Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Wishing all your wishes get sealed this Yom Kippur.

Source: Tablet Magazine

This post was written last week but accidentally  didn’t get posted.

The library and its librarian is back after the break due to the Passover festivities. Today was another fun day at the library.

I got a call earlier the week that today the religious school school’s 10-12 year old students will need books on Israel. Thus as soon as I got into the library I pulled 3+3  books for them. The first set of three included

• Arthur Tcholakian’s “Israel, land of promise” a 30 year old paperback full of excellent black and white photographs
• David Bamberger’s “Young Person’s History of Israel“, a great introduction to Israel in five parts: A land and a people, early Zionism, the road to independence, building a state, Israel today
• A Kid’s Catalog of Israel by Chaya M. Burstein is more in depth than the other two and the drawings are also funny and helpful.

The other three books I thought the children might enjoy are large format picture books:

• Israel, 50 Years: As Seen by Magnum Photographers
• The Israel I Love by Noel Calef
• Israel: The Promised Land by Jacob K. Javits

While I was pulling these out a a teacher came in and asked my help to translate some Hebrew words to English for a game. The first two dictionaries I grabbed didn’t help, but with the third one it was a breeze.

Next I checked in the books that were left in the library’s inbox. I had mixed feeling about it. On the one hand it was good to see that people are using the library and returning books in an timely manner. On the other hand all of these books were Passover related and with one exception all for children. This signaled that the library use is event/holiday driven, we didn’t have a lot of other traffic recently. Furthermore it’s great that adults borrow books for their children, but what about themselves? We have treasures they would surely enjoy had they take the time to browse our collection or ask me for recommendations.

As part of Congregation Beth Ami’s day of Sharing and Learning I gave a presentation on Sunday, November 21, 2010 on “Jewish Life Online.” The flyer of the event said that I would

“share information on the most important websites today for connecting with your Jewish family and friends on-line, discovergin your heritage, and sites you can use to increase your family’s knowledge on all things Jewish.”

As I like acronyms I divided my presentation into four areas, one for each letter of the word “Life”: Learning, Information, Family, Entertainment. The slideshow contains 36 slides, including 20 screenshots and a cover page. You can download the presentation in PPT (5.7 MB) or PDF (2.8 MB) format. The handout has all the URLs (web addresses) mentioned in the presentation, but is much smaller. Its PDF version (38 kb) is best for printing on a double sided, letter size paper for folding, while the DOC/Word version (45 kb) works well on screen.

We had a good exchange and comments from the participants during the hour long session. When I mentioned that Congregation Beth Ami has a Facebook profile, with 105 “friends” right now, a participant raised the idea to create a LinkedIn group for Congregation Beth Ami. He is following up on that so it might come to reality. (LinkedIn is a social network site for professionals, focusing on career development and professional networks.) Another participant mentioned her own site: SacredHome.com. The site combines beauty and functionality, so I recommend it.

The video below contanis three songs from our joint Community Service of Thanksgiving with Church of the Roses on November 23, 2010. The songs included are “Sing to the Lord a New Song”, “Hava Nagila” starting at  2:34, and “Let All Things Now Living” starting at 6:31. I also included a picture of our amazing spread of refreshments at 8:13.

The madrichim of the Religious School (and a parent) performing the Parasha Play for Vayera this past Sunday.

Last Sunday, November 7, we had several activities to mark the three coinciding events. The next few sentences may seem complicated, but I wanted to make sure you have the whole background before I report on our events. Two of our lectures/discussions were organized around the Global Day of Jewish Learning. Our library is a member of the  Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL).  AJL this year joined the “Library Snapshot Day” project, an  advocacy initiative of the American Library Association (ALA). The California Library Association picked October 4 as the Library Snapshot Day in our state, but as we were closed that date we deiced to do it this Sunday, which was within the week long period of AJL’s recommendation of possible dates.

Our first planned event, a discussion with the older students of the religious school got postponed because of logistical reasons. The second one, story time with the second graders, started a little bit later than planned, because of their folk dancing class. The nine children and one madricha arrived to the library a few minutes after 11 AM and we read “It Could Always Be Worse” by Margot Zemach. They enjoyed the story and were active in the discussion about it, providing ideas how a situation could be worse or how the problem in the opening pages of the book could be solved.  Six of the children borrowed books after the reading, one for each. We had four more visitors in the library till we closed at 12.30, not counting the teachers, all of them parents. Two of them borrowed a book each.

At 1 PM USY started its first social action/Tikkun Olam event of the year in the large classroom of the campus, they made brown bag lunches for the Kid Street Learning Center. At 2 PM, I joined them and lead a discussion under the title of “Is Facebook God?” Fortunately, as I suspected, they were all on Facebook so I didn’t have to introduce it to them. We took Maimonides 13 attributes of God and attempted to compare it to Facebook or at least discover connections to it. Most of the nine teens and their group leader seemed to enjoy the conversation which lasted about 45 minutes. At the end they were all keen to take home a copy of the handout (PDF, 105 kb) that listed the attributes and provided one Facebook related idea and a suggestion for each. Rick Concoff, the Chaverim director, also joined us for most of event. Here they are the happy teens, after the discussion, and before I left so they could go on to start planning their next event.

To close the day we had an other presentation at 7 PM, this time on “Jewish Learning Online“. We started a few minutes late as setting up the projector and copying the handouts took slightly longer than expected. The slide presentation (PDF, 1 MB) consisted of  18 slides, including the cover and 7 screenshots of websites. The handout (PDF, 65 kb)  included all the URLs mentioned in the slideshow. The five people who showed up shared some of their favorite sites, particularly in the area that the presentation didn’t even attempt to cover: culture.

The day in numbers:

• 28 patrons (9 children, 1 madrich, 7 teens, 2 teen leaders, 4 parents, 5 adults)
• 8 borrowed items
• 3 events

The fist book club meeting of the season will be tomorrow at 10 AM. We will discuss Zoe Heller‘s novel, “The Believers.” Here is an interview with the author to jumpstart your thinking about the book:

A presentation on Sunday, November 7, 2010, 7 PM to 9:00PM,
on the Global Day of Jewish Learning about

the history of Jewish online learning resources
the forms, methods and places to learn Judaism online

followed by

a discussion and a communal sharing of further resources.

You are guaranteed to take home a list of
useful and inspiring ideas and web addresses (URLs).

PDF flyer of the event.

Event page on Facebook and on Librarything.com

A presentation and discussion
on Sunday, November 7, 2010, 2 PM to 4:00PM,
on the Global Day of Jewish Learning
for and with Jewish teenagers about

• The implications of Facebook and God being omnipresent.
• How Facebook (and the web) is forming our religious life.
• If and how it helps a sense of community.

PDF Flyer of the event.

Event page on Facebook and on Librarything.com

The schedule for our book club has been finalized. Below you will find the dates of our discussions along with the titles of the books we will be reading.

2010

• November 3: The Believers, by Zoe Heller
• December 1: Nothing Sacred, by Douglas Rushkoff

2011

• January 5: Ten Green Bottles, by Vivian J. Kaplan
• February 2: Natasha, & other stories, by David Bezmozgis
• March 2: Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain
• April 6: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin
• May 4: Prophet’s Wife, by Milton Steinberg
• June 1: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
• July 6: Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, by Kai Bird