Community Events
Please note: the events listed here are hosted by our community partners and are not sponsored by Temple Israel unless noted.
We encourage you to reach out directly to the event organizers with any questions.
Red Thread and Ponyfolk Sing Jingle Bells
Friday, December 12
Doors 7:00 p.m.; Show 8:00 - 11:00 p.m.
The Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis
$15 Advance, $20 Day of Show
All Ages, Seated
Red Thread and Ponyfolk are two Minnesota-based ensembles devoted to building community around Midwestern European roots music. The two bands team up to present an “alternative” holiday celebration, sharing new and old songs of winter, luck, and family from Scandinavian, Yiddish/Klezmer, Slavic, English, and Irish roots.
Red Thread is a woman-fronted ensemble playing folk music exploring and exploding Yiddish, Balkan, Irish, and Scandinavian vocal traditions. With the tight harmonies of a family band and lush, innovative instrumentation, the ensemble shares traditional and new music with warmth and humor.
Ponyfolk is the collaborative project of multi-instrumentalists Clifton Nesseth and Paul Sauey. Weaving together interests in folk, rock, jazz and orchestral music, the band is known for intricate arrangements, vocal harmonies and layers of strings and keyboards.
Read more about Red Thread and Ponyfolk, and purchase tickets.
Connection in Recovery: A facilitated support group rooted in Jewish values
Wednesdays through December 17, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
JFCS, 5905 Golden Valley Road, Golden Valley
Register for Connection in Recovery.
This event is free. Pre-registration is required.
If you or a loved one is impacted by addiction, you are invited to join the new six-week support group at Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minneapolis (JFCS). Rooted in Jewish values—reflection without shame, dignity for every person, care for the body, connection in community, forgiveness, and hope—this group provides a safe, supportive, and compassionate space for healing, learning, and connection. All are welcome, regardless of religious background or identity. JFCS is here for all. Always.
About the Group
Led by an experienced professional facilitator, each session will foster open dialogue, personal reflection, and supportive discussion. The group embraces harm reduction principles and is designed to empower participants through shared experiences, education, and personal growth. Whether you are navigating addiction yourself or supporting someone who is, you’ll find a welcoming community here.
When: Wednesdays, 6:30–8 p.m.
· First session: November 5
· No session: November 26 – Thanksgiving week
· Final session: December 17
Who: Adults impacted by addiction of any kind—personally or through a loved one or family member
Donations are welcome and will help support JFCS Addiction and Recovery Services.
Twin Cities Tour de Torah: Leg Two
Illuminating Wisdom in the Dark: Hanukkah Learning Through the Jewish Studio Process
Thursdays, December 4, 11, and 18
6:30-8:15 p.m.
Shir Tikvah Library, 1360 West Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis
$100 for each 3-week “leg”
Register for Leg Two of Tour de Torah.
Join Sustain Studio for a 3-part series exploring what it means to create, reflect, and tend to our inner lives in the season of sacred light and encompassing dark, using the Jewish Studio Process. This ritually held practice includes text study, then a guided creative process of art making and witnessing what came through.
Anchored in the lead-up to Hanukkah and the growing darkness of winter, this series invites us to connect with our innate creativity as a spiritual practice and to explore how light emerges from darkness, and what wisdom this season kindles within each of us. This series is accessible to anyone regardless of experience with art making. Materials will be provided.
This class forms the second leg of the inaugural Twin Cities Tour de Torah. Communities across the Cities will be offering text and arts-based courses leading up to Jewish Holidays with the goal of finding spiritual tools for our times. Students can jump in at any leg.Those who race the whole tour will receive a special prize.
Check out the first leg of the Tour: Creation, X-Ray Vision, and Sacred Light: A Svara-Style Deep Dive into the Torah of Hanukkah with R’ Joey Glick; and stay tuned for information about the next leg of our journey!
Dementia Caregiver Connect
Wednesdays, December 10, January 7 and 21
10:30 a.m. to Noon
JFCS Community Room, 5905 Golden Valley Road, Golden Valley
More information about Dementia Caregiver Connect.
This is a drop-in event, no RSVP required.
JFCS Senior Services is excited to announce the launch of Dementia Caregiver Connect – a twice-monthly “drop-in” program for caregivers of people living with dementia or experiencing memory loss.
If you have picked up a prescription, brought over dinner, given a ride to the doctor, taken care of an errand, or made decisions big or small on behalf of a family member or friend, you are a caregiver.
Participants in this program will have an opportunity to share experiences and receive guidance and education about topics relevant to caregiving. Sometimes the caregiving journey can feel lonely—the intention of this program is to provide a safe place to receive support and connect with other caregivers.
Staff from JFCS Senior Services will facilitate the group sessions, provide support, and answer resource-related questions.
Refreshments will be served.
For more information on Dementia Caregiver Connect, contact Jeanne Schuller at jschuller@jfcsmpls.org or 952-542-4836.
Center for Jewish Studies
Never-Ending Tales: Antisemitism, Jewish Creative Resistance, and a Literature of Hope
Wednesday, January 21, 7:30 p.m.
Minnesota JCC Sabes Center, 4330 Cedar Lake Road South, Minneapolis
Register for Never-Ending Tales.
This event is free and open to the public. Please plan to arrive early at the JCC to allow time to go through JCC security. The JCC requires a driver's license or other government-issued photo ID.
The “Jewish Question,” hotly debated in nineteenth century Europe, asked what non-Jews should do with Jews after their “emancipation.” Should Jews be accepted as full citizens or were they too dangerous? Jewish responses to the Question reveal possibilities that Jews will always be able to survive pernicious misinformation. This lecture will demonstrate how Jewish folk narratives and fantasy writing between 1870 and the 1930s illustrate the dilemmas of Jews who seek to identify themselves by themselves-- yet also want to become fully assimilated under hostile conditions. These tales, largely for a Jewish readership and usually with a self-deprecating humor, stress the necessity of hope—despite worldwide antisemitism—for the survival of Jews and their traditions.
Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, is a founding father of Fairy Tale Studies. He is the author, co-author, or editor of over 70 books, most recently Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales (2023) and Never-Ending Tales: Stories from the Golden Age of Jewish Literature (2025). Zipes also engages in community outreach and founded “Neighborhood Bridges,” which serves over 700 children annually in collaboration with the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis.
Co-sponsors: Center for Austrian Studies, Center for German and European Studies, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Department of English, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas.
For the benefit of those who cannot attend, each Community Lecture is recorded. Please allow two weeks for the most recent lecture to be uploaded. Videos may be viewed at: youtube.com/user/JWSTumn/videos
Center for Jewish Studies
Reconstructing Hadassah Kaplan: A Daughter’s Lessons in the Struggle for Jewish Survival
Thursday, February 5, 7:30 p.m.
Minnesota JCC – Capp Center, 1375 St. Paul Avenue, St. Paul
Register for Reconstructing Hadassah Kaplan.
This event is free and open to the public. Please plan to arrive early at the JCC to allow time to go through JCC security. The JCC requires a driver's license or other government-issued photo ID.
How did the family of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan—founder of Reconstructionism—influence his thinking about women, Jewish law and ritual, and a Jewish homeland? The father of four rambunctious daughters growing up in the early twentieth century--as women’s rights were expanding--Rabbi Kaplan considered how Judaism might become a vehicle for women’s self-expression and creativity rather than a burden in the modern world. With his eldest daughter, Judith, Kaplan initiated the bat mitzvah, a coming of age for girls. His second daughter, Hadassah, joined a small but influential cohort of American Jewish women who studied, worked, and volunteered in British Mandate Palestine, bringing back what they learned to help shape Zionism in America. What role, then, did gender and family play as Rabbi Kaplan developed his concept of Judaism as a Civilization?
Sharon Ann Musher is Professor of History at Stockton University. She writes and teaches social, cultural, and oral history with a focus on the New Deal, Jewish women, and motherhood. She is the author of Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth Century Palestine (New York University Press, 2025) and Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Co-sponsors: Department of History, Department of Sociology, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas.
For the benefit of those who cannot attend, each Community Lecture is recorded. Please allow two weeks for the most recent lecture to be uploaded. Videos may be viewed at: youtube.com/user/JWSTumn/videos
Center for Jewish Studies
A Jewish Language for All Occasions: Ladino Culture and Its Innovations
Tuesday, March 17, 7:30 p.m.
Minnesota JCC Sabes Center, 4330 Cedar Lake Road South, Minneapolis
Register for A Jewish Language for All Occasions.
This event is free and open to the public. Please plan to arrive early at the JCC to allow time to go through JCC security. The JCC requires a driver's license or other government-issued photo ID.
While Yiddish expressions pepper American English and great Yiddish novels are celebrated still today, comparatively little is known about Ladino and the cultural world it shaped from 1492 until World War II in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. While spoken today by relatively few people in the United States, Europe, and Israel, Ladino (also known as Judezmo and Judeo-Spanish) melded Jewish, Iberian, and eastern Mediterranean cultures to produce a new and vibrant language that permeated every aspect of Jewish life in Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. This lecture delves into the defining features of the Ladino language as a source of Sephardic resilience and adaptation after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula through the creation of serious and humorous Ladino folk culture, and the production of key works of Ladino literature, both religious and secular.
Devin E. Naar is an associate professor of History and Jewish Studies and chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. His first book, published by Stanford University Press, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, won a 2016 National Jewish Book Award and the prize for best book from the Modern Greek Studies Association. His current book project explores the history of Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire in the United States during the twentieth century.
Co-sponsors: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Department of History, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Institute for Global Studies, Institute of Linguistics, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas.
For the benefit of those who cannot attend, each Community Lecture is recorded. Please allow two weeks for the most recent lecture to be uploaded. Videos may be viewed at: youtube.com/user/JWSTumn/videos
Center for Jewish Studies
What Did People Talk About in the Warsaw Ghetto? Yiddish Words of the Holocaust
Wednesday, April 15, 7:30 p.m.
Minnesota JCC Sabes Center, 4330 Cedar Lake Road South, Minneapolis
Register for What Did People Talk About in the Warsaw Ghetto.
This event is free and open to the public. Please plan to arrive early at the JCC to allow time to go through JCC security. The JCC requires a driver's license or other government-issued photo ID.
The Holocaust radically altered the way its victims--especially Yiddish speakers--communicated. Finding their prewar language incapable of describing the dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue. This talk will focus on the experience of language in the Warsaw ghetto, looking at the new Yiddish words, how people debated their meanings, and why they felt it was so important to remember them.
Hannah Pollin-Galay is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies, and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018) and Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (UPenn Press, 2024), which won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award.
Co-sponsors: Center for Austrian Studies, Center for German and European Studies, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, Department of History, Institute of Linguistics, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas.
For the benefit of those who cannot attend, each Community Lecture is recorded. Please allow two weeks for the most recent lecture to be uploaded. Videos may be viewed at: youtube.com/user/JWSTumn/videos
Jewish Youth Mentoring Program
Jewish Family and Children's Service (JFCS)
Ongoing
The Jewish Youth Mentoring Program (formerly the Jewish Big Brother/Big Sister Program), is a community-based mentoring program for Jewish-identified youth that is designed to promote positive social-emotional-spiritual development and increase engagement in the Jewish community. Since the program’s inception in 1975, it has matched over 400 Jewish youth with mentors.
The program is open to all families! Anyone can benefit from a personal, one-on-one connection with someone who is giving their undivided attention to them.
Participants are matched with carefully screened and selected volunteer mentors based on family preferences, age, gender identity, common interests, geographic proximity and more. Common match activities include visiting libraries or bookstores; arts and crafts; baking; exploring local parks; playing sports; going to museums; playing board games; and attending community events. Mentees are aged 6-12 and mentors are 16 and up, with a valid driver’s license
For questions, contact Dori Gelfman, Jewish Youth Mentoring Program Coordinator, at dgelfman@jfcsmpls.org or 952-542-4835.
The Chai–light Chorus
Ongoing
The chorale is actively recruiting new members! We’ve been in existence since 2000, having produced over 35 productions. We celebrate the joy of vocal performance without taking it too seriously. Anyone age 60 and above is eligible, and there’s absolutely no program fee — a musical “free for all!” Our weekly rehearsals are during the day. For more information, contact Mark Bloom via email at mark.bloomtru2life@gmail.com or by phone at 612-270–1705.
Free Modern Hebrew Language Courses for High School Students and Senior Citizens
University of Minnesota
Ongoing, Virtual
Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Modern Hebrew Language courses are available for free at the University of Minnesota to high school students enrolled at the university through the PSEO program, and to senior citizens ages 62+ auditing courses through the university's Senior Citizen Education Program.
Taught over Zoom by Israeli-born professor, Dr. Renana Schneller, the courses focus on reading, writing, understanding and speaking Hebrew. Contact Dr. Schneller for more information and placement at schne068@umn.edu. For more information, contact Temple member Jeri Glick-Anderson at jerianders@gmail.com.