Reclaiming Yiddish Earth-Based Ritual for Elul
Connecting to our dead relations & ancestors - Our Sacred, Loved, and Still With Us

SEPTEMBER 22nd, 29th, and OCTOBER 1st ONLINE EVERYWHERE
OCTOBER 6th, 11th IN PERSON IN VANCOUVER

Presented by Knobl un Honik Kollectiv and Community Chevra @communitychevra
Made possible by the generous support of The Yiddish Book Center

The Stories of Our Cemeteries - October 1st, 5:30 to 7 PM PT, 8:30-10 PM ET!
The word for cemetery is Beis Oylem, or Feld in Yiddish. In this session we will begin to ground ourselves in place and purpose by learning from experts and artists Sonia Bazar and Michael de Courcy about two cemeteries: The Back-River Cemetery in Montreal, and the Woodlands Cemetery in New West, which is home to sacred dead who died in the Woodlands institution that closed in 2002. Syl will also make a short presentation about The Jewish Section of the Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver. By learning about their complex and very diverse histories and the people who are buried in these cemeteries we may find we can begin the long slow process of re-connection.

Angelic Goldsky will open the space with a poem.

History and Introduction to Feldmestn with Annie Cohen - September 22nd from 10am to 1pm PT, 1-3 pm ET ONLINE
In the month of Elul, and particularly in the week running up to Rosh Hashone, Jewish women in Eastern Europe used to measure the cemetery with thread in a ritual known in Yiddish as feldmestn. In between Rosh Hashone and Yom Kippur, the thread from these measurements would be used to make candle wick for huge candles known as neshome likht – soul candles. Lit on the eve of Yom Kippur, these candles were believed to create a special connection with the dead, who could advocate with God on behalf of the living, to help them receive a good divine judgement on the Day of Atonement. This session will start with an intro lecture, have a break, then delve deeper into Tkhines, songs, and any questions folks have.

This session will be held in partnership with Arbeiter Ring (The Workers Circle)

Feldmestn and Neshome Likht Pt 2 with Rokhl Kafrissen - September 29th from 5-6:30 PT, 8-9:30 ET ONLINE
Rokhl will share some more beautiful Yiddishist stories and histories surrounding our rituals from her research. We continue to talk about Jewish cemeteries and our collective and individual stories, practice and learn tkhines together, and prepare our plans for doing Feldmestn together in our home communities in a way that feels grounded and connective.

Sof Kreidstein will open the space.

In Person Feldmestn Ritual and Candlemaking - October 6th - 10:30 am -  MEET AT MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY
Join us at Mountain View Cemetery to do Feldmestn for the very first time for many of us! Materials and light refreshments will be provided. We will make the candles together on site.

Erev Yom Kippur Earth-Based Yiddish Stories with Faith Jones - October 11th The Ellis (Downtown Vancouver) @ 6 PM
Join us for a different kind of Erev Yom Kippur (Yom Kippur Evening). At this event we will light our Neshome Likht and hold a space of learning and sharing. Although we won't have a rabbi there, the brilliant translator and Yiddishist knowledge holder Faith Jones will take us through Yiddish writer Shira Gorshman's herbal and natural knowledge, exploring how Gorshman infused her stories with this knowledge. Gorshman (1906-2001) was raised by her grandparents in a dorf in Lithuania. Her stories are deeply concerned with questions of gender and modernity, and ask questions about the value placed on earth-based Yiddishkeit, and Yiddishist understandings of cycles of life and death.

Bios <3

Sonia Bazar - The Stories of Our Cemeteries
Montreal born artist Sonia Bazar works out of their studio in Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Bazar earned a MFA in Photography at Concordia University. Through sculpture, photography and poetry, their practice often examines the notion of alien landscapes and how the body belongs to space. Their practice has always had a heavy research component which informs their materials and process. They have recently begun to explore research as art, finding ways to incorporate it into installations. Their work has been shown as part of a Zine in [Repair Manuals and Cosmic Sounds. Self-publishing to heal the entire universe] at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain. Sonia's current project “BACK RIVER” explores moving through grief, life and death; within the framework of the Back River Cemetery, Montreal’s oldest Jewish cemetery.

Michael de Courcy - The Stories of Our Cemeteries
“Michael de Courcy’s Dead and Buried is a sombre conceptual project by a dedicated artist and community activist. Subtitled The Cemetery at Woodlands, the work is about loss and reclamation. It’s about a former age’s disregard for a group of disadvantaged people and the attempts, by a few contemporary individuals and organizations, to achieve redress. Composed of text panels and copies of newspaper articles, government documents, and letters, along with maps, photographs, and a troubling sculpture, Dead and Buried represents a powerful effort of research and remapping.”— Robin Lawrence, from an article in the Georgia Straight, March 19, 2009. https://michaeldecourcy.com/dead_and_buried https://michaeldecourcy.com/dead_and_buried

Angelic Goldsky - The Stories of Our Cemeteries

Angelic Goldsky (t[he?]y) is a queer trans-masculine slavic Jewitch poet working at the cross-roads of imaginations beyond diaspora, ancestral lineage repair, spiritual and queer mercy. Angelic deep roots in spoken word poetry has propelled them to travel internationally performing for the past decade, including, as the opening act for Shane Koyzcan at the Vogue Theatre with their trio Tiny Tricycle Poets, performing in the 2SLGBTQ+ Word Poetry Slam Championship showcase in Brussels where they
also represented Canada as a judge and featuring in the Lila Queer Arts Festival in Switzerland.

Their performances bring together oracular, transexual and experimental healing– using shadow magic, clown and music to transcend complex-trauma and survival codes into soul retrieval. They love to curate all forms of spoken word magic, whether
that was serving as the Assistant Director for the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (2022) or programming spoken word performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2023), the Museum of Anthropology (2020-2023) and at the Chan Centre (2019).

Currently Angelic is living in Tkaronto and grew up as a youth-poet in the spoken word poetry community on the lands of the The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) – colonially known as Vancouver, BC.

Annie Cohen - History and Introduction to Feldmestin
Annie Gottfried Cohen is a researcher, writer, Yiddish teacher and translator. She has a masters with distinction in historical research and is currently working towards her PhD, looking at Jewish Communist anti-fascism in the interwar period. She is also an ordained Kohenet, and for the past five years has been researching Jewish women’s ritual leadership in Eastern Europe, publishing articles and primary sources on a blog www.pullingatthreads.com Annie currently teaches courses in Yiddish language, culture and history at the Workers Circle and at Sorbonne Université Paris.

Rokhl Kafrissen - Feldmestin and Neshome Likhts Pt 2
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, teacher, playwright and 2022 winner of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. Since 2017, her "Rokhl’s Golden City” column has appeared monthly in Tablet magazine, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In 2021, her song “Kum tsu mir” (a Yiddish translation-adaptation of Jimmy Buffett’s "Why Don’t We Get Drunk …") was recorded by an all-star klezmer trio and in the summer of 2024, another of her Yiddish translation-adaptations, “Makhn a vayivrekh,” (Escape) appeared on the newest album from Israeli funk-fusion band Malox. In October 2023, she taught her first class for the Yiddish Book Center, “Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women's Folklore, Rituals, & Magic.” Since then, her lectures and classes on “everyday Ashkenazi magic” have become a favorite with students around the world. In September 2024, she will teach a new course for the Yiddish Book Center called "Sacred Time and Liminal Space: Ashkenazi Folk Magic at the Threshold."

Sof Kreidstein - Feldmestin and Neshome Likhts Pt 2
Sof Kreidstein is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator creating, destroying, and transforming in connection. With a poetic and experimental approach to material, performance, media, and language, their malleable practice often takes shape through multifaceted installations and socially engaged projects. They are guided by queer and trans ritual, Jewish mysticism and wisdom, neurodivergence and madness, relationality, abjection/intrigue, ecological interconnection, and intuition. Sof is a curious creature. They explore micro/macrocosmic patterns (looking inward and reflecting outward) to cultivate growth, critique, and community.

Faith Jones - Erev Yom Kippur Earth-Based Yiddish Stories
Faith Jones is a librarian, translator, and researcher of Yiddish culture in Vancouver. She is a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which brings primary source material and accessible inquiry to the public sphere. Her book of translations of Shira Gorshman’s stories, Meant to Be and Other Stories, was recently released by White Goat Press. She is a co-translator of The Acrobat (Tebot Bach, 2014), a selection of the poetry of Celia Dropkin, and she created supertitles for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s production of Kadya Molodowsky’s genre-defying, futuristic play “Ale fentster tsu der zun” (All Windows Face the Sun). Her research on Yiddish language activism in Winnipeg and Vancouver has been published in scholarly journals. Her essay “How to Suppress Yiddish Women’s Writing” responds to the current state of scholarly denial of the rich, complex history of women’s literary culture.

Syl |שיף - Host
Syl has performed feldmestn rituals as a way to move through complex loss and connect with ancestors and loved ones. They recently completed The Gamliel Institute Chevra Kadisha Leadership program, and founded Community Chevra, a QT-led and centered support and education network for reclamation of our beautiful Jewish end of life, death, and grief rituals. Syl is learning a bisel Yiddish every day and is a member of the DIY Yiddishist Knobl un Honik Kolektiv.