A Tale of Two Strudels

Chapter 1: In Which We Start a Blog.

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 23:48:20 +0100

Somewhat relevant to this blog: fellow JSC Fellow Sarah and I have started a food blog together! Even though she is in Belgrade and I am in Berlin, we are brought together by our love of all things delicious. You can see what we’re baking and cooking in our respective cities at our blog, A Maidel with a Ladle.

Sukkot is a wonderful holiday to celebrate with children because...

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:35:00 +0200

Sukkot is a wonderful holiday to celebrate with children because there’s a really fun built-in activity to do with them: decorate the Sukkah! And at Bambinim, we have a wonderful Sukkat. Painted by the kids last year, we decorated it anew this year with paper chains and other child-made hanging things.

We opened the activity with baking, as always. This time, I made date cookies with the kids, and if I may say so myself, they came out delicious. Recipe below. After this, we sang an introductory song and a few Sukkot songs. Then we made the above-mentioned paper chains, which we connected all together to make one big chain and carried to the Sukkah together. Razia and Ariella were up next with a song from Judy the Holiday Fairy and then with a show about Keren, who spends the money her mother gave her to buy an Etrog in order to help a baker in Jerusalem fix his oven so that he can make delicious cakes for every for the holiday. (To give away the ending, a miracle happens and Keren gets a beautiful Etrog to bring home AND cake!) At the end, Ariella/the Baker served the children cake, since the oven was fixed in the story. Then, Flora and I explained how the Lulav, Etrog, Aravah, and Hadass are like parts of the body and like our community, and we used a song to teach the kids to shake the Lulav together. After each kid got a turn, we had our usual Kiddush and lunch, again made more delicious by some parental contributions.

This time our activity ended later than usual, though: it was hard to get all those kids and all of the stuffed animals they brought with them out of our tiny Sukkah!

We also repeated this activity in Hebrew and in Russian due to popular demand — all three went great!

Date Cookies, cobbled together from various sources:

Dough: In a mixing bowl, cream together 200 grams of butter and 250 grams cream cheese. Add 1/4 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla, and mix until smooth. Add 2 cups of flour and mix lightly. Refrigerate dough for an hour or more.

Filling: Chop about 2 cups of dates and put in a small pot with water and about 1/4 cup juice (I used orange juice on Sunday, but you could also use grape juice or something else). Simmer for about an hour, until the dates are soft, and then blend with a hand blender or mash with a fork. Let cool.

Roll the dough out so that it is flat and thin, spread the date filling on one side, roll up and cut into individual cookies, and bake for about 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown at 180 degrees Celsius.

Yom Kippur is a tricky holiday to put together a family program...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:40:04 +0200

Yom Kippur is a tricky holiday to put together a family program for: on the one hand, you don’t want to treat the subjects of atonement, sin, forgiveness, and punishment insensitively or in ways that are difficult for children to understand, but you also don’t want to produce a content-less program. Flora and I talked a lot about what would be the most appropriate way to discuss these difficult subjects in a family setting, and I’m really proud of the program we put together.

We opened with letter-shaped cookies, which were to remind us of how we want to be written in the books of life and happiness. We wanted to make book-shaped cookies, but I couldn’t figure out how to make book-shaped cookie cutters. Then we sang Zochreinu LeChayim with the families and learned about the book of life that we write our names in with our good deeds. And for this event, since we had no puppet show, I wrote a story that Flora read out loud to the children. In the story, a little angel learns the importance of saying “I’m Sorry” — you can read the story here.

After this, we took out our model Yom Kippur scales, on which we could weigh good and bad deeds. We talked to the kids about good deeds (sharing, helping people, playing nicely together) and bad deeds (hitting, shouting at people, not sharing), and then asked each parent and child to find a place to sit together and discuss a good deed or a bad deed that they wanted to share with a group. The parents and children drew their deeds on little cards, which they then shared with the group and added to the scale.

Then the kids got to decorate their letter-shaped cookies to make them extra-sweet. We had a few different colors of frosting, sprinkles, m&ms, and more! As always, we closed with Kiddush together and a light lunch, including a delicious vegetable couscous soup contributed by one of the families.

For Rosh Hashanah at Bambinim this year, we held a big event in...

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:47:53 +0200

For Rosh Hashanah at Bambinim this year, we held a big event in our space to help us start off year 5773 right! First, I baked round challot with the kids, who got drawings to color in when they were done, and then Flora sang some Rosh Hashanah songs with them and taught them a little about the holiday. Then, Razia and Ariella performed a puppet show in which Keren meets a fish whose tail wants to lead the body for once (playing off the Rosh Hashanah saying “that we may be a head and not a tail,” that is, that we may move forward). After, the kids painted Tzdakah boxes shaped like apples, and lastly, we had Kiddush and ate a delicious lunch. It was a wonderful way to bring in the new year, and only a few hours later, I was in synagogue, listening to the High Holidays melody and thinking, “Is it time already?”

One Year in Berlin

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 22:07:00 +0200

I’d like to belatedly take a moment on this blog to mark my officially having passed the one-year point here in Berlin! I arrived here on September 8^th, 2011 very early in the morning to a warm apartment where a sleepy Sarah and Molly were getting breakfast ready. The next few days were a blur of tourism, introductions, long words in German, and see-sawing feelings. I remember thinking with bleak desperation on my first evening that I had been here in Germany for 12 hours and, oh god, my first day wasn’t even over yet, and if this one day was never going to end, how long were the other 364 going to take? Clearly time was never going to move forward and cooperate with me and I was going to be homesick and lost and in limbo forever. Of course, the thing about time is that it always does move forward, and it’s done its job so well that I can’t even believe that it has been 365 days and then some since I arrived here. In that time, I’ve met wonderful people, developed both professional and personal relationships, learned a lot about myself and about the Jewish community in Berlin, developed skills and questions about early childhood and family center work, traveled, eaten a lot, and, on the whole, have not been looking back nearly as much as I thought I would be on my first day.

In fact, what I wish for myself for my second year in Berlin, for my 24^th year of life, for the year 5773, is to look ahead enough to be able to take advantage of any opportunities which may present themselves. This may mean impromptu opportunities to travel, or the opportunity to learn a new professional skill, or the opportunity to add a new aspect to my job or to the ways in which I am involved in the community. Time moves so fast that I’m worried that soon it will be September 2013 and I won’t have done even a quarter of the things that I wanted to do this year! So my goal is to try to keep apace of my goals, to try to keep up with my aspirations and ideas, and to recognize a good opportunity when it turns up.

Below, a picture taken just a little while ago, on my birthday, on top of the rotating restaurant at the top of the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz, where I had coffee and cake with Anja and Flora. It was a wonderful birthday surprise and a truly beautiful way to see the city I’ve been living in for a year, from above and in panorama.

Flashback to Family Pesach Seder at Bambinim Soon it will be...

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:52:49 +0200

Flashback to Family Pesach Seder at Bambinim

Soon it will be getting colder and it will become darker earlier, but before we go there, I think it’s time to flash back to Pesach at Bambinim, since I didn’t write about it at the time.

For the second night of Pesach, Bambinim organized a Family Seder - a full Seder, complete with activities for children, and made more cozy by its potluck-style. We divided the Seder up into parts that different families could volunteer to lead, so for example one parent explained Yachatz, the breaking of the Matzah to the kids and hid the Afikoman for them, and two parents told the story of the 10 plagues to the children with the help of their daughters. Flora and I lead the Seder with the wonderful help of a cantorial student who really knows how to animate the children through song. We also had a real potluck at our Seder - each family prepared a (kosher for Passover) dish to contribute, and it was a real feast! But my favorite part was at the end — just as we were singing “Simcha raba, simcha raba, aviv higiya, Pesach ba,” or “great joy, great joy, spring has arrived and Pesach has come,” it started to snow, and our whole Seder crowded around the window to look at the last vestiges of Winter making its exit.

Bnot Mitzvah, Feminism, and Tutoring in Berlin

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 21:56:00 +0200

When I was twelve, my heroines were Eleanor of Aquitaine, Ginger Rogers, and Israeli women’s rights activist Professor Alice Shalvi. I staunchly believed in the importance of equality between men and women without actually understanding that there were people who didn’t. If you had asked me, I would proudly have told you that I was a feminist. (I still am, for that matter.)

As such, and having grown up at B’nai Jeshurun, a progressive Jewish community in New York City, in the first place, my Bat Mitzvah was both a feminist act and a completely ordinary event, taken for granted basically since my birth. I remember hearing from my parents that my Bat Mitzvah was really my twelfth birthday, no matter how we celebrated it or when I was called up to the Torah, and that technically that would mark the beginning of my accountability as a full participant in my Jewish community. I also remember learning that Bnot Mitzvah as we now celebrate them are a phenomenon less than 100 years old, beginning in 1922 with the Bat Mitzvah of Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement.

I diligently learned how to read Torah and Haftarah and lead the Torah and Musaf service along with my Bat Mitzvah partner (we split the portion). For me, though, the most engaging but also most difficult was working on my Dvar Torah, which turned out to be a tribute to my budding feminism: it was an encouragement to view Rahav, the prostitute in the walls of Jericho chapter of Joshua’s story, as a heroine, a brave figure who shouldn’t be written off but rather admired. And on the week of my Bat Mitzvah, I wore a Tallit and Tefilin, and on the day itself I read Torah, lead part of the service, and gave my interpretation of the reading to the community, all in the awe-struck, frightened, adrenaline-addled haze that one might expect of any 12 year old at such a moment.

So, although I had never had to contemplate that if I had grown up in a different context I would not be having this experience, my parents, teachers, and friends did their best to emphasize to me that this was a privilege which, considering history, I should not take for granted. It was a powerful experience for me, and a few years later, I began to work with Bnei Mitzvah myself, teaching children to read from the Torah and helping them to write their Divrei Torah in preparation for their moment in front of the community.

When I got to Berlin almost a year ago, I was lucky enough to be put in touch with Rabbi Gesa Ederberg, the Rabbi of the Oranienburger Straße Synagogue in Berlin, a Conservative/Masorti community in a historic Synagogue in the center of the city. During a very fruitful meeting, she and I discussed the possibility of me working with her to tutor a group of 6 girls who were going to become Bnot Mitzvah at her synagogue later in the year. Shortly after, I was in a room with the 6 girls and Rabbi Ederberg one day after school, discussing which of them was going to come work with me on her Haftarah first, while the others continued their group lesson with Rabbi Ederberg.

And so it went on for the next few months, with me joining Rabbi Ederberg and the girls for our lessons once a week for two hours at the Community building. As they reviewed and practiced as a group, I would take the girls out one at a time to practice. I learned a lot of German from trying to keep up with their rapid middle school speech, and they asked me lots of questions about New York, my family, the community I grew up in, and even about what my Bat Mitzvah was like. I really enjoyed working with such a smart, determined group of girls on a subject close to my heart, and I hope that they got the benefit of working with a young Jewish woman who not only gladly participates in Jewish life, but who moreover expects to be allowed to participate in Jewish life yet doesn’t take that equal participation for granted.

In about a week, the last of these girls will become a Bat Mitzvah, ending the group effort of working towards a common goal, a common experience. They have each had their struggles – overcoming shyness, doing battle with Hebrew vowels, repeatedly asking if they were having a Bat Mitzvah for themselves or for their parents, and if it was for them, what they wanted it to mean and what part of the experience did they want to be emphasized – and they’ve each done a brilliant job as they’ve been called to the Torah and read the Haftarah. I’ll be giving them each a copy of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen as a gift during their first follow-up lesson in a few weeks, and the community at Oranienburger Str. has been kind enough to post about the experience on their website.

Soon I’ll be beginning with a group, this time co-ed (its being all girls was a coincidence last time), and now my work will be focused more on group lessons and discussions with the 11 and 12 year olds. I’m excited to get to know them and to tackle these questions with the future Bnei Mitzvah:

What is the meaning of this experience in the Jewish tradition? What does it mean to you personally? What do you think it will mean to you later? How do you see the connection between your being called up to the Torah in front of the community and the beginning of your full participation in the community as a responsible member of it? How do you interpret your piece of our story which you will be reading, your “bit of earth” which you have been assigned? What story do you want to tell when you get up in front of the community to mark this moment?

A little bit ago, I got to spend a little vacation time with my...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:25:18 +0200

A little bit ago, I got to spend a little vacation time with my family in Paris. We had a great time - the weather was beautiful, Paris was, well — Paris, and it was fantastic to see my family.

On my first day there, my mother and I were a little tired but wanted to walk around, so we decided to do the Hemingway-themed walking tour in our guide book. We visited some of his old residences, enjoying the beauty of the city and trying to imagine what it might have looked like when he lived there. It was fun, relaxed, and definitely a little bit of a tribute to Midnight in Paris. When I got back to Berlin, I looked through the New York Public Library’s Tumblr, only to find this. And that is when I realized that, completely unawares, we had done this Hemingway tour on Hemingway’s birthday. I don’t know how this wonderful coincidence came about, but it felt too good to be true — a little magical. Which is really all I wanted from Paris in the first place.

My sister came to visit me recently and we took a weekend trip...

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 16:23:55 +0200

My sister came to visit me recently and we took a weekend trip together to Prague. I went not knowing what to expect and came back reading a Kafka biography and already planning my next trip there. It’s a city with such a dense and interesting history and the place itself is beautiful, if drowning in tourists and the tourist industry. It is also the home of the Golem and the birthplace of the Pesach Haggadah! We visited the Mucha Museum, the Kafka Museum, the extremely old astronomical clock, the Castle, the Jewish Quarter, the theater where a few Mozart operas premiered, a brewery run by monks, and I’m sure there is something I forgot, as we saw so much in just one weekend. Above, the M. Sisters Visit Prague.

At the Bambinim Summer Camp this year, one of our themes was the...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 21:52:30 +0200

At the Bambinim Summer Camp this year, one of our themes was the creation story - we told it to the kids with the help of some beautiful illustrations several times. It allowed us to talk with the kids about the huge variety of plants and animals that exist in the world, and more broadly about all of the things that we think are wonderful in the world. As part of this theme, Flora taught the children a song about exactly that - it’s a song that allows kids to jump in and say what they love in the world. It’s in German, but listen above - their little voices are very cute!

Summer Camp is in the News!

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:17:51 +0200

Oh darling blog, how I’ve neglected you!

Really, it must seem like I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, but I am a procrastinator by nature, and what can I say — things just kept piling up. But now I’m back and I’m firmly resolved to update faithfully and frequently about all of my (interesting or relevant) goings-on in Berlin. Maybe I’ll even put together some pictures of all of the truly wonderful events and experiences I’ve missed out on writing about! But for the moment, something truly relevant and up-to-date:

Bambinim has been running a summer camp since last week and it’s been lots of fun. We’ve been singing and telling stories each morning and doing arts crafts activities in the afternoon, and there has been LOTS of playground time (which was fun except for the dead mouse we found in the sand…you can imagine how well that went over).

We’ve also had some press, which is great for Bambinim and was fun for the kids.

When the journalist from the Jewish newspaper the “Jüdische Allgemeine” joined us for morning circle on our first day of camp, the kids got to ask him questions about what he does and what writing for a newspaper is like! You can find his article, in German, (and the back of my head in the accompanying picture) here:

http://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/article/view/id/13500

The following day, we had a journalist from Deutschlandradio Kultur (from the segment “Aus der Jüdischen Welt,” or “from the Jewish world”) come join us for the morning. He recorded our morning circle and playground time, got some adorable clips of the kids playing and talking, and spoke to Flora and some parents about Bambinim’s place and mission in Berlin. Like the article, the radio segment and the accompanying article are also in German, but it might be worth it for the cute children and the occasional Hebrew:

http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/ausderjuedischenwelt/1816260/

True, these pieces are in German, but maybe they’ll give you kind of an idea of what Summer Camp at Bambinim is like until I properly write about it (soon, really!). And if not — well, still, it’s cool that we got all that press, isn’t it?

A couple of weeks at Shabbat Playgroup, we decided that even...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:08:36 +0200

A couple of weeks at Shabbat Playgroup, we decided that even though Purim was over, we weren’t done celebrating yet. We baked Hamantaschen with the children and then decorated masks, which we then wore during Kiddush. The results were fantastic all around! Delicious cookies, beautiful masks. Now that we’ve gotten that out of our system, we can movie on to Pesach!

I realized recently that Pesach is in less than a week - a WEEK...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 09:44:30 +0200

I realized recently that Pesach is in less than a week - a WEEK - and I STILL haven’t finished putting up Purim pictures! I will now correct this grievous error.

These pictures are from an event we did with some families in the East side of the city in order to make sure that more people for whom Bambinim is geographically inconvenient could make it. We dressed up, told the Purim story, played Purim music, and made crowns and masks and pizza! A good time really was had by all. And I was so impressed by the craftsmanship these children displayed in their masks and crowns!

Two Sundays ago, Bambinim held a Purim event for families! A...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:23:00 +0100

Clown faces for the groggers!

Groggers need not have two eyes.

The kids had some pretty cool costumes!

Very apt costume for a staff-person!

Purim Spiel in German...

It was a full house!

Glitter tattoos!

Dancing time!

Two Sundays ago, Bambinim held a Purim event for families! A show with masks in German, a puppet show in Hebrew, grogger-making with clown faces, face-painting and glitter tattoos, music, food, dancing - how could anyone fail to have fun with so many cool things going on? For extra credit, see if you can spot my Pippi Longstocking costume in one of the pictures. (Three children also dressed up as Pippi - I had so many twins!)

Two weeks ago, I got together with my friend Eli to bake in...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:58:54 +0100

Two weeks ago, I got together with my friend Eli to bake in honor of our last day of German class. I brought the Bambinim challah recipe, since it’s easy and we thought it would be nice to make bread, and she brought a cinnamon bun recipe that she found because, well, who doesn’t love cinnamon buns? It was definitely more complicated than the challah - the dough was pretty sticky and had to be kneaded a few times in 10 minute intervals and then left alone to rise for an hour - but the result was so delicious and definitely worth the effort (well, she mostly made the effort, but it looked worth the effort!). All I have to do is look at the picture and I remember how they taste - fluffy, sweet, buttery and full of cinnamon, with a tiny hint of lemon. And our entire German class ate like kings the next day during our last 15 minute break!

Movie Night: Le nom des gens

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:53:35 +0100

A few weeks ago, we had our February movie night, and in the Valentine’s Day spirit we decided to keep it light and show the French romantic comedy “The Names of Love” or “Le nom des gens.” We had a great turnout - 40 people from all over the world, all interesting and enthusiastic about the movie night. Many people came to me after to tell me how much they enjoyed the movie, but I was so happy to see that most people seemed to have come just as much to talk to each other and meet other young Jews in Berlin as they did to see the movie.

“The Names of Love” really is a light movie on the surface. A lot of people confessed to me after that they initially didn’t understand why I chose this film. Buried in the plot, though, is the story of one family’s connection with the Holocaust and the guilt and other feelings that burden a second-generation man as a result. I find this movie to be very appropriate for an audience of young European Jews (and also some non-Jews) and to be really fun at the same time!

The movie tells the story of Baya, whose father is Algerian and whose mother is a staunch hippie and who has made it her mission to sleep with and convert as many right wing men as possible, and Arthur, on the surface a very conventional, traditional French man - but of course, he has a secret: his mother’s family is Jewish. His mother’s parents were taken away by the Nazis when their daughter was still very little, and she grew up in hiding in Occupied France. Her name was changed and she was told to say that she was an orphan; later, she spends her whole life avoiding any memory of her past and never mentioning it to her son, who only knows that her parents were Greek and that her father was a taxi driver. Her total avoidance of the subject and her emphasis on being as conventionally French as possible causes Arthur to feel tremendous guilt about this thing that has turned into a secret. His relationship with Baya, herself an outsider with secrets, forces him to confront these issues and the part of his identity that he has repressed. The movie deals beautifully with his identity struggle and portrays with humor and honesty the different things it has meant to be a Jew in France throughout Arthur’s life - the shame when he was a kid, the fetishism when he was a teenager, and the sense of outsiderness he still feels as an adult. I highly recommend this movie both for its sense of humor and for its unexpected ability to deal seriously and well with these complex ideas.

My mother came for a quick visit a few weeks ago - she was...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:25:31 +0100

My mother came for a quick visit a few weeks ago - she was really passing through and only had a few days - and while she was here, we rode the 100 bus line, which passes through most of the major tourist areas of Berlin. We had taken this bus line together before, but this time we got off at the Siegessäule, or the Victory Column, a big monument with a golden figure of Victoria at the top. To me it looks like an angel, but that might be because I first saw it in the German film “Wings of Desire,” directed by Wim Wenders (whose documentary film “Pina” was nominated for an Oscar this year!). Whenever I see this statue, I always think of this image, with the angel sitting on the statue’s shoulder, looking down on the city:

What a beautiful statue and what a great movie! You should see it, and if you visit Berlin and take the 100 bus, make sure to sit near a window where you can crane your head as you pass and look up at the statue.

Movie Night: Walk on Water

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:56:48 +0100

Better late than never, right?

About a month ago, Rotem and I held another Jewish Movie Night for young adults, in which we showed Walk on Water, an Israeli German film about an Israeli Mossad agent who is tasked with befriending the two grandchildren of the elderly Nazi official he is trying to track down.

This isn’t a brilliant film, but it’s engaging and entertaining and it raises a lot of interesting questions about the position (maybe even the role) of second- and third-generation inheritors of the legacy of the Holocaust. This was a particularly interesting movie to show in Berlin to a crowd of Israelis, German Jews, other Jews, non-Jews, and on and on. And we had a great turnout - I counted about 35 people, all as interested in talking with each other and making connections as they were in the movie!

We have another movie night this week. This time, we’ll be showing the French romantic comedy “The Names of Love” - more on that soon!

Bereshit in Berlin

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:01:22 +0100

On Sunday, February 5th, JDC Germany brought Bereshit to Berlin and I was lucky enough to participate! Bereshit is a program created to serve the European Jewish Community by bringing Israeli professors or innovative thinkers to come give seminars to various Jewish communities. The idea of helping a community by trying to feed it intellectually is one that really speaks to me and I was so excited to witness it firsthand and to get to participate in the seminar.

This particular seminar was given by Dr. Elie Holzer, a professor at Bar Ilan University and a co-founder of Shira Hadasha, an innovative and relatively new synagogue in Jerusalem. The subject of his talk was “Sounds of Community and Voices of Prayer: The Synagogue Between Past and Present.” The program description is roughly translated as follows:

For centuries, life in Jewish communities was both reflected and shaped by the synagogue. What are the challenges that the synagogue faces today? What can it offer people in today’s society and culture? This workshop will provide a perspective on the changing role of the synagogue throughout the centuries and will be followed by a discussion about the challenges, potential, and actual role of the synagogue in modern society.

This was a fascinating topic to learn about and discuss, and by the end of the three hours, we were nowhere near done. Dr. Holzer was a lively, engaging speaker with a lot to say about the different roles that synagogues have in our lives. We talked about how synagogues can feed certain social and spiritual needs and especially focused on what it takes to build a community of prayer. Readings included the two different stories of the creation of humanity in Genesis, the beginning of a work by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and various excerpts from “The Lonely Man of Faith,” by Rabbi Soloveitchik, an important figure in the Modern Orthodoxy. We would have gotten to read a bit from the Little Prince, too, but we ran out of time! The seminar was really beautiful in how it displayed the tension between our social, practical selves and our selves that feel deeply our aloneness and wonder at the universe and asked us to think about what kinds of communities best feed those aspects of ourselves. We were able to have an engaging discussion after as well, and it was nice to see people from so many different backgrounds seeking out this kind of activity on a Sunday afternoon.

I found the readings really moving and the discussion so much fun to participate in - I really miss school and was so excited to be in an academic, intellectual environment again! There are a few more Bereshit seminars happening in Berlin in the next few months, and I am so excited to participate in this program again in the future.

Last Sunday, Bambinim celebrated Tu Bishvat — twice!...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:40:16 +0100

Last Sunday, Bambinim celebrated Tu Bishvat — twice!

Our first event that day was led in Hebrew and in conjunction with an Israeli family center in Berlin, Kumsitz. The space was beautiful and about 40 children attended! You can imagine the mayhem that resulted, but hopefully my pictures will also give you an idea of what beautiful activities we had that day. First, the kids sang a few Tu Bishvat songs and heard a Tu Bishvat story, and then after a short fruit snack break, we got started on the arts and crafts. First the kids made cookies, which we put on skewers before we baked; then they decorated flower pots; then they put a cupcake in the flowerpot, stuck their skewered cookie in the cupcake, and decorated their baked goods! As pretty as a flower but better-tasting! They also did a fair amount of coloring, decorated wooden tree figures, and used different kinds of fruit to make faces on oranges, kind of like Mr. Potato Head with real produce.

A little later, the Bambinim team held a second event, this time at a different family center in East Berlin and with the (wo)man power of a few Bambinim moms, who had volunteered to help plan the event. It was great for us to be able to engage families who live far away and for whom it is difficult to get to Bambinim with their children, and it seemed like they were about as excited to be there as we were. This event was smaller in numbers, but not lesser in enthusiasm, and it was lovely to see how quickly a warm environment developed. First, the kids painted flower pots, which we set to dry for later, before we moved on to a story about Tu Bishvat and then to a tree-decorating activity. Then, we did a little bit of singing and dancing before clearing the table for our Tu Bishvat Seder. We went through it with the children, explaining the significance of the different cups of wine/grape juice and fruits on the table. Then, we sat down to a meal to which each family had contributed something - we had pastries, hummus, couscous salad, and more. There were even waffles with powdered sugar for dessert! Then, before the kids left, we took out the flower pots they had painted and repotted some pretty flowers into them for the families to take home.

Although I had a great time at both events, I was pretty Tu Bishvat’ed-out after. I have noticed since, though, that the weather has gotten a little more pleasant and that my mind has been focused more on the coming few months, and all these little things are coming together to make it feel like spring really on its way.