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The Jewish Family Services of Middlesex County (JFS) is seeking volunteers for its Kosher Meals on Wheels (KMOW) program to deliver meals to homebound seniors and check on their wellbeing. While volunteers for all routes are welcome, the need is especially great for those in northern Middlesex County. Deliveries are made Monday, Wednesday and Friday with pick-up in New Brunswick at approximately 10 a.m. Those subbing must be flexible in accepting assignments on short notice.
Volunteers and subs are also needed for the KMOW telephone reassurance program to make calls to check on of meal recipients on the non-delivery days of Tuesday and Thursday. Calls can be made from the callers own home. Background checks will be conducted on all volunteers for the protection of vulnerable seniors. For more information or to volunteer, call JFS at (732) 777-1940 or office@jfsmiddlesex.org.
Chris Farrar, a novelist and lay student of biblical archaeology who has lived and studied in Israel, will speak at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Feb 8 at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick about the Mysterious Origins of the God of Israel.
Although there were multiple deities among the ancient near Eastern gods only the God of Israel emerged. There was no precedent among the gods of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians or Canaanites or their modern civilizations. The program will explore how an obscure desert deity emerged to not only become the God of Israel, but also be worshipped by almost half the population of the Earth, including the one crucial event through which God emerged from the physical land of Israel and into the world at large.
Through his lectures and historical novels about the history of the Hebrew Bible, Farrar shares his insights through stories of ordinary people caught up in the world-shaping events of the Hebrew scriptures.
The cost is $15 for temple members and $18 for non-members. Registration is required at aemt.net.
In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II, American Jewish women took advantage of a rise in mass tourism that reduced travel costs all over the world. They traveled for a variety of reasons– to sightsee, visit relatives and homelands, study abroad, pursue international activism and work. But they also traveled to British Mandate Palestine in surprisingly large numbers.
On Monday Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. Melissa R. Klapper, a groundbreaking scholar of American Jewish women’s history, will discuss her forthcoming book, Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism, and American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism in a virtual program presented by Rutgers University’s Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life. The program, Not Just a Pleasure Trip: American Jewish Women’s Travel to Mandate Palestine in the Early 1900s, will explore how their decision to travel to Palestine was impossible to separate from their Jewishness, whether they defined that in religious, cultural, national, familial, ethnic, or historical terms. Palestine became a place where American Jewish women tested their ideals in a complex religious, social and political setting at times sparking new ways of thinking of themselves as Americans, women and Jews.
Klapper is professor of history and director of women’s and gender studies at Rowan University in Glassboro and a Rutgers University graduate. She is the author of numerous books about American Jewish women and the history of American childhood, including Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890 –1940, which won the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies.
The program is free but registration is required at bildnercenter.rutgers.edu.
In celebration of the United States’ semiquincentennial, the Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County in Freehold will hold a rescheduled opening reception for its new exhibit marking America’s 250th birthday from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 15. The exhibit, Jews in Colonial America: New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah and Monmouth County, will reimagine what life was like for the early Jewish residents of the American colonies. It will feature refreshments and speakers.
Monmouth County attracted Jewish settlers, typically Sephardi peddlers from New York, as early as 1720. The first resident, Isaac Emanuel, a Freehold merchant, appears in documents in the early 1720s.
Registration is required by calling the museum at (732) 252-6990
On its website jhmomc.org. Cost is $25 per person. For more information, contact Barry Haber at the museum or bhaber@jhmomc.org.
