change your world event

The annual Change Your World Celebration is the signature fundraiser for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. Proceeds from this important evening guarantee our program success each year and advance our statewide mission of promoting respect for human dignity and diversity through education. This years event will be held at the Boise Centre, The Grand Ballroom.  Our own Rabbi Dan will be honored at this important event.  Learn more here.

October 11: Nimisha Barton, Neilsen Lecture, @ 6pm in CML BO1. Talk title: Magical Thinking: Family Mythmaking and Memory Healing in the Sephardic Diaspora

Description: Last year, a woman recognized the Turkish Sephardic family on the cover of an obscure book in French history called Reproductive Citizens. She contacted its author – Dr. Nimisha Barton – who found herself captivated by the Abouafs, a family expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, chased out of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth, persecuted in Europe during the Holocaust, and now scattered across the globe. In spite of the many historical traumas visiting upon this Sephardic Jewish family, their stories and memories emphasized creation and healing over destruction and loss. By braiding together Ottoman, French, and Jewish mystical traditions, the Abouafs managed to create a sense of home, identity, and belonging in a world trying so viciously to tear them out of it.  Their saga suggests how people living in involuntary diaspora experience world-altering trauma and, more significantly, how they can become authors of their own healing using one of the only means available to them – storytelling.

Dr. Nimisha Barton is a Visiting Researcher at UC Irvine and an Equity and Inclusion Consultant in education. Her award-winning research on gender, sexuality, and immigration in modern France has appeared in French Politics, Culture and Society, Journal of Women's History, and various edited volumes. Her co-edited volume on women, gender, and citizenship in modern France appeared in 2018 with the University of Nebraska Press. Her book, entitled Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in France, 1880-1945, appeared in 2020 with Cornell University Press. It recently won Honorable Mention for the Society of French Historical Studies’ David H. Pinkney Prize which recognizes the most distinguished book in French history. It also was awarded the J. Russell Major prize offered by the American Historical Association for best Anglophone book in French history.

November 7:  Mariusz Kałczewiak, Nelisen Lecture, 7pm KAIC 106,  Talk title: Between Striking Roots and Trans-Atlantic Loyalties. Interwar Polish-Jewish Migration to Argentina.

Description: Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. In this talk, Mariusz Kałczewiak will speak about the mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. He will present how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children and will analyze the dynamics that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and maintaining commitments to the country of origin.

Mariusz Kałczewiak is a social and cultural historian of modern Eastern Europe and Latin America. One of the leading scholars in Latin American Jewish Studies, currently Kałczewiak develops a new research focus on Jewish Gender Studies.  He holds a PhD degree from Tel Aviv University (2017) and a MA degree from the University of Warsaw (2011).  His first book Polacos in Argentina. Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture appeared in 2020 with the Alabama University Press.

URGENT

Interfaith Sanctuary has put out an emergency request for help.  Volunteers are needed on Sundays to help with outreach at and around Cooper Court.  Corpus Christi is no longer open on Sundays which leaves a lot of our friends outside needing water, popsicles and welfare checks.  (Many of the cooling centers are closed on Sundays.)  They are hoping to get volunteers from congregations/faith groups.  New volunteers will be paired with experienced people.  Contact Denise Caruzzi at 208-340-7449.

CABI has been asked to pilot a new Boise Faith Group program called Furnishing Hope. This collaboration will help families who are transitioning from temporary hotel housing sponsored by Interfaith Sanctuary to permanent homes. In both November of this year, as well as in June of 2024, CABI will be helping to outfit the homes of our sponsor family with gently-used or new furniture and other household essentials.

In the meantime, Furnishing Hope continues to work with other families in need (and Boise-area congregations to help meet those needs) each month. If you have gently used household items such as those contained in this list, please reach out to Kali and she will put you in touch with the team of folks collecting donations. Also, if you have a truck and/or are interested in helping to move folks into their new homes, please let Kali know.

Prohibiting access to potentially lifesaving medical procedures for women is contrary to the Jewish values of protecting life (pikuach nefesh) and respecting human dignity (kayod ha’briyot). As such, our Reproductive Justice Team has recently partnered with Idaho Abortion Rights to provide congregants with access to reproductive health items.

Reproductive health boxes - which include pregnancy tests, condoms, and emergency contraceptives - will be placed in both the women’s and men’s bathrooms in the social hall, as well as in the all-gender bathroom in the basement of the sanctuary. Items are placed in these locations to provide privacy to congregants in need and will be positioned on high shelves (out of reach of little hands). During religious school sessions, the boxes will only be available in the sanctuary bathroom.

For more information about reproductive health options in Idaho, please visit: https://idahoabortionrights.com/.

For more information about Social Justice opportunities at CABI, please email melissa@cabi-boise.org. We are looking to build both our volunteer base as well as our Social Justice outreach here in Boise and would love your help. Together, we will continue our work to create a more equitable Boise for all. 

Simcha!

How many times have you wanted to do something nice for a very special person but couldn't come up with the right idea?  What better way to recognize someone than a Simcha Leaf for our Simcha Tree! You could publicly praise, laud, glorify, or just plain acknowledge a meritorious moment in their lives while contributing to the living legacy of our synagogue's survival! Wow! All in one small leaf for mankind! 

Please contact Roy Ledesma HERE, if you would like to order a Simcha Leaf.