We are so excited to welcome Rabbi Katja Vehlow as our Scholar-in-residence for this Shabbat, May 5-6! Rabbi Vehlow was our USH rabbinic intern in 2020-21 -- meaning that she played a very important role in our congregation though she never actually spent Shabbat with us in our community. Rabbi Vehlow was ordained from the Jewish Theological Seminary and works as a chaplain at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn; before rabbinical school she was a professor of Judaic studies at the University of South Carolina. We are excited to learn from and with her this shabbat!

Friday night May 5: Services 6:30pm, presentation 7:15pm: Birth, choice, family, love: Jewish identities today Is Jewishness a binary -- either you’re Jewish or you’re not? Or are the boundaries of Jewishness more complex? What can we learn from Jewish history to help us to understand the joyful variety of Jewish identities today? Shabbat morning

May 6: services 9:30am, presentation 11:40am: Groundhog Day for Jews: Insights from a little-known holiday for today’s world How did the minor Jewish holiday known as Pesach Sheni (Second Passover) turn into a holiday of second chances? We will discover how we can harness the power of this day and celebrate Pesach Sheni as a day of inclusion and reconciliation with ourselves.

Lunch/Learn discussion: May 6, 1pm: Can we really translate the Torah? What does it mean to read the Bible in translation? Come and see how an iconic translation of our sacred text transformed the way we think about the Bible, language, and translation, and why its author referred to translation as a form of prayer.