Get ready for a UMBC first as we celebrate the Jewish New Year on campus like never before.

All you need to know is at tendaysofawesomeness.org

On May 2nd, UMBC’s JSU will be touring Philadelphia. Led by Jordan Kritt and Morey Rosner, we will be visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art (http://www.philamuseum.org/), the renowned synagogue Beth Shalom (http://www.bethsholomcongregation.org/synagogue/), along with much of historic Philadelphia. Aside from appreciating the more famous side of Philadelphia, this trip aims to incorporate the Jewish legacy of the city as well.

This trip costs $5.00.

If your 21 or over and are willing to drive, you don’t have to pay the $5.00. Please contact either Jordan or Morey for more information.

The Jewish Student Union election is now over and the ballots have been counted. I’d like to thank everyone who voted for their participation. We received a total of 55 votes both in person and online. Without further ado here are the results:

President: Lena Salins
Vice President: Morey Rosner
Treasurer: Morgan Russo
Secretary: Sarah Sexton
Marketing Director: Liz Scott
Recruitment Director: David Sivak
Programming Director: Adam Gerber
Shabbat Chair: Sam Khuvis
Commuter Chair: Adina Goldwasser
Israel Chair: Amalia Mark
Philanthropy Chair: Zena Renteria
Policy Chair: Dan Stone

Our community is grieving at the loss of Beni Simon, who died this past Shabbat.  Beni was a student at UMBC for two years and was taking time off from school this year.  Beni was active in the Jewish community on campus.  He frequently led services on Friday nights and introduced some favorite melodies.  He was an AEPi brother and has been credited for other AEPi brothers joining UMBC’s Jewish fraternity.  He served as the Jewish Student Union’s learning chairperson last school year and could often be seen on campus having a intense conversation or debate about some matter of Jewish tradition or philosophy.  He was also passionate about getting other students involved in the Jewish community.

Shiva (seven days of mourning) observance continues at Beni’s family’s home, 2903 Oakton Court in Pikesville through Monday morning.  Religious services will take place Thursday evening at 7:20 PM, Friday morning at 7:35 AM, Friday afternoon at 1:45 PM, Saturday night at 8:30 PM, Sunday morning at 9 AM, Sunday evening at 7:30 PM, and Monday morning at 7:35 AM.

If you are interested in helping organize or participate in a memorial service on campus, please email Rabbi Jason Klein at rabbijason@umbc.edu.

So many of us are still in shock at this loss for the Simon family, for Beni’s friends, and for the whole community, so we thought this space could be one way in which members of the extended UMBC Hillel family could respond to Beni’s death by expressing their thoughts and their feelings.

Just click “comments” below to add your own thoughts.

I can’t believe it’s Sunday night—rather Monday morning at 1:20 AM.  This morning we had a relatively leisurely breakfast and then headed out for shopping near the opera.  We learned that bargaining for more than 10% is not the norm; some of us felt challenged to try to go beyond 10% but in general I think we found the Matrioshka dolls, fur hats, alabaster, and Soviet (simulated?) relics to be reasonably priced.

After a quick to-go lunch on our van, we drove to the Migdal JCC, which is the oldest Jewish cultural center in the Former Soviet Union.  We joined youth group counselors and spent an hour preparing creative pre-Passover commercials which were then filmed.  We had a tour of the building, saw arts & crafts, the library, classrooms, and even a yoga class.

We returned to the hotel where we packed up our bags and then joined together to write some thank-you notes and have a closing conversation, a follow-through plan, and an evaluation.  By 7 PM we were on our way to the lobby to go out to a celebratory dinner with our Odessan peers back the same (“Hevron”) restaurant at which we started last Monday evening.

After dinner, we presented our thank-you notes and presents and then headed out for a reprise of Wednesday’s karaoke evening.   This time, we were even less shy and concluded the night with “American Pie.”  We just walked back to the hotel with our Odessan friends and had a rich, teary good-bye wit hopes to see them soon—here, Baltimore, or anywhere else in peace.

What a full two days it has been.  After breakfast on Friday morning, we met with three members of the Odessa Ghetto and Concentration Camp Survivors’ Association.  While all three of them live in Odessa now, two of them were born in other towns outside this city but one was in Odessa at the time the German and Romanian armies occupied it during World War II.  We heard each of their stories, horrors and heroism included, and learned in particular about how difficult it was for Holocaust survivors in the USSR to re-acclimate into Soviet society after the war because there was often an assumption that in order to survive they must have been collaborators with the Nazis and, therefore, enemies of the Soviet Union.  After some huge and photos, we joined our Odessan peers and met at the city park where the Holocaust memorial and monument to Righteous Gentiles is to do a clean up.  We picked up trash, raked the ground, and cleaned the monument statues themselves.

After a short reflection and memorial ceremony, we headed to Chesed at Beit Grand, where we visited a group of elderly who were doing a pre-Shabbat “Kabbalat Shabbat” celebration, learning about Shabbat together.  After prayers over candles, wine, and challah, several talented singers from the group of elderly performed for us including one elderly man who turned 70 years old on Friday.  Then, we all joined together dancing to traditional Eastern European Jewish folk melodies and a few of us convinced the “birthday boy” to sit down in a chair which in which we then held him aloft amidst a circle dance to “Hava Nagila.”  Finally, we presented the game “Apples to Apples” to the group—the Yiddish edition—and explained that we play it on Shabbat and encouraged them to try it too.  We admired some of the beautiful beading artwork of one of the groups at Chesed and were given one piece of work to bring home with us, inscribed with a message of appreciation by its artist.  Perhaps the most moving part of the afternoon when two women sang an original song written in Odessa in appreciation of the Odessa-Baltimore relationship called “Odessa-Baltimore.”  Its words mean:

The world is great to live and sing, when you have somebody to think of.
And if we can together pray, tears and sorrow go away.

Odessa-Baltimore, from heart to heart we talk.
The words fly through the mist, and find you overseas.
Today you are guests here, tomorrow we are there.
Our friendship is stronger than a diamond.

A lot of grief we’ve over come, we have been thrown up and down.
But when you spread your friendly hand, the things get better that were bad.

Odessa-Baltimore, from heart to heart we talk.
The words fly through the mist, and find you overseas.
Today you are guests here, tomorrow we are there.
Our friendship is strong than a diamond.

You can imagine that we were  moved—to say the least.

After lunch, we returned to the hotel to prepare for Shabbat.  We were dropped at the Rozmaryn restaurant where we had been once before, only this time it was ready for a Shabbat service, Odessa Hillel style, followed by dinner around many tables put together all into one with our peers from Odessa Hillel.  I tried to say one line of Kiddush in Russian and we ate a delicious Shabbat dinner.  After dinner, we taught our friends from Odessa how to play Apples to Apples—this time the Jewish English version, which was a lot of fun.

After dinner, we walked back to the hotel and enjoyed an Oneg Shabbat—a fun time together—together with an American woman named Violeta whose parents came to New York from Odessa.  She is the Ralph Goldman Fellow of the JDC this year and has spent several months in the Odessa Jewish community.  Some people headed to bed, others hung out later.

In the morning, half the group was up a little earlier to head to the Tikvah Ohr synagogue (it is Orthodox and Lithuanian style) for services.  The rest of the group joined us there for lunch.  From food to speeches to how we were received, it was an intense experience for a whole variety of reasons.  After lunch, we began another walking tour of Odessa, this time with Jewish angle.  We saw the homes of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Shalom Alechem as well as old synagogues, banks, and a lovely sculpture garden connected to Odessa’s tradition of humor.

Back at Beit Grand, our Odessan friends greeted us with snacks and a fun Odessa/Jewish trivia and challenge game for us, which lasted until nearly Shabbat was over.  After a reflection on the past couple of days and discussion of Tzedakah, we said Havdalah, the ceremony distinguishing Shabbat from the rest of the week, and then went to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

After changing clothing at the hotel, we returned to the new Odessa Hillel space that we have been helping to renovate for a fuller Havdalah celebration and then headed out to a club for some music and dancing.  Finally, we just took a nice long walk home at the end of the day.

Another one of my favorite things that has happened in the past few days is that a few family members and dear friends of a few of our students have come to visit them, some from Odessa, and some from Kyiv (an overnight train away).  Most of these folks haven’t seen their friends/grandchildren/nieces and nephews since they were infants, so this was a particularly special part of this journey in the past couple of days.

How refreshing for me to say “good evening” when it is actually still “PM” here and not a few hours after midnight.

This morning we woke up and, following breakfast, divided into three groups to visit clients of Chesed here in Odessa.  Each of them was a single elderly woman without family around, so we were able to help them with cleaning and some other work around their houses.

For lunch we were back at the Beit Grand JCC (if Odessa is our home-away-from-home, Beit Grand is starting to feel like our Living Room) and we were joined by two leaders and two members of Odessa’s Reform Jewish community who spoke with us.  At the conclusion of lunch, we relaxed for a few minutes and then had a reflection conversation that focused on how we allocate limited resources in communities and who and how we decide to help.

In the afternoon we returned to Odessa Hillel to complete the work we were doing to renovate the space which included some scraping of paint, sanding, and cleaning the floor.  We were greeted by a familiar face since one of the students who was there was in Baltimore last year when some Odessa Hillel students visited our community.

After a snack on the van on the way back to the hotel and an hour to freshen up, we rode to the Odessa opera, joined several of our Odessan friends, and watched and listened to the first two acts of Tosca, complete with Italian lyrics and Ukrainian super-titles.   In my humble opinion, the music was beautiful.  And after a tasty vegetable and fish dinner, we returned back to the hotel for one of our earlier nights.

I am thankful to report that all our participants seem healthy and happy, learning a lot about this community and more about themselves.

Yet again, it’s been a very full day.  We began this morning with a yummy breakfast, similar to yesterday, and then headed out, this time by foot, with our first daylight view of the Black Sea,  early to continue our work renovating Odessa Hillel’s new apartment.  We primed, painted, and spackled.  Wow, did we spackle.  Bre mixed spackle cement like smoothies while Luanna tried to keep a “Trading Spaces”-like video record of the experience.  After a few hours of work, we headed by van back to the hotel to pick up a few things and change our clothes and then returned to the Beit Grand JCC for lunch (chicken or tuna & sardine sandwiches today with potato salad and pastries) followed by a reflection about helping those in need and comparing our sense of obligations to different communities, Jewish and otherwise.  After our conversation we boarded vans to visit Warm Homes, neighborhood-based, identity/interest-based social groups for the elderly.  Half of the group visited a group of community volunteers and half visited Righteous Gentiles and survivors and children of survivors of the Odessa Ghetto.  We were all honored to hear stories.  Jeff connected with one elderly woman in particular and they had a great conversation at the end of our visit.

After our Warm Homes visit, we did a two-hour walking tour of the Odessa city center.  We walked down and up the Potemken steps, and saw statues and mansion of city planners and dreamers. Rich and I were curious about the extent of Odessa’s history as a duty-free zone and compared it to Libertarian visions of New Hampshire.  After an unusual encounter with an accordion player whom I asked to play “Tumbalalaika,” we headed from City Hall to the Opera, where we expect to be tomorrow night for Puccini’s Tusca. Igor tried to take some nice pictures of the group with his camera.  We stopped back at the hotel, gathered up our hundreds of pounds of donations for the JDC, and then rode to dinner at Rozmaryn, where the participants generally loved the food (this might be my favorite meal so far; as it’s all been delicious, I’m not quite sure).   

At the end of dinner we were joined by our Odessa peers, by now friends—my colleague Sasha and her studnts Genia, Tanya, Kristina, Yulia, Kola, and Maksim and they took us briefly to an Irish pub (we are several hours east of Ireland today as opposed to several hours west but the “green” day was noted) and then spent a couple of hours at a Karaoke bar where Mila and Hannah brought the house down.  Yuri sang Karaoke for the first time ever and returned for an encore with a song in Russian.

On the way home (just about an hour ago), Sam made some observations comparing what he thought might not be popular music in Ukraine based on what he saw on-line to what actually seemed popular while Max had a conversation with Nikolai, our guard. Margaret reviewed the Cyrillic alphabet with other participants and coached them sounding out words from storefronts on the way back home.

Wow!  What a day.  The hour is late (or is it early?) and the day has been full.

This morning we were up eating breakfast of bread, butter, yogurt, eggs, fruit, cereal, blini filled with sweet cheese, and orange juice and then were joined by Inna from JDC Odessa and sat in the hotel’s conference room with Irina Zobroskaya from JDC in the Southern Ukraine region to learn more about how JDC supports the Jewish community of Odessa.  We learned about the size and trends of the Jewish population as well as the different programs that the Jewish community provides, from Chesed (social welfare, largely for the elderly) and synagogues to the two JCC’s (that stands for “Jewish Cultural Center” here, by the way).  We also began a conversation about Jewish religion vs. Jewish identity that continued to be a theme throughout the day.

After our JDC briefing, we boarded our van and drove to Beit Grand, the new JCC campus.  We were all blown away by the beauty, creativity, and size of the space which included much original artwork, both professional, and created by clients of the JCC.  We visited Chesed at the JCC and, with Igor translating the director, learned about social welfare for the elderly in the Odessa region and the thousands upon thousands of people that Chesed serves from Odessa.  We learned that about 90% of these elderly are college graduates.  We visited a Yiddish club where clients chatted, sang, and danced with us.  One played the violin which was a particular treat.  Most of the clients read Yiddish, so—lucky for us and them—we thought to bring the Yiddish version of “Apples to Apples” and hope to teach them to play it in a few days.

Mila and Margaret were complimented on their Russian speaking; Jeff and Yuri were quite the dancers with the clients as well.  Gila and I tried to sing to “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof as it was played on the piano.  I’d estimate that we remembered about half the lyrics—not so bad.

We moved from Chesed to the new pre-kindergarten facility at the JCC, with its state-of-the-art toys and supplies.  We toured the classrooms and visited with the kids.  They range in age from 20 months to four years, more or less.  Sam (who is a math major) taught one kindergarten student how to use a tape measure while Hannah quickly became a celebrity running around with many of the students.

We went to a classroom in the JCC for a lunch of Piroshki, tuna, salads, drinks, and pastries and were joined by Professor Vladimir Dubovik for a talk on the political and economic situation in Ukraine.  He was a great teacher and touched on issues of language, identity, power, anti-Semitism, and corruption in his conversation with us.  Rich asked him about Ukraine’s relationship with the United States and Israel which many think has not reached its full potential yet.

After lunch we set to do some work at the JCC.  Some students did some gardening to add some greenery to the kindergarten play balcony area.  Others made Jewish symbols out of pottery with which the school area could be decorated.  Bre made a “Shalom” plaque in Hebrew and a menorah.  Later, Maxim had the opportunity to use both Russian and Hebrew with the clay instructor, who is originally from Moscow but who has also lived in Jerusalem.

After the pottery-making session today (at which Luanna particularly enjoyed the clay challah–in honor of Challah for Hunger), we headed back to the van and rode to Odessa Hillel’s new apartment and started some renovation.  We tore out old shelves, cleaned up debris, swept the floor, scraped off peeling paint to prepare walls for spackling, and painted primer.  We will continue tomorrow morning.  We returned to the hotel and prepared to go out for Ukrainian food at a fancy Ukrainian-style restaurant on the shore of the Black Sea.  We ate pickled vegetables, zucchini with dill, mushroom soup (with very pretty sour cream garnish inside) bread and garlic butter, potato and cheese vereniki, smoked salmon, cheese, gefilte fish, and mushroom and potato zrazey (and more).  Dessert was sweet blini with cream and orange topped with cranberry jam.

We returned to the hotel, picked up a few groceries at the 24-hour store next door, and reflected on the day, our experience so far, and on the idea of identity, Jewish identity, and peoplehood.

Finally, we organized our TEN(!) bags of toiletries, Judaica, school supplies, and clothing to bring to JDC and sorted out some souvenirs for our hosts, and started to call it a night.

Paka!

As the end of two long days wind down, a bunch of us are relaxing in the hallway of the hotel before bed.

You can probably imagine that we all arrived at Dulles Airport without a hitch and—after only minor negotiations (easy to say in retrospect), we checked *eleven* bags filled with arts & crafts supplies, Judaica, toiletries, UMBC Hillel mugs & t-shirts, Jewish and Hebrew text books in addition to our own luggage.

We all found the 8.5 hour journey on Austrian Airlines to Vienna pleasant and smooth. We transferred planes in Vienna and besides a fellow passenger who seemed to think it was appropriate to put her dog through the x-ray machine (and the fascinated chaos that followed as people looked at the radiogram on the screen), our hour and a half was uneventful.

Students also noted the bold anti-smoking slogans on cigarettes in the duty-free zone.

Our second flight was on Ukrainian National Airlines (“MAY” is the acronym in Cyrillic characters and according to their in-flight magazine, Panorama, they are rated the best airline in Ukraine!). The first 87 minutes were lovely; the last 3 minutes and landing were, on the other hand, not on anyone’s top ten list. As we prepared our immigration documents we were given a survey about our experience and had the opportunity to review some of the English translations on the document (further details about this may be available from participants but this is probably not the right place. . . )

After clearing customs at Odessa’s seeming one-room airport, we were greeted by representative of The American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and students and staff from Odessa Hillel! We brought our luggage to the bus outside the airport. We boarded our bus, drank some water, ate some snacks, and were greeted by Gila Ward, our staff from JDC, who arrived from New York via Poland just a few minutes after we did.

We headed to downtown and checked in at our hotel, had some time to rest and shower, and reconvened to walk a few blocks to Hebron, a kosher restaurant in the basement of Tikvat Or Sameach, the synagogue in our neighborhood that has been reclaimed by the Jewish community and renovated about twenty years ago. We were joined by our peers—now new friends—from Odessa Hillel, and did some ice-breakers –from human webs to charades—to get to know each other and build relationships. Then we sat down to eat—fruit and salads, juices and bread, fish and chicken, even matzah ball soup and French fries. All the students—UMBC and Odessa alike—talked and laughed non-stop over dinner in some grand mix of English, Russian, and Hebrew, and after we finished the meal, we returned to our hotel walking the few blocks back on now dark streets—now lit up by pretty street lights—accompanied by Nikolai, the guard who is accompanying our group.

We debriefed as a group about the day and are looking forward to learning about the city and the Jewish community tomorrow and jumping into our volunteer work.

Remember, our students are also blogging at www.jdcinservice.org, so check that out too!