Israel is turning 60 on May 8th. In commemoration of this historic milestone, a variety of activities designed to explore and celebrate this fascinating country and culture have been put together. Events occur at a variety of times and offer unique ways to approach Israel.

ALL WEEK (AND THE REMAINDER OF THE SEMESTER)

Israel Photo Gallery–360 photographs covering 18 facets of Israel in the Commons photo gallery spaces on the walls of the Mezzanine and 2nd floor / Upper Main Street of the Commons.

Israel DVD Collection–UMBC Hillel and the Department of Judaic Studies have just donated 40 DVD’s about Israel to the UMBC Library. These range from documentaries, to feature films, to tourism videos.

All Day–Israel culture tent on Erickson Field: Experience Israeli culture with Israeli sports, FREE FALAFEL, HOOKA, music, and dancing.

Monday, May 5

12 Noon–Dispelling the Myths: What do you think you know about Israel? Bring your questions or just listen in the Mosaic Center on the second floor of the Commons (2B23). There’ll be FREE PIZZA too.

4:30 PM–Tree planting in honor of Israel’s 60th on the Center Road side of Erickson Field. Shovels will be provided.

6:00 PM–UMBC Hillel’s annual meeting: open to the entire campus community. Celebrate our new board, our new student leaders, the school year, and great things to come. Dr. Nancy Young, Interim Vice President of Student Affairs will be our speaker and dessert will be provided in UC 312.

Tuesday, May 6

8:30 PM until 11 PM–Spice up your Tuesday night by learning and watching some Israeli Dancing. No experience or skill required/expected ;-). We’ll be teaching dances from the beginning. We’ll also be having ISRAELI SNACKS.

Wednesday, May 7

12 PM to 6 PM–Israel: A Nation is Born film screening in the Commons SportsZone.

6 PM to 8 PM–Memorial candle lighting for Israel’s fallen soldiers on the Commons Terrace.

Thursday, May 8

11:30 AM to 1:30 PM–Have some FREE CAKE and get a mini-Israeli flag on the Commons Terrace.

8 PM to 11 PM–PARTY! Join other students in the Commons SportsZone from 5 until 10 PM as part of 13 Thursdays of Culture for a party celebrating Israel’s 60th birthday! There will be food (FREE FALAFEL), music, dancing, games, great conversations, and guided tours of the Israel Photo Gallery in the Commons.

6 PM– FREE SHABBAT DINNER celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary and honoring our graduating seniors in the Interfaith Center (on center road across from Erickson Field). Shabbat: a Sweet Time is sponsored by the Nathan and Lillian Weinberg Family Foundation.

Mazal tov to the new Board of the UMBC Jewish Student Union! Matthew Glassman
is the President; Justin Eisenstadt the Vice President for Programming; Joan Heller,
Secretary; Erik Waserstein, Treasurer; Jordan Kritt, Shabbat Chair; Heather Glovinsky
and Scott Swick, FYSH (Frist Year Student of Hillel) co-chairs; Leo Serebreni and
Joe Spekterman, Jewish Learning co-chairs; Joey Zelenak and Igor Shusterman, Tzedek
(social justice) co-chairs; and Lauren Romano and Beni Simon, social co-chairs.
Natalie Kuperman has been appointed Senior Adviser as well!

Did you ever wonder how UMBC Hillel events get planned? Have you ever had a great idea for a Hillel event but didn’t know how to get started? Want to gain leadership experience and be in charge of spending UMBC Hillel’s programming money: Then run for The Jewish Student Union board!

Schedule of elections:

Nominations due Friday April 25, 2008 at 12 noon to nikoo1@umbc.edu (nomination form follows).

Elections for Executive Board and Committee Chairs by paper in the Commons opposite Jazzman’s April 28 until May 1 from 11 AM until 2 PM (absentee ballots can be arranged with the election commissioner, Nikki Raoofian, nikoo1@umbc.edu) and are due May 1 at 2 PM.

To run for and or vote for a JSU board position a candidate must have attended at least two events (this includes Shabbat dinners, Jewish Learning, Sukkot celebrations, the Hanukkah party, etc.)

Create fun creative interesting Jewish life programs at UMBC!
Being on the Board is a GREAT meaningful leadership experience… plus, it’s fun!
You can make your dreams and ideas for UMBC Hillel into a reality.

POSITIONS AVAILABLE:

Executive Board

President: Shall preside over all executive board meetings and over all general meetings. Shall coordinate and supervise the operation of the organization as a whole. Shall make decisions and set policies for the organization when the executive board is unavailable, in times of crisis, emergency, or urgency. Shall be chief spokesperson and representative of UMBC Hillel student. Shall Meet regularly with the Director.

Vice President for Programming: Shall assist the President with his/her responsibilities. Shall assume Presidential responsibilities in absence or vacancy of the President’s position. Shall be the coordinator of all programming of UMBC Hillel and work to centralize programming of Jewish life on campus.

Vice President for Marketing: Shall be the outside voice of UMBC Hillel and shall be in charge of all marketing of Hillel. Shall be in charge of marketing for UMBC Hillel events using any means (e.g. flyers, evites, etc).

Treasurer: Shall handle all UMBC Hillel student board financial records and transactions with the approval of the executive board. Shall be required to give a financial report at every board meeting or at the request of the board members. Shall prepare and sign requisitions and business transactions with the approval of the President. Shall maintain a general ledger. Shall follow SGA policies in creating and submitting a budget.

Secretary: Shall be responsible for the student board minutes of all executive meetings and of general body meetings when needed. Shall be responsible for keeping a file of the typed minutes and making sure that executive board members receive the minutes at each executive board meeting. Shall be responsible for the clerical duties of UMBC Hillel whenever deemed necessary by the President. Shall maintain the blackboard site of UMBC Hillel and shall be primarily responsible for organizing the calendar

Vice President for Marketing: Shall be the outside voice of UMBC Hillel and shall be in charge of all marketing of Hillel. Shall be in charge of marketing for UMBC Hillel events using any means (e.g. flyers, evites, etc).

Committee Chairs

Shabbat Chair(s) the Shabbat chair(s) shall be responsible for the Shabbat committee, which shall be responsible for planning and running Shabbat Celebration each week.

FYSH Chair(s) Schedule and oversee FYSH meetings. • Recruit interested freshmen to join the FYSH committee. • Provide guidance and support to the FYSH committee and its activities. • Serve as a resource and mentor to freshmen. •Be responsible to help committee plan two large events one in the fall and one in the spring. •Meet regularly with the Engagement Professional.

Social Chair(s) the social chair(s) shall be responsible for the Social committee, which shall be responsible for planning one major social event open to the entire UMBC community per semester, plus smaller social events throughout the year.

Jewish Learning Chair(s)- Shall Schedule and run all Jewish Learning committee meetings. Plan and execute at least 4 Jewish learning events per semester. • Meet regularly with the Director. • Provide weekly Jewish learning opportunities for Jewish students at UMBC.

Tzedek (social justice) chair(s)—The tzedek chair(s) shall be responsible for coordinating social justice opportunities on campus, in the larger Jewish community, and in the greater world.

Nomination Form (you may nominate yourself)

(please copy and paste into an email to the election commissioner, Nikki Raoofian (nikoo1@umbc.edu), by Friday, April 25 at 12 noon.

Your name:

Name of person you wish to nominate:
Email of person you wish to nominate:
Phone of person you wish to nominate:
Current Class Status of person you wish to nominate:

Position you wish to nominate the person for:

What experience or qualifications does this nominee have? Why is the nominee the best person for the job?

Any additional thoughts or comments?

Purim and Shabbat in Odessa
Baltimore Students Arrive in Odessa!
From Kyiv to Berditchev and back again
Привет from Kyiv!
UMBC HillelStudents Arrive in Kiev
Kosher for Passover Meal Plan

I understand that Thursday night’s Purim celebration at Odessa’s Migdal JCC was particularly meaningful to our students. Between the puppet theatre, singing and dancing, and the attention to detail in the hand-made decorations, people were blown away by the mind, heart, and soul that went into the celebration.

On Friday morning, our students had a tour of the new Jewish campus (some would say akin to the Owings Mills JCC) being built in the center of the city. There will be a health center, community center for Hesed and Hillel, and there continue to be negotiations in the community at who gets what space. Students noticed the work of a Baltimore painter hanging there as well.

The group visited Odessa Hesed and played piano, sang and danced with the clients there. They talked about Purim and Shabbat as well. Friday’s Purim celebration was at the circus which was an amalgam of local performers with classic circus acts. Friday afternoon, the group went to visit Warm Houses, a program in which one person opens his or her home to a group for a social event in the Jewish community. They visited an older house on French Boulevard, a well-known part of town on the Black Sea. The owner volunteered to open the house weekly before Shabbat for people in the community. About twenty people gather there every Friday before Shabbat to spent time together, eat together, and sing together. Our students were struck by the variety of backgrounds of people there—tour guides, filmmakers, and doctors among them. The visitors to the Warm House were particularly impressed when David recited some Pushkin by heart for the group.

After returning to the hotel to freshen up, the group went to Café Hillel where they met a smaller group of students from Odessa, got to know each other, and then welcomed Shabbat together. Our students gave a beautiful Chanukah menorah and some other gifts to the students of Odessa Hillel from our lay leadership here in Baltimore. Baltimore students and Odessa students welcomed Shabbat together. Two of our students spoke about the weekly Torah portion for the group.

Students returned to the hotel and hung out with new and old friends alike.

Our students have been getting to know about six students from Odessa Hillel particularly well as they have been spending the whole weekend with our students, so most everything you’re reading here includes both the students from Baltimore as well as their peers in Odessa.

On Shabbat morning three students went to services at a local synagogue while the rest of the group walked around the center of Odessa. They were struck at the contrast between some of the impoverished people they had met the day before and the high prices of clothing and other goods they saw in local stores and malls.

Everyone met back at the Lithuanian synagogue for lunch, at which about 300 people were present, mostly teenagers and many Israelis. They ate a delicious homemade lunch before walking around the city a little more. After resting, they returned to Odessa Hillel where they had a Havdalah ceremony (separating Shabbat from the rest of the week), hang out at the Israeli cultural center, watched a movie, went out for dinner, and headed out to a local disco and danced for a couple of hours before heading back to the hotel.

Somehow after all of that our students managed to wake up before 9 AM this morning, visited and helped clean up the Holocaust memorial, and had a relaxing pizza lunch. This afternoon their plan is to walk around Odessa, do some souvenir shopping, and then head to the Opera to see Verdi’s Rigoletto this evening before they head to a big Purim party at a local nightclub.
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This morning our students woke up around 4:45 AM so that they could head to the airport an hour later to board their flight to Odessa. They arrived right on time and were instantly struck by Baltimore’s sister city’s beauty and mild climate. People commented how laid-back it seemed and how much greenery there is; those who had been elsewhere in Europe compared it to a variety of capital cities.

The group checked into the hotel, which Tanya described as a classic Soviet hotel that has been renovated, rooms painted with upbeat colors. After a few minutes to freshen up, the group met with Professor Volodymyr Dubovyk who teaches political science and international relations at Odessa National University from which he received his Ph.D. in 1996. His talk was dynamic and there was lots of time for questions that our students had been saving up throughout their trip so far, in particular about the economic and cultural situation in Ukraine, and the role of the Orange Revolution in contemporary society.

Sasha, the Director of Odessa Hillel, joined our students for a three hour tour of the city and our students felt quickly at home. The last stop of their tour was the JCC, after which about eight Odessa Hillel students joined our students. After some getting-to-know you games, they donned funny hats headed to synagogue to usher in the holiday of Purim. The synagogue was packed with people including many young people. Some of the most popular costumes were fairy tale characters.

After a quick stop at the hotel to pick up some masks, costumes, and more hats, our students went out to dinner with Odessa Hillel students as a kosher restaurant that I am told was delicious. Students from Baltimore and Odessa toasted to the holiday together and headed out to the Migdal JCC for a community-wide intergenerational Purim celebration.
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Everyone woke up early this morning to drive toward the periphery of Kiev
around 100 miles to the town of Berditchev. Berditchev is a shtetl that
has been known in particular for one of its leaders, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak
(1740–1810), who is an important figure in the development of Chasidic
Judaism and is particularly known for his Torah commentary, Kedushas Levi.

In Berditchev, the group visited Hesed, had some long conversations with
older people (the fact that half the group speaks Russian and translated for the rest of the group today was great) and even participated
in one gentleman’s 80th birthday party. Our students and the people they
met asked great questions of one another. They also visited some
homebound members of the Berditchev community, one woman with a
neuromuscular disorder and one woman who has been confined to her
apartment for three years because her building does not have an elevator
and she cannot use the stairs.

The group visited the old Berditchev synagogue where Levi Yitzchak taught
and learned about him and the history of the community and visited his
grave and then saw the synagogue that Chabad has built in Berditchev,
which is staffed by a rabbi and his wife from Israel—both of whom
appreciated that a few members of our group speak Hebrew and reflected how
refreshing it felt for them to speak with them in Hebrew. They ate lunch
at the home of the rabbi and his wife before heading back toward Kiev.

On the way back toward Kiev, one student who desperately needed to use the
restroom was disconcerted to find a “hole in the ground” at a gas station
on the way back to Kiev and said she would continue to wait until they
returned to the city. As I understand the story, she stopped at the first
place she could, the Sofi’iski Sobor (the Church of St. Sophia, the most
famous church in Ukraine and probably one of the most well known for
Orthodox Christians world-wide), she quickly paid the admissions fee—not
toward the end of seeing the famous mosaic icons—but toward the end of
using the restroom (no pun intended), and arrived in the nick of time only
to discover—yes, you guessed it, another hole in the ground.

In the early evening, the group had a guided tour of Independence Square,
the site of the Orange Revolution just over three years ago and then
walked around Kreshchatik. This evening, the weather, which had been
relatively mild, became a bit chillier in Kiev, which was a good excuse
for most of the group to buy fur hats (rumor has it that there will be
some fun pictures of this when the group returns or internet access is
found).

The group joined peers in Kiev and from Chicago to have dinner at the King
David kosher restaurant before heading back to the hotel. Although they
have to wake up early tomorrow, I believe they’re staying up late hanging out with each other and new friends.
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Our students were up early this morning in Kiev and headed out to see the Chernobyl Museum which chronicles the events around the nuclear reactor meltdown from 1986. After the museum, they visited Kiev Hesed. Hesed (Hebrew for “lovingkindness”) is the name of an organization that operates in various cities in Ukraine that connects the elderly to one another and to the Jewish community. Our students brought presents to the community there, ate lunch with them, and met coordinators of different departments and programs there to learn the needs of the community. Kiev Hesed also houses a pre-school for young children who also do joint programming with the elderly, such as this week’s Purim celebration.

The Kiev subway system is known for it’s beautiful station, and not only did our students see one of the deepest and most interestingly decorated subway stations in Kiev (Dorgozhychi), but imagine their surprise when one of Ukraine’s most popular bands was filming a music video there as well!

After the visit to the subway, our students joined Chicago Hillel students for a visit to Babi Yar, the area in Kiev where around 100,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis and collaborators beginning in September, 1941. Together, all of the students lit candles and held a memorial service for victims of the Shoah, the Holocaust.

Before leaving that part of town, our students toured the Podol synagogue and visited its matzoh factory which supplies all of Ukraine before continuing to have a walk around the city highlighting sites and personalities of Jewish interest such as Golda Meir. After some hanging out in Kiev’s city center, our students joined again with peers from Chicago and Kiev for dinner, at which the guest of honor was the head of Hillel for Moldova, Belarus’, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan who gave them a broad perspective on Jewish student life in the Former Soviet Union.

After a quick trip to a local supermarket to get a sense of local life, the students went out bowling for a couple of hours before they returned to the hotel at nearly 11:30 PM.

Wow, what a day!
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Our UMBC Hillel Goes to Ukraine participants arrived together just a few minutes late to Kiev’s Borispol’s airport around noon today. Although there was a slight delay in the airport, by the time our students sailed through customs and headed into town for a tour of the city. After seeing some churches (Ukraine was the locus of the proliferation of Orthodox Christianity among the Slavs late in the 10th Century), they visited Kiev Hillel and met the director of Kiev Hillel.

They settled into the Jewish Home, their home in Ukraine these first three nights of the trip. The Jewish Home hosts visitors to the Jewish community and some locals as well. Our students are joined at the Jewish Home by a group of Hillel students from Chicago as well (who will remain in Kiev, Chicago’s sister city), so they will get to some activities together with their local host in Kiev.
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With Spring Break fast approaching, teachers are trying to fit in test after test and a seemingly endless pile of assignments, do you need a mini-break before you can finally get away from it all for a week?

Take some time for yourself to kickback, relax, and enjoy delicious tea. Hang out with friends and maybe make some new ones.

This is a therapeutic you won’t want to miss. Be at the Commons across from Jazzmans at 3pm on Tuesday.

Any questions? Email Tanya, UMBC Hillel’s JCSC Fellow.