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Music is a powerful tool, and it’s one that 25-year-old Michael Greenstone uses when he teaches students at Sinai Temple’s Religious School about Judaism. Greenstone sees song as a way to make Jewish education more entertaining, more adhesive, and more enriching.
No permission from the legal guardians of the children in this video was obtained. Contact Emily with questions.
Triumphant and jarring, the shofar is a musical instrument used in Jewish rituals since biblical times. In modern Judaism, the shofar is used most commonly on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two holidays observed in the fall, as a call to worship.
In this piece, Rabbi Norman Klein, the leader of Sinai Temple in Champaign, talks about shofar tradition, the sounds they make, and an unlucky shofar of his own.
Listen: The Shofar (without voiceover)
Listen: The Shofar (with voiceover)
Only 1,500 Jewish residents live full-time in Champaign-Urbana, according to Rogerio Cukierman. Rogierio lived in seven cities on four continents before settling down in Champaign, the smallest city of all.
A Brazilian Jew, he and his wife, Karin, live their lives through the lenses of multiple minority identities. They discuss how they raise their family at the intersection of these identities: Jewish and secular, Brazilian and American, Portuguese and English.
View Intersections in a larger map
After escaping from slavery in Egypt, the early Jews, or Israelites, wandered through the desert for 40 years on the way to the Promised Land. The Jewish holiday Sukkot celebrates the fact that God provided shelter for the Israelites in the form of small, temporary huts. Each hut is called a Sukkah, the singular or Sukkot.
Today, the holiday focuses on the appreciation of nature and community. For seven or eight days in the fall, Jewish people around the world build Sukkot, eat meals in their Sukkot, even sleep in their Sukkot. This year, Sukkot was celebrated from Oct. 12 to 19.
This audio slideshow explores the ways Jews in Champaign and Urbana celebrate the harvest-time holiday. I focused on three people: Karin Cukierman-Zingerevitz, a Religious school teacher at Sinai Temple; Naftali Rothstein, an Orthodox rabbi living in Champaign; and Craig Koslofsky, an Urbana resident who built a Sukkah on his back porch.
