Wednesday Sep 1st and Thursday September 2nd
8pm

The High Holidays often leave people feeling physically and mentally overwhelmed. Why aren’t we getting the satisfaction we deserve from our efforts? After all, we sat through the whole thing…

No one in their right mind would run the NYC Marathon without training, stretching and warming up. This year, take the time to get in shape BEFORE the time comes, and we promise you will emerge feeling strong, confident and most of all, more connected.
Join us for our pre Rosh HaShana marathon warm up sessions led by our rabbinic intern Avi Rosenfeld. 8-9:15PM. No charge, bring a friend!

Monday September 6th (for Rosh haShana) and Monday September 13th (for Yom Kippur)
8pm

“The melody lingers on”…

One of the best ways to immerse ourselves in the spiritual process of Rosh Hashana is by raising our voices in song.. But, what is the tune? Join Rabbi Wall, rabbinic intern Avi Rosenfeld, and our cantorial team as we explore the melodies used to sing the most important verses and songs of the high holidays. Monday, Sep 6 at 8PM (for Rosh Hashana) and Monday, Sep 15 (for Yom Kippur) Bring your heart, your voice (and your musical instrument?…optional…)

Wednesday, September 15th
8pm

Pre Yom Kippur marathon training!

Yom Kippur, the sabbath of sabbaths, is often called the holiest day of the year. Let’s get it right this year, and replace the empty feeling in our stomachs with a fullness of heart and spirit.

Join us for our pre Yom Kippur marathon warm up session Wednesday, Sep 15, led by our rabbinic intern Avi Rosenfeld.

The Forward and Sixth Street Synagogue Present:

Jewish Art for the New Millennium: 3 Alicias 3

Evening of Music and Poetry with Alicia Svigals, Alicia Ostriker, and Alicia Jo Rabins
Curated by Jake Marmer and Dan Friedman

Tuesday Aug 24th @ 7.00pm
325 East Sixth Street (b/n 1st and 2nd avenue)
$8 cover

The evening will feature these acclaimed artists who represent eclectic genres, mediums and generations. Each will perform a set, then all three will come together in a collaborative work, and finally, a panel discussion will follow.

Alicia Svigals, violinist/composer, a founder of the Klezmatics and of the all-women band Mikveh, is considered by many to be the world’s foremost klezmer fiddler. During the past decade, she almost singlehandedly revived klezmer fiddle playing, which came close to extinction in this century; traditional klezmer violin style is now being played again by hundreds of her students, including most of today’s best professional players. She taught and toured with violinist Itzhak Perlman, who recorded her compositions as duets with Ms. Svigals accompanied by the Klezmatics. She is a past winner of the first prize at the Safed Klezmer Festival. “She is without question the greatest living exponent of the klezmer fiddle…” - Seth Rogovoy, author of The Essential Klezmer. See http://www.aliciasvigals.com/.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently “The Book of Seventy” (2009), which won the Jewish Book Award for Poetry. As a critic Ostriker is the author of two path-breaking volumes on women’s poetry, “Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America.” Ostriker has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University and is a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program. Ostriker has taught in the Princeton University Creative Writing Program and in Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program. She has taught midrash writing workshops in the USA, Israel, England and Australia. See http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~ostriker/home.htm

Alicia Jo Rabins is a fiddler, singer, songwriter, and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She has toured Central America as a cultural ambassador for the United States. A regular fiddler with Golem, her own band, Girls in Trouble, plays art-pop songs about women in the Torah. “An entrancing one-woman string quartet” — The Forward. Check out Alicia’s Girls in Trouble Project here: http://www2.myspace.com/girlsintroublemusic.

Sunday July 18th, 7.00 pm: Yiddish Play! David Mandelbaum’s “Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d.”

The show runs 50 minutes

David Mandelbaum as Yosl Rakover
Directed by Amy Coleman

In the ruins of the ghetto of Warsaw, among heaps of charred rubbish, there was found, packed tightly into a small bottle, the following testament, written during the ghetto’s last hours by a Jew named Yosl Rakover.

Warsaw April 28th, 1943
“Is G-d dead or just keeping quiet for a while?”

For twenty years the story of Yosl Rakover was believed to be an eyewitness account of the ghetto’s last hours, and the true story of a pious Jew whose fate it was to die fighting the beasts that destroyed his world. In the hours before his death he reconsiders his relationship with G-d and concludes that although his relationship with G-d has changed, his faith in Him remains, and his love for Him burns as strongly as ever.

The story was actually written in 1946, by Tzvi Kolitz, a young Palestinian who as a delegate to the World Zionist Congress traveled extensively to speak on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. His clandestine purpose was to recruit fighters for the Irgun, of which he was a member. While in Argentina, he was asked to write an article for a Yiddish paper in Buenas Aires for their special Yom kippur edition. The result was Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d. Through a set of bizzare circumstances the story was republished in an Israeli Yiddish journal without his name on it, and was assumed to be real. It has since been recognized as one of the classics of Holocaust literature, been translated into many languages, and been the subject of essays by theologians and philosophers. Adapted for the stage and performed by David Mandelbaum, it makes for powerful and compelling theater. In Yiddish with English Supertitles.

Donations will be accepted after the show.

Reservations: 917 670-1631 or reserve online at newyiddishrep.org.

The day before erev Tisha B’Av is an especially appropriate time to confront the issues dealt with in this classic of holocaust
literature.

Jewish mystics say that one day, in the future, the world will reverse itself and Tisha B’av (the Ninth of Av) will become a holiday. A radical idea, given the fact that today, this day commemorates Jewish tragedies: destruction of the first and second Temples. Also, on this day we think back to other terrible events: expulsions, crusades, pogroms, the Shoah. We fast, read the book of Eicha (Lamentations) and Kinot (ancient elegiac poems). But in the force of us, coming together, confronting the heaviest moments of our history, there’s the hope - that none of this will happen ever again, and then there indeed will be something to celebrate. In addition to learning and prayer, the shul will feature a poetry reading by Walter Hess, and a number of
films, relevant to the day.

Please join us @ the Six Street Shul!

Mon July 19 - Tue Jul 20
TBD Mincha
8:28pm Fast begins
8:45 Maariv with Eicha and kinot

Tuesday July 20
8:30 AM Tisha B’Av shiur with Rabbi Wall
9AM Shacharit
10 AM Kinnot
10:45 Poetry Readings by Walter Hess
11AM Films
1:45 Mincha
8:30 Maariv
Fast ends at 9:12

Jazz Rabbi Invitational Series continue with a series of great rocking gigs in June -

Monday, June 21
7:30pm: Class on Ramchal’s “Derekh Hashem” (the Way of G-d), ongoing inquiry into the classic text by legendary Kabbalist-philosopher Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato.
8.30pm: Further Definitions: Jazz Pilpul, featuring David Chevan of Afro-Semitic Experience (bass), Jesse Chevan (drums), special guest Rabbi Greg Wall (tenor and soprano saxophones).

Monday, June 28
7:30pm: Class on Ramchal’s “Derekh Hashem” (the Way of G-d), ongoing inquiry into the classic text by legendary Kabbalist-philosopher Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato.
8.30pm: Ayn Sof Arkestra & Bigger Band!!!

NYC’s newest addition to the canon of new Jewish influenced music and culture, the Ayn Sof Arkestra and Bigger Band, under the direction of saxophonist Jazz Rabbi Greg Wall and grammy winning trumpeter Frank London.The Arkestra consists of some of the most innovative artists on the scene today, such as Pam Fleming, Paul Shapiro, Aaron Alexander, Fima Ephron, Eyal Maoz and many others. The repertoire will consist of original compositions and arrangements of the members and guest composers, in the great NuJu/Rad Jew/SunRaJoo tradition.

Sixth Street Synagogue and the Forward present:

Jewish Art for the New Millennium: Avant-Garde Poetry and Music
Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Jamie Saft
Curated by Jake Marmer

Tue June 8th, 8:00 pm
Sixth Street Synagogue
325 East 6th (b/n 1st and 2nd Ave)
Cover: $8 (includes a free drink)
RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125609840793872

Sixth Street Synagogue, Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Forward present the first in a new series of innovative cultural evenings at Sixth Street Synagogue. The “Jewish Art for the New Millennium” series is aimed to showcase cutting edge Jewish artists, who represent their identity in most original, innovative ways.

The first night features three artists who represent different generations, genres and aesthetics. Multi-instrumentalist musician Jamie Saft, poet Charles Bernstein and writer/poet Kenneth Goldsmith team up for an evening of intellectually provocative words and music as each performs separately and then join forces for conversation.

Charles Bernstein is a rebel voice in the world of poetry and poetic theory. Author of a number of acclaimed poetry collections including this year’s “All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. For this event, he will be reading from Shadowtime (Green Integer, 2005), his libretto in/on/around/about Walter Benjamin, for an opera by Brian Ferneyhough, which was performed in 2005 at the Lincoln Center Festival (CD from NMC & I-Tunes; more info: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for the opera, “Trans-Warhol” the same year that an hour-long documentary on his work, “Sucking on Words” premiered. More about Goldsmith can be found at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith.

Jamie Saft is a virtuoso pianist, keyboardist, producer, and composer from New York and a mainstay of the Downtown scene. Saft’s stylistic versatility, multi-instrumentalist capabilities, and production skills have been featured with The Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, The B-52’s, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, John Adams, Donovan, Bobby Previte, Dave Douglas, Antony and the Johnsons, and scores of other artists. See more of his work here: http://www.jamiesaft.com/.

On Sunday, May 16th For Sunday, May 16 at 2 PM in the Community Synagogue:

A Thousand Years of Jewish History in Krakow

George J. Alexander, author of the book “Generations: A Millenium of Jewish History in Poland from the Earliest Times to the Holocaust told by a survivor from an old Krakow family” will speak on his book and the history of Polish-Jewish relations. In the artistic portion of the program, noted singer and composer Josh Waletzky will perform a selection of songs by the great Yiddish folk poet Motkhe Gebirtig, who perished in the Krakow ghetto. Kibed and book-signing will follow the program.

For more information, please contact the Congress for Jewish Culture at 212-505-8040 or at kongres@earthlink.net

Jazz Rabbi’s Invitational concert series are back!

Unless otherwise noted, the cover for each concert is $10 (includes a drink).

Monday, May 17th
7pm: Kabbalistic Exploration of Ramchal’s Derech Hashem
8.30pm: New American Quartet: Mystical Americana influenced music, a touch of heaven on earth.

More info: http://www.GregWall.com.

Monday, May 24th
7pm: Kabbalistic Exploration of Ramchal’s Derech Hashem
8.30pm: Ayn Sof Arkestra and Bigger Band

NYC’s newest addition to the canon of new Jewish influenced music and culture, the Ayn Sof Arkestra and Bigger Band, under the direction of saxophonist Jazz Rabbi Greg Wall and grammy winning trumpeter Frank London.The Arkestra consists of some of the most innovative artists on the scene today, such as Pam Fleming, Paul Shapiro, Aaron Alexander, Fima Ephron, Eyal Maoz and many others. The repertoire will consist of original compositions and arrangements of the members and guest composers, in the great NuJu/Rad Jew/SunRaJoo tradition.

Please mark your calendars!

Shavuot @ Sixth Street this year:

Tue May 18th: shul dinner, followed by learning into the wee hours…. Services will start at 7.30, dinner at 8:15, and learning from 10pm and on. Featuring our very own Rabbi Greg Wall plus:

Lawrence Zalcman: Ambiguity and Assonance at Zephaniah 2:4

Dr. Lawrence Zalcman is currently spending several months at NYU on sabbatical from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where he is Lady Davis Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Gelbart Research Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. His interest in the solution of textual problems in the Hebrew Bible has resulted in the publication of over a dozen papers in leading academic journals of Biblical research. Larry and his wife Adrienne have lived in Jerusalem since 1985.

Freema Gottlieb: Of Seeds and Souls: Ruth the Gleaner

Dr. Freema Gottlieb was born in London and grew up in Scotland. She taught Midrashic Literature at various Jewish institutions in New York. Recently she was a visiting lecturer of Midrash at Charles University in Prague. She is the author of three books: “The Lamp of God: A Jewish Book of Light” (Aronson, New York); “Jewish Folk Art” (Summit, New York); and “Mystical Stonescapes in Prague Jewish Town and the Czech Countryside (Tvorba, Prague, 1997).

Wed May 19th: serious dairy kiddush following services
Thu May 20th: BBQ lunch following davening

Please register for the Shavuot dinner in advance!!!: CLICK HERE.

We hope to see you there!

Sixth Street Sundays Presents:

2VC: New Music for Two Cellos
3pm concert, 1:30pm lecture/workshop

Cellists Jessie Reagen Mann and Gene Carr met as Musicians in Residence at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They quickly discovered the joy in playing together and how few pieces were composed for 2 cellos! Gene and Jessie have made it their mission to commission amazing composers to write music for them, and the cello community at large. Occasionally these works include one other instrument. For this performance, 2VC will be joined by percussionist David Buchbut and guitarist Amanda Monaco. With varied classical, rock, improvisatory and Jazz backgrounds, Gene and Jessie bring excitement and freshness to this exciting new repertoire. Works to be featured by living composers including Derrik Jordan, Will Van Dyke, Jonathan Bell, Ljova, Amanda Monaco, Ramon Tasat and Oded Lev-Ari as well as some oldies but goodies.

Included with admission is a free pre-concert lecture/workshop at 1:30pm including some of the composers!

$15 adults, $8 under 21
Includes FREE wine for adults and refreshments for all