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planning your TEVET/SHâ€™VAT 5777 8th Annual Feature Section SPECIAL EVENTS

Plan your event with professional help Editor’s Note: Some of HAKOL’s advertisers offered tips for event planning in the Lehigh Valley.

KEVIN RAMALEY Rockin’ Photobooth When looking for entertainment for your event: 1. Meet your DJ or band. Many companies have more than one team member. Meeting with your DJ or band can help ensure smoother planning and ensure compatible personalities. 2. Ask your DJ or band if they have a backup DJ or band/member. Do they have someone of equal or greater quality as a backup in case they are unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances? When looking for a photo booth for your event: 1. Personalization of your

photo strip makes it a memorable favor for your guests. Ask to see samples of past work to be sure they can personalize the way you want it. 2. Ask if your photo booth company props are new. Used props may appear tattered and old in your photos.

ALAN RAISMAN Civic Theatre of Allentown When planning an event, it is important to make sure that you have a checklist of all of the tasks to complete and make sure you run through the list prior to the start of the event. From the food, to the décor to the restocking of the restrooms, a checklist is important to a successful event. When planning a Jewish event, it is important to remember that food is critical, not just because it always makes for a great event, but

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you have to accommodate those who keep kosher, those who are vegetarian and those who have allergies to certain foods like nuts. Food is one of the most memorable parts of an event, and it is important to make it high priority on your list when planning an event.

1. Get your committee to weigh in from the start so everyone is on board. 2. Break up the committee into small groups so everyone has a goal to reach at the end of the event whether it’s fundraising related, or booking a great band for dancing.

LUCY BLOISE Miller Symphony Hall

SAMANTHA CHITSWARA The Center at Holiday Inn

Planning an event to make it less stressful:

We like to recommend that guests are flexible when plan-

ning for their groups; keep the overall focus on your guests’ happiness to guide your decisions, rather than your personal preferences. Also, we recommend that guests be open to the creativity and suggestions of their planners or sales contacts; we live and breathe this daily and can help guide you from experience and best practices in the industry.

LANCE W. EK Reflections Creative Photography, LLC Tips from a photography standpoint: 1. Use an experienced professional that has photographed “your type of event” before. There is more to capturing all of the emotions, activities, most flattering poses, in a timely and non-intrusive way than just having a good camera. 2. There is more to selecting your photographer than “how much will it cost?” Although important, it should be one of three considerations: Quality and creativity of the images, cost and – what I think is one of the most important – the personality of your photographer. Your photographer can set the entire mood for your day based on how they interact with you, your family, your guests and the other professionals.

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2 JANUARY 2017 | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | PLANNING YOUR SIMCHA

Bar mitzvah of boy with autism brings community together in support and understanding

On Oct. 22, 2016, at Temple Covenant of Peace, Mika Kanofsky celebrated his bar mitzvah. Joined by a caring community of family, friends and synagogue members, and encouraged by Rabbi Melody Davis and Cantor Jill Pakman, Mika, who has autism, was able to celebrate his special day in his own way that was meaningful for him and insightful for the community. At the beginning of the studying process, “Rabbi Melody said it’s your service, what do you want to do?” recalls Heather Arak, Mika’s mother. Every part of the service, including the portions he led on Friday night, Saturday morning and Havdalah, was done with him in mind, an experience that Arak says made her son feel comfortable. “He [says] she’s so nice, she makes me feel important, and that’s all anyone wants, to feel important and special and like you’re seen and like you’re someone, and they do that for him, which is really special.” During the ceremony, for example, he was surrounded by people who he felt comfortable interacting with both on and off of the bimah. During a prayer by family friend Alisa Tongg, Mika interrupted her speech and said, “Auntie Alisa, I see God in that picture, in the beautiful clouds.” He had a conversation with her about God in the middle of her speech. When his mother asked him afterwards why he spoke then, he said, “I always know I can talk to her.” “The most amazing part for us was

“America,” which Mika’s parents sang to him as they landed in the U.S. for the first time after bringing him home from Russia. And in addition to the traditional roles in a bar mitzvah service, Mika’s celebration included five prayers written by friends and family to honor community, teachers, creativity, Israel and America. After the service ended, the family headed home for a short break before returning to the temple at night. Since Mika has sensitivities to sound and light, the Kanofsky family opted to create a silent dance party in which each participant was given a pair of headphones and although the same song played in everyone’s ears at the same time, which enables dancing in a group, everyone could control their own volume. “He hides during bar and bat mitzvah [parties],” Arak said. “He loves music, but it’s so loud and there are so many lights. So we had a silent disco. He loved it. He danced all night long.” He brought his own special flair to the party as well. Rather than creating a photo board for people to sign at the party, Mika provided one of the scrolls he makes as a favorite hobby. In addition to the scroll placed in each invitation, Mika created scrolls for the party, and guests had the opportunity to use tools like a magnifying glass, packing tape and permanent markers to add to his scroll. For the food, Arak said, “he wanted sushi, so we had a lot of sushi, they made a sushi boat. He wanted pie, so my mom made him 6 of his favorite pies, and then a friend of ours made these beautiful Russian-inspired cake pops. It was just right for him.” To replace traditional party games, “Nathan made him a cornhole game, and [Mika and younger brother Benjamin] were either dancing or playing cornhole all night.” And in the morning, Arak recalls him crying: “I [asked] what’s going on, what happened? And he said, ‘I’m just so happy, and I’m just so sad that I can’t do it over again.’ He said, ‘I just want to relive it every day.’” But the bar mitzvah process, for Mika, was about far more than the celebration. When asked what it meant for him to become a Bar Mitzvah, he told his mother, “I want

JEREMIE BARLOW

By Michelle Cohen HAKOL Editor

the sense of community that I felt before, during, and after,” Arak said. “I felt so loved and I felt like Mika is such a loved person. These people who are in our community, they get him, they meet him where he is, and they support us.” Rabbi Melody’s support started at the beginning. “She was very patient with him,” Arak said. Both she and Cantor Jill Pakman “were willing to say that they didn’t know how to handle it, how to make it right for him, but they were totally willing to learn. They totally accommodated him, and I think they both got so much joy out of seeing him succeed and feel so connected and happy.” Pakman’s help was important as well. When studying Hebrew became too intense, she tapped into Mika’s love of memorizing favorite lines and scenes from videos and created dozens of Torah reading videos, each with a sentence or two, to help him learn in a way in which he felt comfortable. By using hand signals rather than making Mika read the words, Pakman was able to help him learn in a series of videos. “He loved these videos,” Arak said. “They became almost like his movie lines, and he memorized them that way.” Mika also designed his own mitzvah project; he and his father, Nathan Kanofsky, built TCP’s sukkah because “he wanted to make something special where people could find God,” Arak said. The motif of a sukkah was built into the rest of the bar mitzvah, including a collection of symbols used in a stunning 3D papercraft invitation, a photo booth based on the invitation’s design and the day’s program. Along with the symbol for sukkah, Mika and his family created other themed symbols including a honeycomb for community, a palm frond for gathering and concentric teal circles for mitzvot. “Then, in his thank you [portion of his d’var Torah] he thanked God for shining down on all of us” on his special day, Arak said. Special people contributed to Mika’s day as well. His piano teacher, Betsy Buzzelli-Clarke, who Mika calls a “special person” and favors with his attention, played Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” a song that they enjoy playing together, as well as Neil Diamond’s

to be like all the people I look up to at our temple, I want to be a leader and I want to be a Jewish man.” She describes various interactions with him in which he has described talking to God on his own terms whenever he chooses, and he cited a relationship with God throughout his bar mitzvah studies. In addition to creating a meaningful experience for her son, Arak wanted to bring community awareness to the bar mitzvah to show that autism does not preclude human relationships and an understanding of autism should not come from stereotypes. “I feel very strongly about destigmatizing autism and helping people to understand it’s on a person-by-person basis,” Arak said. “I feel like if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. They’re all different.” Yet she does feel that “it does help when someone makes a connection with my son because then they think … I know this awesome person with autism so that does help them the next time they think about it. There’s a person attached to [the label].” Arak concluded, “My son Mika is a young man who has autism, he’s not an autistic young man. That’s not the only thing he is. He’s a million other things, but that’s the one thing that defines him sometimes in our society. He is also a kid [who] loves pop music, and he loves 80s music, and he is fun to be with, and he loves New York City.” And on Oct. 22, he became a Jewish man according to his own wishes.

PLANNING YOUR SIMCHA | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | JANUARY 2017 3

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Bar mitzvah project brings Jewish, Muslim teenagers together

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4 JANUARY 2017 | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | PLANNING YOUR SIMCHA

When Ari Abramovitz turned 13, his bar mitzvah project was nothing new to him. He had been involved in it for several years – and three days before the ceremony at Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El in Wynnewood on Dec. 3, Ari and 10 other Jewish teenagers joined 11 Muslim teenagers for a basketball game at the Wells Fargo Center, home of the Philadelphia 76ers. Ari, the grandson of Allentown residents Yair and Ilana Levy, became inspired to start the project in 2014, when his parents told him about Operation Protective Edge. “He was starting to adopt the same sort of opinions that the people around him were, in terms of, it’s all one-sided, it’s all the Palestinians’ fault, so on and so forth. So we encouraged him to try to think of things a little bit different,” said Ari’s mother, Meirav Abramovitz. She encouraged Ari to learn Matisyahu’s song “One Day” on the guitar, and after becoming inspired by the sentiment behind the melody, Ari decided to write his own song. The song, “Shalom,” is about “trying to live together, changing the way that we think about things and trying to coexist,” Abramovitz said. Ari was nearly 11 when he wrote “Shalom,” and around that time, he began to think about his bar mitzvah project. When his parents encouraged him to research coexistence, a theme that he was now interested in thanks to his new song, he learned about the Israel Tennis Centers Foundation (ITC), who he contacted. The ITC, which serves 20,000 children in Israel each year, focuses on bringing together Israeli Jews, Arabs, Bedouins and Druze to play sports together. Ari was given the opportunity to go to an ITC exhibition, where he got to watch a religiously mixed team play tennis and meet the players afterwards. The experience inspired Ari to go beyond his original idea of a mitzvah project to raise money for the ITC and decided to organize a round robin coexistence tennis tournament with local Muslims and Jews. Ari got in contact with Al Aqsa Academy in Philadelphia, and the principal, Abdur Rahman, was “excited to speak with Ari and he thought it was a wonderful idea,” said Abramovitz. After debating different sports, they settled on holding a basketball tournament. At this stage of the project, Ari began to fundraise. Planning a large opening event for what he hoped would turn into a long-term project, he began his fundraising on CB Baby, the platform where he published his song, as well as iTunes. He hosted a concert for coexistence in 2015 at his synagogue, and earned over $2,000 from selling tickets and a silent

auction. He matched this money by fundraising on Jewcer, a crowd-funding website with a Jewish slant. Half of the money went to ITC as a donation, and the other half went to the thrilling event on Nov. 30 that represented a culmination of his effort to bring Muslims and Jews together. For the next step in the process, Abramovitz said, “I reached out to the Sixers and explained what Ari was trying to do, and they offered to have the kids play on the court of the Sixers before a game and stay for a game.” They chose the night of a game against the Sacramento Kings so that the kids could meet Omri Casspi, the only Israeli basketball player in the NBA. They also planned a meeting for the kids with Alaa Abdelnabi, an Egyptian sports announcer for the Sixers. “It was a perfect opportunity for them to be addressed by an Israeli and an Egyptian, a Jew and a Muslim, so it was a great thing,” Abramovitz said. On the big day, 11 Jewish teenagers and 11 Muslim teenagers played for approximately 75-90 minutes on the Sixers’ court. “At first it was a little bit awkward,” Abramovitz said, “but then my husband was the one who was setting up the teams and mixing them up throughout the game, so by the end of it each kid had played with every other kid. They were high-fiving each other, they were talking to each other, and it was exactly what we were hoping to accomplish.” Although the Sixers-Kings game was canceled, Abramovitz found a silver lining in this fluke: “it means that we’re going to be able to get the kids back together relatively soon to see each other again,” she said. Ari is unsure of how he will continue the project, considering how recent his bar mitzvah was, but there are already plans to ensure this won’t be a one-time event. The project, named Crossovers for Coexistence after a basketball move, will continue on as the boys met to watch another game on Dec. 14, and reunited four days afterwards when Ari received an award from the Sixers on Dec. 18. His younger sister has expressed an interest in hosting a game of her own with girls as her own bat mitzvah project. For Abramovitz and her family, the opportunity to create an environment of tolerance for the teenagers was what made everything worth it. “The kids continued to high-five each other after, and they were just sitting around and eating French fries. You could see that the ice had melted and the kids knew each other. It was no longer about what they knew about the other side, it was about their personal experience. As parents who haven’t been afforded that opportunity, having the possibility to shift was awesome,” she said.

Lehigh Valley teen celebrates bat mitzvah in Yoav

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By Carol Wilson Special to HAKOL Planning a bat mitzvah requires coordinating, scheduling and making lots of decisions. When it came time to plan our daughter Rebecca’s bat mitzvah, it also required our ability to honor her wishes, plan a ceremony that truly reflected her and, when all was said and done, make her happy. Standing on the bimah to chant Torah in front of a large crowd was not the right fit for her. She envisioned a smaller, more intimate ceremony that spoke to her love of Judaism and reverence for the day. Rebecca decided she would like to celebrate her bat mitzvah in Israel. Rebecca has traveled to Israel on two family missions and Judaic studies are a significant part of her day at The Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy. She has developed a love for the land and its people and sharing a milestone lifecycle event there made sense. As Rebecca’s brother was studying in Israel for a semester, we already had a family trip planned over Sukkot. The coordinating, scheduling and decision making are hard enough when the simcha is in your own neighborhood. When the simcha takes place thousands of miles away, compounded by language barriers and time zone changes, it’s even more challenging. Our first challenge was to decide on a venue. Rebecca is an excellent researcher and put her skills to the test. She explored a variety of op-

tions from Neot Kedumim to the Bell Caves to the Kotel. In the end, we kept coming back to what was most important about her bat mitzvah. For us, it was a day that would ultimately reflect her connection to Israel and the relationships we have all nurtured and developed. All roads kept leading to Yoav, the Lehigh Valley’s Partnership2Gether community. Our friendships with our Yoav family and their willingness to help plan a memorable day for Rebecca made it an easy choice. The difficult part was all the decisions that had to be made. How does one find a rabbi from the other end of the world? Where could we plan a lunch with Rebecca’s favorite foods? Where should we stay in Yoav? Our Yoav friends were more than happy to assist. When Rabbi Miri Gold was recommended and we discovered our friend’s son mentored with her during his first year of rabbinical school, we knew it was beshert. Café Lion was reserved for the luncheon. Reservations were made for Kibbutz Gal On in Yoav and we were on our way. Our trepidation in planning from afar soon abated. Our Lehigh Valley friends also had connections. Allentown friends suggested a photographer who documented their son’s bar mitzvah in Israel. Hebrew speaking friends were able to help confirm the lunch menu and guest house accommodations. They also arranged for fabulous experiences while in Israel. A friend’s cousin offered his gigantic sailboat

for a sunset cruise. The same friend arranged for a tour of three wineries in the Judean Hills with the wine editor of the Jerusalem Post. Rebecca’s bat mitzvah took place on Oct. 18, 2016 at Kibbutz Gezer. It was a perfect day for a remarkable young lady. We traveled to Israel without our extended family and while we missed them, we were surrounded by the love and support of so many. In addition to our Yoav friends, Rebecca’s counselors from Camp Harlam and her teachers from the Jewish Day School were there to support her. Our son’s four friends came along for the Rebecca Wilson Bat Mitzvah tour. Our one disappointment was that Rebecca’s pen pal from the “Same Moon” program was unable to join us. Their faceto-face meeting will happen next year when Rebecca travels to Israel with her 8th grade class. To be able to reflect back on an experience and truthfully say there was not one thing we would have changed is remarkable. To be able to provide our daughter with the experience she envisioned gave us tremendous pleasure. To watch our daughter chant from the Torah and take her place amongst generations of Jews was a thrill. As our one regret was not being able to share this simcha with everyone, in the fall, Rebecca will lead a Havdallah service and be able to celebrate with friends and family. We have no doubt we will have as much pride and awe for our daughter as we did on Oct. 18.

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Lehigh Valley love story turns to multinational Israeli wedding By Michelle Cohen HAKOL Editor When Meidan Keidar first arrived in the Lehigh Valley as a shlicha in 2011, she knew she would be meeting teachers, rabbis and other influential members of the Jewish community – but she had no idea that she would be meeting her future husband and sparking an intercontinental romance. Keidar’s role as a shlicha, or cultural emissary, meant that she worked extensively throughout the Lehigh Valley, including with the Jewish Day School, all the synagogues, the JCC, including the summer camp, several college Hillels and Federation. Through this role, she got to know many people, including Cantor Ellen Sussman of Temple Shirat Shalom. At a dessert party after Yom Kippur, she was introduced to Cantor Sussman’s son Jeremy Vaida, who she began dating and continued to date for the rest of her shlichut. After a year in the Lehigh Valley, Keidar returned to Israel, where she went to college. During the following three years, she and Vaida were in a long-distance relationship, something she acknowledged was quite different from the long-distance relationships between different states in the U.S. The couple spoke every day on What’s App and coordinated their schedules to accommodate the large time difference. “When he would get up in the morning, that was when I would have a break between classes, and when I finished classes, that’s when he would have lunch. We would talk during his break, and when I would go to sleep around mid-

night, he would [have] just finish[ed] work so we would be able to talk on his way home and right before I go to bed,” Keidar said. “You either grow from it or it breaks you apart, and we really grew from it,” Keidar concluded from her experience with long-distance dating. “We grew and we knew if we could pass this, we could pass everything else as a couple afterwards. We knew it was worth the wait.” In addition to online communication, they met up in person every few months. Keidar would come to the Lehigh Valley on her school breaks, and Vaida would visit her in Haifa on his. After a year of long distance, Vaida got off a plane during his winter break and proposed to Keidar at Ben Gurion Airport. “He proposed right there because we knew, he’s American, I’m Israeli, we knew that it would mean so much to our relationship. Every time we go through the airport” is now a special moment, according to Keidar – which includes the procession of their 60 American wedding guests. “All the guests that came from the U.S., most of them are from Allentown, had to go through that same gate and the same area where he proposed,” Keidar said. Since Keidar and Vaida were from different countries, they wanted to bring cultural practices of each country to their wedding. For the American side, Keidar remembers the joy and confusion of her friends when she asked them to be her bridesmaids, a practice not typical in Israeli weddings: “they felt like they were doing it in a movie!” For the Israeli side, the first dance at the 300-person wedding, which is considered small

6 JANUARY 2017 | HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | PLANNING YOUR SIMCHA

by Israeli standards, was done on a sheet of confetti and dry ice, creating an ethereal effect that dazzled the American guests. Israeli guests had their share of surprises, including the band, which is less common than a DJ at a typical Israeli wedding. Accommodations were made for all guests; the rabbi who officiated the ceremony spoke in both Hebrew and English, ensuring everyone could understand. After the wedding, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Keidar is a shlicha at American University. She explained that being a shlicha on a campus is very different from her work in the Lehigh Valley:

“In a community, I get to see and touch a lot of people a little bit, and on campus I see less people but a lot more.” Although Keidar no longer lives in the Lehigh Valley, she and her husband visit his family here often. “The Lehigh Valley, to me, was and is home in the United States, so whenever we go back to his family, like we just went back this past Thanksgiving, I felt like I was going home because this was my community for a whole year. As much as I am also Israeli and from abroad, this is my community that I worked with and [have] been a part of for so long,” Keidar said.

Congregation Keneseth Israel looks back at historical simchas At Congregation Keneseth Israel, the walls feature the rich history of the synagogue. Among the various artifacts, like the historical items displayed in the bottom left photo, two remnants of the synagogue’s early days are on display. On the left, a marriage certificate between Charles Kline and Figa Cohen from Apr. 14, 1896. On the right, a newspaper clipping describes Hyman Gladstone, son of KI founding member Morris Gladstone, as being “confirmed into the rites of the Jewish Church” as he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1904. These artifacts were unearthed as KI celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003. The synagogue continues to work to find more ways to preserve and display its history.

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