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Jewish Education Task Force Begins Work
A new Jewish Education Task Force, chaired by Rob Greenwald and Risa Levine, held its first meeting this week. This strong and diverse group of community volunteer leaders will work together over the next year to guide the development of community strategies and resources to strengthen the reach and impact of Jewish education in our community. In the task force’s first discussion we saw a strong desire to focus on the importance of life-long learning.

The area of Jewish education is one of vital importance to our community, and involves many stakeholders, including school and synagogue leadership, educators, parents, students and more. It encompasses a wide range of formal and informal educational settings and modalities, and, of course, it engages a community that is undergoing rapid and complex demographic and sociological changes.

The task force’s process will provide significant opportunities to engage many voices throughout the community at different stages. Planned with the limited time frame of a year, we look forward to coming to the community with a road map for how our community can build and strengthen our existing educational institutions and programs, as well as address emerging needs and opportunities.

Vancouver Joins 106 Communities in Walk for Israel
As part of a worldwide celebration of Israel’s 65th anniversary, 107 communities around the world, including 89 in North America, are holding a “Global Walk for Israel”. Vancouver’s takes place this Sunday morning, bringing back an event that had taken place for many years in our community.

The Global Walk for Israel begins at Temple Sholom, with people gathering to register and receive T-shirts at 10:00 a.m. The walk will proceed down Oak Street to the JCC starting at 11:00 a.m. Once at the JCC, participants can enjoy a community festival with live entertainment, food and children’s activities, as well as the youth performances that are part of the JCCGV Festival HaRikud (Israeli folk dance festival) that afternoon.

National Young Leadership Retreat
Last weekend, 20 young Jewish volunteer leaders from across Canada gathered in Banff for the first ever National Young Leadership Management Team Retreat. Organized by Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA, the retreat was an opportunity for leaders to meet each other, learn about other communities, and develop the collective vision, purpose and priorities of a national group that connects and strengthens Canadian Jewish communities and a national Jewish identity. Through goal setting and brainstorming sessions, management team members were tasked with creating portfolios to work on for the duration of their two-year term. Vancouver was represented by Eric Bulmash, our new chair of Young Leadership Development, and Dana Troster, our manager of Young Adult Initiatives. To learn more about local and national young leadership opportunities, please contact Dana at dtroster@jewishvancouver.com.

Archives a Jewel Tucked Away in Richmond
The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia (JMABC) hosted tours showcasing their archival storage facility this week for leadership from several Metro Vancouver Jewish organizations. Having outgrown their previous space, the archives moved into a 3,000 square foot suite off Number 5 Road in Richmond. Professionally organized and curated, the archives are a treasure trove of organizational and personal history. The collection began in 1970 when founder Cyril Leonoff convened a small group of people to explore creating a historical society. With over 1,000 linear feet of documents and more than 300,000 photos, along with numerous and varied other artifacts, the organization has grown dramatically in its sophistication.

For academics studying a wide range of topics, families doing genealogical research, and others, the archives provide a professionally managed means of accessing documentation of our past. For example, Congregation Emanu-El of Victoria, soon to celebrate its 150th anniversary, has lodged its archival material with the JMABC, and has worked collaboratively with them on various facets of their anniversary celebrations. The JMABC is working through a backlog of material as a result of several recent large donations, and relies heavily on volunteers and students, working under professional supervision.

In addition to the collection, organization and preservation of materials in the Nemetz Jewish Community Archives, the JMABC also offers programs of interest to the community including historic walking tours, Philosophers’ Cafes, genealogy workshops, and traveling and virtual exhibits.

If you’ve got organizational or personal material to consider passing along, or would like to volunteer or support JMABC’s work, contact Jennifer Yuhasz, archivist, at archives@jewishmuseum.ca.

Parashat Emor
This week’s parasha continues a detailed description of laws related to purity and the priesthood, and then shifts to a listing of the festivals celebrated during the biblical period, starting with Shabbat and moving on to the harvest festivals. In the midst of the description is the famous dictum to not reap the edges of your fields, in order to leave them and the gleanings for the poor and strangers. Two suggestions have been offered for why this commandment appears here. The first is that it follows the description of Shavuot as a harvest festival taking place seven weeks after Passover, and so the commandment appears as a detail related to the harvest. The other interpretation, from the Sifra, the halakhic midrash on the Book of Leviticus, is that when one shares with the poor, it is as if you have made an offering to God. Thus, it is included as another means of offering.

Whichever interpretation you might subscribe to, the verse stands as a timeless reminder of the ethical imperatives of our tradition, to always be mindful of our responsibilities to those in need.

Shabbat shalom!