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Community Service
As a member of local community and religious groups whose goals and values we share, we volunteer where help is needed.
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Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur
The shofar is heard at CHJ Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Family Services.
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Social Justice
After Charlotttesville
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Tu B’Shvat
Celebrating nature at the Tu B’Shvat seder is a joyous event filled with music and good food.
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We’re a Cooperative!
Members all play a role in making the congregation work. Read about how CHJ is organized.
Shavuot
Shavuot is a minor, ancient pilgrimage festival that marked the harvest of barley. Shavuot literally means “weeks,” so named because the festival is exactly seven weeks (plus one day) from the second night of Passover. For Humanistic Jews, Shavuot is a wonderful day for picnics with fresh loaves of challa. Shavuot is a significant Jewish holiday with… Read More
Mitzvah Mentoring Program
Mitzvah Mentoring Program For over six decades, the CHJ’s bar and bat mitzvah program has offered highly meaningful opportunities for secular Jewish families to celebrate a traditional milestone in their children’s lives while remaining faithful to their humanistic beliefs and values. Uniquely tailored to the interests of the student and family, the mitzvah program allows… Read More
Invitation to Join
Humanistic Judaism offers contemporary Jews an alternative to theistic-based branches of Judaism. At the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism (CHJ), our services and programs embrace Jewish historical and cultural traditions and its ethical values as applicable to our secular humanistic worldview. In our services, and especially on the High Holidays, we celebrate our Jewish identity while… Read More
Letter from the President
Thank you, all CHJ members, for giving me the opportunity to serve as your President. I promise to do my very best to meet your needs. Also, thank you, CHJ’ers, for enriching my life, and for your friendship in difficult times over the past >17 years. CHJ has given me the opportunity to celebrate being Jewish, to enjoy being Jewish, to share being Jewish, to learn more about being Jewish, and to support social/environmental goals. There are as many ways to do these things as there are members of CHJ.
Celebrate, Enjoy, Share, Learn, and Act!
Under the guidance of Steve Getz who is now Immediate Past President, the CHJ Board held special extra meetings over the last year to work on a project Steve called “Envisioning CHJ.” This initiative was successful in many ways. It reconfirmed our commitment to the goals in the bylaws. It achieved the financial review required by the bylaws. It enabled us to update our insurance contract. And it will be ongoing, because it generated a list of multiple ways in which we can act to make sure CHJ can thrive in the future. Among other ideas that have now been implemented is the renewed commitment to the B’nai Mitzvah program. We also had not one but two Havdalahs on the beach last summer. Friday evening programming and Sunday morning Jewish Journeys continue. I am convinced that the more that we enjoy what we do in CHJ, the stronger CHJ will be. Read More
Upcoming Events
Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.
The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.
Join Ruth Light to celebrate the joys of being Jewish on those Fridays when there is no official “program.” Ruth will be lighting candles at her home online in a Zoom room at 7 PM on those Fridays. “This is a new thing for me: even my grandmothers didn’t light candles for Shabbos”, says Ruth. We will take just a few minutes to schmooze, light candles if you like, perhaps share a little music or poetry or a short video, and touch base with our CHJ family.
A Zoom link will be sent closer to the date. Contact Ruth with questions.
Come schmooze! A fun way to get to know one another. For CHJ men only.
Bring your own food. Drinks will be provided.RSVP Dana Preis.
Join Ruth Light to celebrate the joys of being Jewish on those Fridays when there is no official “program.” Ruth will be lighting candles at her home online in a Zoom room at 7 PM on those Fridays. “This is a new thing for me: even my grandmothers didn’t light candles for Shabbos”, says Ruth. We will take just a few minutes to schmooze, light candles if you like, perhaps share a little music or poetry or a short video, and touch base with our CHJ family.
A Zoom link will be sent closer to the date. Contact Ruth with questions.
A poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown–and the love,
loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.
With her trademark spare, crystalline prose, Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner
workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through
the early days of the pandemic.
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and
bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For
the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled
against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart–the pain of a beloved
daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. (304 pp) Fiction
SAVE THE DATE!
– Please come join us to celebrate the well-lived life of Gail Ostrowr. This will be a time to share collective fond memories and stories of Gail in an intimate environment with those who loved and cherished Gail.
The event will be held in one of Gail’s favorite venues – the Unitarian Church of Westport. We plan on live-streaming the event, as well as recording it, for those of you who are unable to attend in person.
SAVE THE DATE: JOIN US FOR CHJ’S
ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP PARTY ON THE PATIO AND POOL!
Special musical guests: The Pasternak Duo
Potluck luncheon (CHJ provides drinks and desserts)
Last names A-M bring hearty salads and appetizers. Last names N-Z bring luncheon main dish.
RSVP with names and number of guests to events@humanisticjews.org.
Program to be decided.
There will be a brief service followed by a short program. Zoom link will be sent out prior to the date.
Open to the Public.
Join Ruth Light to celebrate the joys of being Jewish on those Fridays when there is no official “program.” Ruth will be lighting candles at her home online in a Zoom room at 7 PM on those Fridays. “This is a new thing for me: even my grandmothers didn’t light candles for Shabbos”, says Ruth. We will take just a few minutes to schmooze, light candles if you like, perhaps share a little music or poetry or a short video, and touch base with our CHJ family.
A Zoom link will be sent closer to the date. Contact Ruth with questions.
Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.
The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.
Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.
The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.
Join Ruth Light to celebrate the joys of being Jewish on those Fridays when there is no official “program.” Ruth will be lighting candles at her home online in a Zoom room at 7 PM on those Fridays. “This is a new thing for me: even my grandmothers didn’t light candles for Shabbos”, says Ruth. We will take just a few minutes to schmooze, light candles if you like, perhaps share a little music or poetry or a short video, and touch base with our CHJ family.
A Zoom link will be sent closer to the date. Contact Ruth with questions.
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn’s very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic
impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in the most startling and original ways.
Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster
Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel’s colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim’s widow skips town. Lionel’s world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has
trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel
by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. (311 pp) Fiction
Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.
The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist
who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too
much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve
“American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and
restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of
Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians,
into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. (335 pp) Fiction
Facebook Activity
On May 21st, CHJ held a special art program at the Westport Woman's Club. Dr. Deborah Varat, Professor of Art History, Southern New Hampshire University, presented "Arthur Szyk's The New Order (1941): How the Cartoons of a Polish Jew Helped Prepare the U.S. for War." A very interesting and well-attended program that was organized by Jessica Wolf and the CHJ Jewish Journeys committee. The Westport Woman's Club were co-sponsors and CHJ is grateful for their partnership on this wonderful event.
CHJ in the news... (read til end)
