A holiday craft fair for adults and a fun show for youngsters by Karen Rostoker-Gruber with prizes, stories, puppets, singing, magic and more will be held Sunday, Dec. 7. Shopping will be available 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and children’s activities from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick. Rostoker-Gruber is author of children’s books, many of them Jewish-themed, including Don’t Invite a Bear Inside for Hanukkah and Farmer Kobi’s Hanukkah Match. The program is being jointly sponsored by PJ Library, run and funded by the Jewish Federation in the Heart of New Jersey.
In addition to children’s activities there will be a hot cocoa bar and a variety of unique handmade crafts to give as gifts by a number of vendors. The program is free. For more information, contact rabbisec@aemt.info.
A Hanukah and Yiddish concert, sing-along and lecture featuring Diane Cypkin and pianist Lena Panfilova will be held Sunday, Dec. 7 at 2 p.m. at the Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County in Freehold. In addition to joining with Cypin in singing Hanukah songs, she will discuss and sing Yiddish folk songs, or freylekhs, that are frequent additions to many Jewish gatherings.
She is a professor emerita from Pace University and has worked in English-speaking theater as both a singer and actor. Cypin has also presented the Molly Picon and Songs of WWII shows throughout the tri-state area.
Panfilova received her musical training at the Moscow Conservatory of Music and has performed as an accompanist and taught in the tri-state area.
Admission is $20 for members and $25 for non-members. Children 13 and under are free. For more information or to make reservations, call the museum at (732) 252-6990 or go to jhmomc.org.
What is a Jewish book and how did it evolve over time? Rutgers University’s Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life will provide answers to that question during a virtual program, From Clay Tablet to Digital Tablet: The History of Jewish Books at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 8. The program will be conducted by Joseph A. Skloot, the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History at Hebrew Union College in New York. He will discuss the how Jewish ideas have been transmitted over the centuries from oral traditions to handwritten manuscripts and then to printed books to today’s computer mode.
Skloot is a scholar of Jewish culture and religious thought in the early-modern and modern periods whose work explores the history of Hebrew books, Jewish-Christian relations, the development of Jewish law, and Reform Jewish theology. He is currently working on two projects: a biography of three generations of the ibn Yahya family who were exiled from Portugal and became leaders of the sixteenth-century Italian Jewish community; and a study of the ways that technologies of printing and digitization have influenced how Jewish thinkers understand what it means to be a human being and a Jew.
The program is being co-sponsored by the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. The program is free but registration is required at bidnercenter.rutgers.edu.
International human rights lawyer Anne Bayefsky will discuss The UN Versus the Jewish State: Jew Hatred on a Global Scale, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 13 at Congregation Etz Ahaim in Highland Park for the Jewish Community Forum of Raritan Valley. She is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, a UN-accredited non-governmental organization, as well as the author and editor of 11 books and a regular contributor to media outlets in North America and Israel. Bayefsky has 200,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and is the leading expert on global antisemitism at the United Nations. She has served as a delegate of many organizations, including the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and the American Society of International Law, at UN conferences worldwide for four decades. Bayefsky has been presented with the Champion of Israel Award by UJA Women, the Ben Hecht Award for Outstanding Journalism by the Zionist Organization of America and the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research, which is Canada’s premier human rights fellowship.
For more information about the program go to www.jcforumrv.org . The forum is a community grassroots initiative and donations of any amount are appreciated. Voluntary donations may be sent to Congregation Ohr Torah Gemach Fund, 48 Edgemount Road, Edison, NJ 08817 with Jewish Community Forum written in the memo line.
