Purim across Jewish Tidewater

PURIM

Purim in Jewish Tidewater

Creativity reigns throughout the community with plans to celebrate Purim with both traditional and innovative, fun events. The holiday commemorates the saving of the Jewish people in Persia as recounted in the Book of Esther. Compiled by Ronnie Jacobs Cohen for Shalom Tidewater

B’NAI ISRAEL

Rabbi Sender Haber’s ‘Daily Dvar Torah’ WhatsApp group is currently studying the Book of Esther with short and inspiring daily lessons. If interested in joining this group, contact B’nai Israel’s office.

COVID-19 compliant Megillah readings Thursday night, February 25 and Friday morning, February 26

A special Purim scavenger hunt throughout Ghent will take place.

Rabbi Haber will facilitate ‘Matanos La’evyonim’—‘Gifts for the Poor’ with distributions taking place on Purim both locally and in Israel.

Everyone is encouraged to fulfill the mitzvah of ‘Mishloach Manos’—‘Gifts of Food’ to family, friends, and particularly to people who are housebound and on their own this Purim.

In keeping with State and Rabbinic Guidelines, there will not be a communal Purim meal this year. For more information, scheduling, or to participate in any of the above, contact the B’nai Israel office at office@bnaiisrael.org.

CHABAD OF TIDEWATER Megillah readings Thursday, February 25

Ma’ariv begins at 6:25 pm; Megillah reading at 6:45 pm and again at 7:45 pm

Friday February 26

Shachris at 8 am; Megillah reading at 8:30 am and at 10 am Activities will be in-person, with limited seating. RSVP is required. For information and to RSVP, email rabbilevi@chabadoftidewater.com.

CONGREGATION BETH EL The Beth El Players present the Story of Esther on Zoom Thursday, February 25, 5:45 pm Full Megillah reading Friday, February 26, 7:15 am during morning Zoom minyan.

Contact noelle@bethelnorfolk.com for Zoom links. Thanks to Beth El’s Men’s Club and the volunteer delivery team, Beth El delivered mishlo’ah manot boxes to all members.

KEHILLAT BET HAMIDRASH, KEMPSVILLE CONSERVATIVE SYNAGOGUE Food In; Food Out Sunday, February 21

Stop by KBH to drop off non-perishables for the JFS Food Pantry and receive some hamantashen and sweets.

Virtual Purim Parade and Megillah reading Thursday, February 25, 7 pm Purim Seudah February 26, 12 pm

Grab your lunch and join via Zoom for Purim games and activities—and maybe a few l’chaims. For information and the Zoom link, email kbhsynagogue@gmail.com.

OHEF SHOLOM Hamantashen Cooking with Phil and Tal Sunday, February 21, 4 pm via Zoom

Go to ohefsholom.org for ingredients and Zoom link.

A Pandemic in Persia: A Purimshpiel Thursday, February 25, 6:30 pm

If you haven’t already joined the kingdom-wide Zoom meeting, by royal decree, King Achashveirosh requests the presence of every Persian in the land to Zoom for A Pandemic In Persia! A Virtual Zoom Shpiel. For more information, call 757-625-4295 or email information@ohefsholom.org for the Zoom link.

The Whole Megillah with Jay Lazier Friday, February 26, 12 pm

Sit down for lunch and tune in to hear the full Megillah read by Jay Lazier. Groggers and megillot optional. RSVP to reservations@ohefsholom.org for the link.

PJ LIBRARY

Purim in a box is being delivered to Jewish families in Tidewater who reserved one before they were all gone. The Purim box includes a Purim craft, markers, a decorate your own mask, Purim accessories, a PJ Library’s Be Happy, It’s Purim DVD for the everyone to enjoy and a plate of assorted Hamantashen cookies.

STRELITZ INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY In-school Purim Celebration Friday, February 26

Students will come in costume, review the Purim story and enjoy treats including Hamentashen. SIA students will also participate in Purim-themed games with prizes and be treated to special entertainment via Zoom.

TEMPLE ISRAEL Zoom Megillah reading of the Book of Esther Thursday, February 25, 7 pm

What really happened when COVID came to Shushan? Write a short song, poem, or story about a section of the Purim story and what really happened when COVID came to Shushan. For more information and the Zoom link, email templeisraelva1954@gmail.com.

TEMPLE EMANUEL Purim Celebration Sunday, February 21, 11 am

A community—for kids and adults—celebration will take place via Zoom. The celebration will include Reading of the Megillah and the film, Rise of the Empress. For the Zoom link to the Purim Celebration, go to www.tevb.org/virtual.

TIDEWATER CHAVURAH Rock ‘n’ Roll Purim Megillah Reading Friday, February 26, 7 pm

Dress in costume or at least wear a fun hat and wild jewelry. For more information, visit www.tidewaterchavurah.org or contact rabbicantorejg@ gmail.com.

PURIM

These 7 US bakeries will ship hamantaschen directly to you

Shannon Sarna

It’s always great to bake hamantaschen and share them with friends and family. But this isn’t a normal year, of course, and it may be harder to find the time to bake hamantaschen because your kids are home doing remote school; or you’re worried about getting the packages out in time; or maybe you just want to share a little extra sweet cookie deliciousness with the people you love who are far away.

Whatever the reason, here are a bunch of wonderful bakeries from around the United States that will ship hamantaschen for you. Bonus: Your kitchen will remain mess-free. Win, win.

Three Brothers Bakery

Three Brothers Bakery is an absolute gem and makes the best hamantaschen I’ve ever tasted. The Houston-based business is family run and dates back to before the Holocaust (read more about the family history here). You can order a package of traditional hamantaschen or try their s’mores hamantaschen. You might want to order some extra goodies while you’re on their site.

To order, visit the Three Brothers Bakery website.

Breads Bakery

Breads Bakery, based in New York City, comes up with new hamantaschen flavors every year to keep us excited. This year is no different: Their apple pie hamantaschen is a bite of heaven. They also have chocolate, poppy, halva and pizza. And new this year will be their weekly rotating flavors, which include matcha, coconut-lime and chai, just to name a few. You can order pick up or delivery if you’re in New York City, or you can have them delivered anywhere in the U.S. via Goldbelly.

To order, visit Goldbelly.

Ricki’s Cookies

Based in Memphis, this family bakery is beloved by the Tennessee locals. In fact, I have been hearing about Ricki’s Cookies for nearly 15 years from a friend who was raised in Memphis. You can order a mixed assortment of fruit hamantaschen or choose a whole package of just one jam. This bakery is kosher.

To order, visit the Ricki’s Cookies website. York bakery via Goldbelly. They’re kosher, a New York favorite and you can send them anywhere in the U.S.!

To order, visit Goldbelly.

OhNuts.com

OhNuts.com doesn’t just have kosher hamantaschen, and you can have them shipped anywhere. They have beautiful, drool-worthy chocolate-dipped hamamtaschen packages with rainbow chips and peppermint, among other festive flavors. For the purists, they also have all the standards, like apricot, raspberry and poppy seed.

To order, visit the OhNuts website.

Sunflower Bakery

This Maryland-based nonprofit bakery isn’t just making delicious kosher sweets shipped straight to your door: They are also doing important community work. Their mission is to provide training and job skills to adults 18 and older who have learning differences. And since tzedekah is also an important part of Purim, you can give some hamantaschen that have a little extra meaning. They have a huge selection of hamantaschen flavors, including cookie dough and coco-caramel, and even gluten-free hamantaschen!

To order, visit the Sunflower Bakery website.

Zingerman’s

Everyone’s favorite Michigan bakery will send you a package of mixed hamantaschen including vanilla bean, poppy and apricot. Want to boo Haman? For a little extra, you can get some groggers, too.

To order, visit the Zingerman’s website.

This piece originally appeared on The Nosher.

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PURIM

We’ve lost almost an entire year: COVID-fatigued communities prepare for a distanced Purim

Shira Hanau

(JTA)—In any other year, the mask-decorating party planned for later this month at Congregation Beth El Ner Tamid in Broomall, Pennsylvania, would make perfect sense: Costumes are part of the ritual for festive Jewish holiday of Purim, which begins Feb. 25.

This year, though, the masks being decorated aren’t meant for a carnival— they’ll be appropriate to use as personal protective equipment as long as the coronavirus pandemic lasts. The gathering, and the subsequent synagoguewide celebration, will take place on Zoom.

The party represents Beth El Ner Tamid’s effort to preserve the spirit of the holiday, even as its very celebration offers a cruel reminder that an entire year has elapsed since COVID-19 turned life upside down, seemingly overnight.

“There’s a lot of grief in the fact that we’ve lost almost an entire year of synagogue life and our personal lives,” says Rabbi Janine Jankovitz of Beth El Ner Tamid. “I know people are tired and sad, and we’re trying to bring them just a little bit of joy.”

In 2020, Purim began on the evening of March 9, just before the country shut down to stop the spread of the coronavirus. For some Jewish communities, the holiday was the first celebrated over Zoom. In others, the typical parties gave way to more somber, hand sanitizer-soaked services, stripped of the raucousness that characterizes the holiday. For many in Tidewater, the Purimsphiels and carnivals were the last in-person events. By the following Shabbat, they had canceled in-person services, too.

A year later, the holiday is symbolic of one thing for everyone: an entire Jewish calendar year in which the holidays, the Shabbats and all the rituals in between have been adapted under the burden of the pandemic and its restrictions.

For non-Orthodox synagogues, that means a Zoom production that builds on a year of expertise.

Temple De Hirsch Sinai, a Reform congregation in Seattle, Washington, located near an early outbreak, canceled last year’s Star Wars-themed Purim programming but vowed that its annual Purim spiel would be “back next year, bigger and better than ever.” This year, its schedule boasts multiple online events, including a spiel inspired by the viral video app TikTok.

But some elements of the celebration— including the reading of the Megillah, the scroll containing the Purim story—do not lend themselves to the practicalities of pandemic broadcasting. Listeners typically use groggers, small noisemakers, to cancel out the name of Haman, the villain who tries to destroy the Jews, whenever it’s mentioned in the story.

“How do you do the groggers on Zoom?” Jankovitz wondered, bemoaning the fact that the experience for little kids, for whom the silliness on Purim is a special treat, won’t be the same. “The sense that we’re going to have to mute people in between really does take away from the joy and festivity of Purim.” Locally, Ohef Sholom Temple mailed cards to its members to hold up while on zoom during the spiel instead of groggers.

At the Orangetown Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation in Rockland County, just north of New York City, this year’s Purim costume parade will be replaced by a car parade through the town, with congregants decorating their cars for the occasion and the fire department leading the way. For the Megillah reading, congregants will gather in the parking lot to hear the story on their car radios.

With congregants able to safely distance from one another in their cars, Rabbi Craig Scheff hopes the setup will be an opportunity to feel connected as a community while staying safely distanced.

The Leffell School, a Jewish day school in Westchester County, an early epicenter of the pandemic in New York state, had already switched to online learning by Purim last year.

“Because everything was so new on Zoom, there was this excitement of what Purim would look like online,” Rabbi Yael Buechler of the lower school recalls.

“This whole year has been a bit of a ‘v’nahafoch hu’ experience,” Buechler says, using a Hebrew phrase from the Megillah meaning “it will be turned upside down” that symbolizes the topsy-turvy nature of the Purim story.

For Rabbi Shaanan Gelman, this Purim will in some ways be more normal than last year.

Gelman, who leads the Modern Orthodox Kehilat Chovevei Tzion in Skokie, Illinois, attended last year’s AIPAC convention in Washington, D.C., where he came in contact with someone who later tested positive for the coronavirus. So, while his congregation met in person, he was in quarantine at home and listened into the synagogue’s phone line to hear the Megillah reading while reading along from a scroll on Purim night.

This year, Gelman’s synagogue will host multiple services and provide a livestream option for those who are not able to attend, though Gelman stressed that the streaming option is not an ideal way to fulfill the obligation to hear the Megillah.

“A lot of what has become synonymous with Purim is not going to be happening this year,” Gelman said. “Hopefully next year we’ll get back to the bigger celebration of Purim.”

While Gelman noted the fatigue that had set in around continued pandemic restrictions on daily life, he says being able to attend services in person this year should not be taken for granted. “I am appreciative that I can, God willing, come to shul and hear the Megillah live.”

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