Also on display will be several artifacts from the Beth Israel archives on loan from the Ramsey Library at UNCA.

To learn more about the exhibit visit www.jewishnc.org.

Friday, July 1 

The Noon Study Group will NOT meet on 7/1.

We will resume meeting on 7/8. 

We began last Friday’s session by reviewing some of the  motivations Dara Horn ascribed to those who rescued Jews in chapter 8 of People Love Dead Jews: 1) they were possibly adrenaline junkies who saw the whole rescue process as an adventure worth taking a risk for; 2) their actions may have been instinctive, motivated by an altruistic gene; 3) it was the morally right thing to do; 4) they wanted to feel important (or, in Fry’s case, to “hang-out” with important people); 5) they may have been somehow deranged, bi-polar, unhinged.  We concluded that such motivations are multiply determined and impossible to pin down, even if the rescuers themselves try to account for them.  We also discussed reasons that those who were rescued may not have displayed their gratitude–“survivor guilt” that they were saved while others perished, they were humiliated by their dependence upon another for their survival, or they just wanted to put the whole unpleasant experience behind them.  We concluded our discussion of this long and ambiguous chapter by considering Horn’s point that, in addition to, or far from being inspirational, these stories “make painfully clear everything that might have been” because so many others were not rescued.

Our group then turned its attention to Chapter 9, about a digital mapping program that permits viewers to visit lost Jewish Communities (https://diarna.org/).  We all seemed to agree that Horn was far more straightforward, positive–and less snarky–in her portrait of an organization dedicated to using technology in “preserving places that apathy and malevolence have almost erased from the world.”  Horn’s interest in Diarna ties in with her preoccupation with the irretrievability of the past and with how Jewish and other traditions intend to protect their culture from oblivion, and, in the case of Diarna, to demonstrate that past cultures existed in a world that was far more heterogeneous than the world we observe today.

Following our discussion of Chapter 9, our group once again considered some of the potential ways of interpreting the provocative title of Horn’s essay collection.  People like dead Jews

• because they hate us/literally people like Jews dead

• because they are fascinated/obsessed with antiquity and wish to preserve our memory–or to exploit, by profiting from, our memory

• because they see Jews as metaphors/symbols of endurance, faith, freedom and/or they see our persecution as a sign of the depths to which civilization can sink

• because they can somehow objectify us and our experience in order to teach a powerful lesson.

When we resume meeting on July 8, we will look at Chapters 10 and 11, which deal with an exhibition on Auschwitz at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage

(https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/auschwitz/),

and on the figure of Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Now in its 23^rd year, our informal discussion group meets in person from 12-1 in CBI’s small chapel (with an option on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person).  All are welcome to attend regardless of their level of expertise.  Copies of Horn’s collection should be available in local bookstores and through the internet.  If you have questions, please contact Jay Jacoby at jbjacoby@uncc.edu.

Join us for Shabbat morning services in-person or via Zoom every Saturday morning at 9:30am.

Join the Zoom service by going to Our Virtual Community page here, then scroll down and click on the blue Saturday Morning Service button.

Jewish Law frames the abortion issue very differently than it is presented by contemporary debate. By looking at how our foundational texts regard the issue, we will be introduced to a perspective which is nuanced, compassionate, and surprisingly progressive for an ancient, patriarchal tradition.

Lunch is potluck and vegetarian, but we’ll have baked ziti available for those who RSVP by July 6.

Friday, July 1 

The Noon Study Group will NOT meet on 7/1.

We will resume meeting on 7/8. 

We began last Friday’s session by reviewing some of the  motivations Dara Horn ascribed to those who rescued Jews in chapter 8 of People Love Dead Jews: 1) they were possibly adrenaline junkies who saw the whole rescue process as an adventure worth taking a risk for; 2) their actions may have been instinctive, motivated by an altruistic gene; 3) it was the morally right thing to do; 4) they wanted to feel important (or, in Fry’s case, to “hang-out” with important people); 5) they may have been somehow deranged, bi-polar, unhinged.  We concluded that such motivations are multiply determined and impossible to pin down, even if the rescuers themselves try to account for them.  We also discussed reasons that those who were rescued may not have displayed their gratitude–“survivor guilt” that they were saved while others perished, they were humiliated by their dependence upon another for their survival, or they just wanted to put the whole unpleasant experience behind them.  We concluded our discussion of this long and ambiguous chapter by considering Horn’s point that, in addition to, or far from being inspirational, these stories “make painfully clear everything that might have been” because so many others were not rescued.

Our group then turned its attention to Chapter 9, about a digital mapping program that permits viewers to visit lost Jewish Communities (https://diarna.org/).  We all seemed to agree that Horn was far more straightforward, positive–and less snarky–in her portrait of an organization dedicated to using technology in “preserving places that apathy and malevolence have almost erased from the world.”  Horn’s interest in Diarna ties in with her preoccupation with the irretrievability of the past and with how Jewish and other traditions intend to protect their culture from oblivion, and, in the case of Diarna, to demonstrate that past cultures existed in a world that was far more heterogeneous than the world we observe today.

Following our discussion of Chapter 9, our group once again considered some of the potential ways of interpreting the provocative title of Horn’s essay collection.  People like dead Jews

• because they hate us/literally people like Jews dead

• because they are fascinated/obsessed with antiquity and wish to preserve our memory–or to exploit, by profiting from, our memory

• because they see Jews as metaphors/symbols of endurance, faith, freedom and/or they see our persecution as a sign of the depths to which civilization can sink

• because they can somehow objectify us and our experience in order to teach a powerful lesson.

When we resume meeting on July 8, we will look at Chapters 10 and 11, which deal with an exhibition on Auschwitz at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage

(https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/auschwitz/),

and on the figure of Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Now in its 23^rd year, our informal discussion group meets in person from 12-1 in CBI’s small chapel (with an option on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person).  All are welcome to attend regardless of their level of expertise.  Copies of Horn’s collection should be available in local bookstores and through the internet.  If you have questions, please contact Jay Jacoby at jbjacoby@uncc.edu.

Join us for Shabbat morning services in-person or via Zoom every Saturday morning at 9:30am.

Join the Zoom service by going to Our Virtual Community page here, then scroll down and click on the blue Saturday Morning Service button.