Rochelle Zell Jewish High School E-news: Purim is Coming

9 Adar II, 5776 This Week at Rochelle Zell

March 18, 2016

Purim is Coming Order Mishloach Manot from YPI

Mishloach Manot Performance at SSDS Chesed Club Arts in April Pi Day Parent Get-­‐Together Senior Bible Art DECA and the Family Business QuarkNet and GravitaEonal Waves Upcoming Events Ad Book Community Events Alumni Trivia A Taste of Torah

Class Schedule

The deadline for the Mishloach Manot orders has been extended un4l Monday! Buy your holiday treats from YPI, our student philanthropy organiza4on, and support the Chicago Founda4on for Educa4on, a local organiza4on that provides resources to teachers and schools to enhance the quality of educa4on. Click here to download a form and add your name to the Purim bags for students and teachers!

​Monday, March 21 A Tuesday, March 22 B

Rochelle Zell Plays at Schechter Jazz Ensemble and Vocal Ensemble Perform

Wednesday, March 23 A -­‐ Ta'anit Esther Special Bell Schedule Thursday, March 24 Purim Special Service Day Friday, March 25 CC

Quick Links RZJHS.org Calendars Lunch Menu Edline Give Now

Save The Date ​March 18-­‐19 All School Shabbaton March 24 Purim March 25 2:15 Dismissal Begins April 10-­‐11

Wagner InsEtute April 10 ACT April 14 School Musical April 20-­‐May 2 Pesach Break April 22

The vocal ensemble and jazz ensemble gave a concert for the seventh and eighth grade at Solomon Schechter Day School around the corner in Northbrook, including many selec4ons from our big showcase concert last month. The eleven Schechter alumni enjoyed seeing their old teachers, and everyone enjoyed sharing our music with the middle schoolers!

Purim Basketball Tournament Chesed Club Raises Funds for Chai Lifeline On Purim aNernoon aNer the service projects, Chesed Club is running a 3-­‐on-­‐3 basketball tournament! The tournament is raising money for Chai Lifeline, the founda4on improving life for children with cancer and their families. The drive is in memory of Daniella Moffson, a Barnard student and long4me supporter of Chai Lifeline, who lost her life a few months ago on a relief trip to Honduras in a tragic road accident. We are well on our way to our goal of $500 in Daniella's memory! Click here to sign up or donate.

Arts in April RSVP for Opera Field Trip

First Seder

STEM Corner ​NxtGen Tech -­‐ Summer High School Technology Program Through IIT Illinois Ins4tute of Technology invites high school sopho-­‐ mores, juniors and seniors to aYend NxtGen Tech in Summer 2016. NxtGen Tech Courses are held in Chicago from July 11-­‐ August 5 and in Wheaton from June 13-­‐July 1.

Choose from: Front-­‐End Web Design and Development Hacker Highschool -­‐ IT Security Modding MinecraN -­‐ Java Development System Administra4on Building and Securing a Network Click here to learn more!

Exci4ng news! Rochelle Zell Jewish High School is sponsoring a school-­‐wide field trip for all students and staff (and interested parents!) to aYend the big-­‐screen telecast of the Metropolitan Opera's produc4on of Puccini’s Madama BuYerfly on Wednesday evening, April 6. Joining together as a community to celebrate great art is a wonderful way to deepen our apprecia4on of the poten4al for human expression and foster the cultural literacy of our community. The bus will leave school at 5:00 p.m. and returns shortly aNer 10:00 p.m. RSVP to Ms. Friedman to reserve your spot!

Save the Date: Rochelle Zell School Musical Thursday, April 14, 2016 Get your leYers on, spellers, because you are going to get schooled! Join us for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, our sixth annual school musical! Get the word out, Tigers-­‐-­‐rehearsals are hea4ng up, and they're sounding great!

See if you can spot your favorite performer in next week's cast shot!

Pi Day Math Event of the Year On 3.14.16, Rochelle Zell celebrated Rounded Pi Day (3.1416 rounded from 3.14159...) by doing some recrea4onal mathema4cs. Students had to complete a set of tasks in teams in order to earn a delicious piece of pie. Students who completed all of the tasks in the most crea4ve way were entered into a compe44on for extra credit in their math classes! Tasks included finding a real life parabola in the school, teaching a staff member (who is not a math teacher) something about pi, and solving Page 314 #15 in their own math textbook. Congratula4ons to Josh Weisskopf's team and Shai Sklar's team for winning the Pi Scavenger Hunt! In addi4on, Ms. Gitlin's Honors Geometry students calculated the

approximate value of Pi to 4 decimal places by approxima4ng the circumference of a circle using a 1000 sided regular polygon. Ask them how!

Parent Get Together Parent and Alumni Parent Event Draws Over 100 On Saturday night, March 12, over a hundred parents, alumni parents, and staff joined us for the Third Annual Rochelle Zell Parent and Alumni Parent Event. Guests mixed and mingled throughout the evening, sipping drinks and munching the tasty crea4ons from Shallots.

A great evening was most definitely had by all! Many thanks to the event chairs, Debbie Copley, Karen Ecanow, Judi Kelly and Carolyn Rosenberg for an outstanding event.

Midrash as Art Senior Rabbinics ElecEve Rabbi Greenberg's seniors are exploring the first four chapters of Genesis in the art studio, having studied the original chapters of the crea4on stories and interpreted them in ar4s4c representa4ons. The class is now learning midrashim on Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the Trees of Knowledge and Life. Rabbi Greenberg explains, "We are layering more materials, textures, and colors on top of our original crea4ons to capture our new understanding, thanks to the midrashim. The layers in our artwork mimic the layers of meaning in a biblical text that has been studied and inherited for genera4ons."

Alumni Trivia

"This is how girls do it!" Do you fight like a girl, drive like a girl, sail like a girl? Which of our former students starred in the IDF's video for Interna4onal Women's Day?

QuarkNet Guest Speaker NU Professor Explains GravitaEonal Waves to Physics Club and Faculty The lasers are late! Miles from anywhere in remote Washington State, a state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art inferometer detected a ripple in the paYern made by two laser beams as they travel a fixed distance, reflect off a mirror, and arrive back at the lab at the same 4me. But billions of miles away, the collision of two black holes sent ripples through space and 4me itself, causing distances to stretch and 4mes to slow. This 4ny, 4ny ripple is not detectable by any human means-­‐-­‐on an interstellar scale, it would make a star at Alpha Centauri closer to us by the width of a single hair-­‐-­‐ but it was enough to make one of the laser beams arrive late, as it raced doggedly across a beamline that was suddenly longer than it had been before! This 4ny flicker observed last fall confirmed Einstein's long-­‐disputed theory of gravita4onal waves, the long-­‐sought physics phenomenon that explains how gravity propagates across the universe.

Q: Did we just discover these waves when we saw the block holes colliding? How rare is this?

A: These phenomena happen in space all the 4me; we observed them for the first 4me last fall because that was when the LIGO laser inferometer first began taking data!

Q: The machine measures ripples in space. So what happens if a truck drives by and shakes the ground?

A: Disaster! The experiment was held up for weeks because of a car accident on a nearby highway.

That's why the lab is built so far away from civiliza4on.

Ask your favorite physics aficionado for what else they learned! And many many thanks to Dr. Michael SchmiY, physics department chair at Northwestern University-­‐-­‐where he was Mrs. Eliaser's favorite college prof ever-­‐-­‐for coming to explain them all to us!

DECA Guest Speaker Inside a Family Manufacturing Business On Tuesday, DECA welcomed Gigi Cohen, mother of Dana Levin ('14) and seniors Sarah and Melissa Levin, to give a career talk to the club. Ms. Cohen is a family-­‐member execu4ve of Magid, a mid-­‐ sized family-­‐owned and operated manufacturer of personal safety equipment. Over 20 students took advantage of the opportunity to learn about her company and career and to get a "behind the scenes look" at what it takes to operate a family business. Thank you Ms. Cohen, for dedica4ng your 4me to helping our students learn about business! Ms. Cohen was the first of three speakers in DECA's guest speaker series.

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We're ramping up our Facebook presence! Click here to follow us; invite your friends to “like” Rochelle Zell Jewish High School. Help us reach this milestone…get connected today! #RochelleZell #1000fans #GoTigers

AIPAC Chicago Policy Conference Rochelle Zell DelegaEon If you haven't RSVPed to Rabbi Silver, do so today!

We look forward to seeing you at AIPAC next week!

Click here or anywhere on the image above to register

Wagner Institute

Adbook Sponsorship Adver4se your business in the Rochelle Zell Jewish High School ad book supplement to the yearbook. Recall memories, give a bit of advice, or simply extend good wishes to students, the community or to the faculty and staff. Click here for an order form, or pick up a form in the school office. Complete and submit to the front office at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in an envelope marked 'yearbook'. You can also email ad copy/artwork here. All ad book submissions are due April 15. For ques4ons or more informa4on, contact Ms. Averbach at 847.423.5977.

Community News and Events MUN in the News We're famous! The Pioneer Press and the Chicago Tribune have heard all about our #1 Model U.N. team! Read all about it in yesterday's paper!

JUF's Annual Jewish Day School Night Tuesday, March 29, 7:15 p.m. | 5300 West Touhy Avenue in Skokie, IL

Alumni Trivia Naly Krishtal, who graduated high school in 2014, made aliyah immediately thereaNer to study communica4ons and liberal arts at Tel Aviv University and take her tour of duty defending the Jewish state in the Israeli Defense Forces. Naly is in her second year in the army, where she works in the Oketz Counter-­‐Terrorism Canine Unit. In Naly's less-­‐than-­‐plen4ful spare 4me, she indulges her passion for dance and immerses herself in nature. We are so proud of you Naly-­‐-­‐may you go from strength to strength!

A Taste of Torah: Ta'anit Esther There is one people, sca<ered and dispersed among the other na=ons in all the states of your empire. Their customs are different from all other people's, and they do not keep the king's rule, so there is no benefit in tolera=ng them.

-­‐ Esther 3:8 They ruin our holiday cheer: they keep neither the Calends nor the Saturnalia. -­‐ Midrash Esther Rabbah They will not marry among us, nor eat at our tables. And they do not pay their taxes promptly as good ci=zens, saying, "Not today-­‐-­‐it is our Sabbath! Not today, it is our Passover fes=val!" -­‐ Tractate Megillah 13b

Where have we heard this logic before? In our homes, safe among our friends, in na4onal discourse? That evil among us is due only to the presence of those Others, those whose different language, different faith, different customs are the source of all that is wicked, and by forcibly removing those Scoundrelly Others, we will forever remove all evil from our midst? Who in the great empire of Persia was truly the most wicked: those whose difference made them culpable, or those whose same-­‐ness made them blind to their own violence and hatred?

This Wednesday, the Jewish community will band together to observe Ta'anit Esther. We are commanded to fast in memory of all the sacrifices our leaders and our people have made to keep us safe: those who prepared to give their lives and those who did give their lives so that the Jewish people would endure. We remember what it is to not know where our next meal is coming from, to be hungry and desperate not just for the fast to end and the feast to begin, but in desperate danger of our safety. Those of us who will be ea4ng or drinking, let us instead abstain from words of accusa4on and blame. Let us fast from polarizing discourse that accuses without solving problems, that place all evil firmly in the realm of Those Who Are Not Us and absolves us from policing our own faults. And for those of us who can and will keep the fast, let us fast for ourselves, the whole people Israel, and those Others of today, who see Haman's fingers reaching out to destroy them, and who look to us to support them, as the Persians in Mordechai's 4me supported his people.

-­‐-­‐Mrs. Shira Eliaser

For those interested in Mrs. Eliaser's drasha on Vash= from this morning, the full story with her transla=on and commentary can be found on her website here. Of the more modern commentaries, Vash= and the Angel Gabriel comes from Sisters at Sinai, Rabbi Hammer's collec=on of modern midrashim. As a companion piece, a thrilling and unique take on Esther can be found in Tommy Tenney's 2004 novel Hadassah: One Night With the King. The more explicit and violent view of the history, crown with Queen Vash='s triumphant reemergence can be found in Rebecca Kohn's 2005 novel The Gilded Chamber. A freilichen Purim to all our readers!

1095 Lake Cook Road • Deerfield, IL 60015 • 4gers@rzjhs.org • 847.470.6700