This week CTV Morning Live! invited me to share about Passover and I appreciated the opportunity to discuss our holiday with the broader Edmonton community. As I mentioned in the interview, remaining connected with our traditions is an important component for us to see ourselves through this pandemic, and finding ways to for us to connect as a community will ensure our continued resilience. 

The Government of Alberta is declaring a “Day of Multi-Faith Prayer and Reflection” on April 6, 2021, encouraging faith leaders and community members to share their own reflections and messages of hope on social media using the hashtags #shareyourprayerAB and #shareyourreflectionAB. This is an effort “to promote intercultural understanding among us all as we continue to face the challenges of the pandemic together, honouring lives lost, and inspiring hope going forward.” If you are a social media user, please join and share more about our culture. 

Connecting with community and performing tikkun olam is another way to build our personal resiliency and so we hope that you saved your chametz (and more) for the food drive on Good Deeds Day April 11. This drive through drop off will have masked and distanced volunteers retrieving groceries from your trunk to place in an Edmonton Food Bank truck. We even have ‘mitzvah bags’ for the first 18 PJ library families to show up! We are thrilled that yegSpark, a grassroots initiative supported by Catholic agencies in Edmonton, will be “joining us” in this endeavor. yegSpark is relatively new program that matches volunteers to needs, you can learn more about them at yegspark.ca. In future years we look forward to working side by side, but for this year their ‘joining’ will be through promoting the event and adding drop off sites of their own.

In the week to come we will be commemorating Yom Hashoah with a book launch April 7, a national ceremony on April 8 at 5 p.m., and a very moving, deeply personal ceremony featuring local survivors and their families on April 8 at 7 p.m. You can learn more and register from our website. Regrettably, with the increase in cases and variants we are cancelling our drive-in Yom Haatzmaut event. Through Jewish Federations of North America we will join in virtual programming, and you can learn more. We will be welcoming virtual shlichim (counsellors) from Israel to our community this spring and look forward to the fun programming they have to offer. More details to come soon!

Finally, Film Fest is approaching and our line up is stellar and varied. Proceeds will benefit the Covid Relief Program. Please consider becoming a sponsor. You can contact susans@edjfed.org. 

Shabbat shalom,

Stacey