We’re Raising Dough

This low key challah gala is a fundraiser for my long-distance rebbetsin Chana’s sister Shayna’s programs on the Upper West Side engaging families with young children, and also to support the amazing community Seders and holiday dinners they host in their home that I’ve enjoyed the past couple years.

Register or donate at https://tinyurl.com/Challah4Chabad 🩵

Use code MARGARITA for 50% off tickets :)

A warm community to celebrate with

Since the Chabad family that had been engaging our South Bronx community relocated to community-build near Cleveland last year, it’s been tough to orient and re-establish a feeling of belonging in a physical Jewish community. While I continue to study Torah and Tanya with my long-distance rebbetzin Chana and the wonderful communal learning practice we’ve cultivated digitally over Zoom, her sister Shayna on the Upper West Side has made sure I had a warm community to celebrate with physically on holidays for community dinners.

In Rabbi and Shayna Sapo and their children’s home on holidays for community dinners, I’ve experienced unexpected moments of joy and laughter, learning and belonging. These Passover and Rosh Hashanah celebrations always collect a very special mix of people somehow, coming from all over: I’ve Sedered with Jews from South Africa, Iraq, Iran, Israel, and even Jersey and Long Island.

Understanding & Belonging

Some of the families I’ve met at these dinners have young members of their family serving in the IDF, and it’s been an honor to meet their siblings and parents and toast in their honor.

Personally I’ve also felt belonging in my own way. As a Jewkrainian, I have a need for access points to my own Jewish heritage to catch up after generations of Soviet/ Bolshevik religious oppression. This is an added area where Chabad and specifically this family have strengthened my Jewish practice and bond with Hashem. Because of Chabad’s mission to create opportunities for local Jews to reconnect with Jewish rituals throughout the yearly cycle, they anticipate and design around these needs to understand from the foundation up.

Coming from Ukraine with this inherited disconnection from my heritage, I’ve often felt not enough in American Jewish spaces, and like an outsider. However, in Shayna (and Chana’s!) homes, I felt the opposite. With the rebbe and his predecessors sharing Ukrainian roots, along with annual celebrations of liberations from the Soviet prisons that held captive my own family members, I finally felt seen and centered rather than othered in a Jewish space. Even the Sapo and Mishulovin’s oldest boys (both named Mendel) resonated with my story, with knowledge of subjects like Cossacks, refuseniks, and even a working knowledge of Yiddish! I cannot encapsulate in words the profound feeling of belonging that comes from discussing with an eight year old the story of my great grandmother’s acting in a traveling Yiddish theater troupe, and their escape from the Nazis to Kazakhstan.

Ukrainian Shmura Matzah

At last year’s Seder, Rabbi Sapo gifted me and another Jewkrainian with a box of matzah from Ukraine, which he received from Chabad delegates visiting from Ukraine—another gesture that made me verklempt (although that may be due to the four glasses of wine). That Passover week, I carried the box with me, offering my friends and colleagues a taste of the satisfyingly crispy and burnt-edged Ukrainian wheat shaped into round shmura matzahs, happy for the chance to serve as an ambassador of my Jewkrainian heritage.

A low-key Challah Gala

Anyway, this is all to say the Sapo family and their community building work are a gem in the uptown Jewish community. While there are other Jewish circles in the area, this is the one that truly makes me feel *at home.*

I hope you can join us April 16th on the Upper West Side! Register or donate at https://tinyurl.com/Challah4Chabad 🩵 (And you can use code MARGARITA for 50% off tickets.)

Chana and her sisters (Shayna Sapo kvelling with phone) looking on as South Bronx Jewesses bring Chana’s baby Chaim to his Bris.

Baba Eva on stage as an actress in the traveling Yiddish theater troupe in Kharkiv, Ukraine.