Toward the end of our journey, after spending four days in beautiful, forested, eastern Poland, also known as Yiddishland, we had a not-so-typical Variety Show in a retro hotel conference room.
This culminating group experience is meant to help us digest our journey through creative expression. Participants sang songs and read poems they love or had written on the journey, shared pieces of their journals and other writings, letters from ancestors, got the group up for a dance party, and put on silly skits (Cyrise and I were the shvestern (sisters) from Białystok).
🥒 For some folks, getting up in front of a group isn’t easy. But it gets much easier when Reb Pickle, aka artist-educator-performer Julie Weitz, sets the vibe. (In case you’re wondering about what is happening in this pic, that’s a literal jar of pickles down their pants — participants were welcome to try them 🥒 )
Julie Weitz is one of our educators for this final leg of journey, and in addition to her alter ego, she and Danya Voskoboynik helped us “Reforest our Jewish Imaginations,” guiding us through the teachings of Rabbi Aaron Tamares in the woods (the 1880s anti-nationalist rebbe of the region), on a tour with border activists to the Belarus-Poland border where a modern refugee crisis is playing out in the same forest where Jews hid from the Nazis, in a Yiddish dance workshop called Release Your Dybbuk, and through conversations that engage questions and practices around memory culture, grief, Zionism, diasporism, Yiddish folklore, borders and nationalism.
This is the work and play of this journey: reaching back, weaving with the present, and creating (sometimes ridiculous) new possibilities for the future.
