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A Minnesota synagogue built an ice rink — and is inaugurating it with a klezmer skate
(JTA) — A forecasted low of -16 degrees in the Twin Cities on Thursday has the stage set perfectly for two frozen Jewish firsts — a Klezmer on Ice festival and a synagogue-run skating rink.
Such is life in Minnesota, where bone-chilling temperatures are no match for Jewish festivities.
“It kind of shows us the Minnesota-style of thinking about the winter where just because it’s freezing cold outside, you don’t have to stop doing everything,” said Marcus Rubenstein, rabbi at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul.
“I used to be a rabbi in New York. They said you couldn’t schedule any big events in the winter because no one would come in case it snowed,” Rubenstein said. “But [here] sometimes it will snow 6, 7 inches and be -5, -10 degrees, and you’ll have everybody come out. I mean people in their 80s, 90s to little kids. And they just put on their coats and go out and have fun.”
Rabbi Marcus Rubenstein of Temple of Aaron test drives his synagogue’s new ice rink. (Courtesy of Marcus Rubenstein)
Temple of Aaron, a Conservative congregation of about 700 families, is inviting families to bundle up and have fun on what Rubenstein believes is the first-ever skating rink on a synagogue property. The rink, which can accommodate about 30 people at a time, was built and is being maintained by “Ice Captains” — synagogue members who clear it of snow and shovel off any extra ice that forms.
On Thursday, skaters at the rink heard the kickoff performance of the klezmer festival, featuring Jewbalaya, a hybrid klezmer and New Orleans jazz band in which Rubenstein plays the trumpet.
But the music will be piped in from inside the synagogue — a concession, Rubenstein and others associated with the festival said, to the cold.
Last week, musicians promoting Klezmer on Ice with a pre-festival performance alongside Lake Harriett, the (usually frozen-over) body of water at the heart of Minneapolis, ran into some technical challenges. Anticipating frigid temperatures, the musicians planned to play from a lakeside booth decorated like a boom box as part of a pop-art initiative called Art Shanty. But there was a wrinkle.
“We were supposed to have a sousaphone player who by the time they got their heavy big brass instrument into the box, the valves were frozen so they couldn’t play,” said Josh Rosard, an organizer of Klezmer on Ice. The performance went on without the sousaphone.
It’s not just brass instruments that are vulnerable to cold snaps. Strings and woodwinds can quickly go out of tune in the cold, as metal contracts and wood begins to warp. Clarinets and violins, staples of the Eastern European Jewish music genre, just can’t take it.
That’s why most of the Klezmer on Ice events will take place indoors — including but not only at Temple of Aaron. On the schedule for the weekend-long festival are local and national performers Sarina Partridge, Tzipporah Johnson, Izzy Buckner, the Klezmommies and the band Midwood. There will also be a cabaret variety show; klezmer-infused Shabbat services; and a luminary Havdalah ceremony.
Rosard said he saw the event as a breakout moment for the Twin Cities’ klezmer scene and, given the strong track record of longstanding klezmer festivals at spawning new acts, an opportunity.
“I’m really excited for what players in the community are going to take out of the workshops in particular and excited to see what may come out of it in the future,” said Rosard, who grew up casually playing the accordion but got more seriously involved in the klezmer world during the pandemic. He met his Klezmer on Ice co-organizer, Jewish musician and folklorist Sarah Larsson, with whom he attended KlezCanada and the Portland Klezmer Festival.
Still, he acknowledged, “It’s a little bit tongue in cheek to do something like this in the middle of February in Minnesota.”
Rubenstein said his congregants are up for it. Temple of Aaron’s new ice rink will be open not only during the klezmer festival’s opening night but for skating sessions most Saturdays after Shabbat morning services and Hebrew school classes finish.
The sun sets ahead of the Klezmer on Ice Festival’s opening night, which features a free skate session at Temple of Aaron’s ice rink. (Courtesy of Marcus Rubenstein)
If the activity isn’t exactly standard after-synagogue fare, it’s perfectly permitted under the Conservative movement’s interpretation of Jewish law. The movement, of which Temple of Aaron is a part, permits non-competitive ice skating on Shabbat, so long as no Shabbat rules are violated (such as driving to or from a rink or paying to rent skates), and the skating takes place within the boundaries of an eruv, or Jewish legal enclosure inside which certain objects can be carried on Shabbat.
Rubenstein said he was thinking about the activity in different terms — as it relates to making Temple of Aaron a centerpiece of a St. Paul Shabbat.
“The kids are ice skating anyway,” he added. “So why not ice skate at shul and come do it together with their Jewish friends, and build community that way?”
Temperatures are supposed to rise over the course of the weekend, but the high on Friday should be in the low single-digits. So for the klezmer performance that is supposed to take place at Lake Harriet, Rosard says, a plan is in place to avoid last weekend’s snafus.
“We’ll have the sousaphone player drive up as close as possible, then run-slash-briskly walk straight into the performance shelter,” he said. “We didn’t quite have the urgency last time.”
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home appeared first on The Forward.
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At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance
VIENNA — A keffiyeh was blocking my view, and it bothered me less than I would have expected.
It was around 9:45 pm, and I was standing outside Vienna’s city hall, where the city had erected a “Eurovision village.” The pan-European singing competition was taking place in the former Habsburg capital, grand architecture framing massive public viewing screens.
Security was tight. Visitors weren’t allowed to bring bags inside the area, and we were patted down by two separate guards before we were allowed to enter. In August 2024, a foiled terror attack led to the cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts, an international embarrassment authorities were keen not to repeat.
And then there were the protests over Israel’s participation.
The day before, an anti-Israel solidarity concert had featured a video call with Unorthodox author Deborah Feldman, who said she was protesting the “whitewashing” of a genocide. A separate “song protest” reportedly escalated from chants of “One love” to “Death, death IDF.” Earlier that day, demonstrators had marched along Vienna’s main shopping boulevard. By the time evening rolled around, a group of clowns had gathered outside the parliament, practicing creepy, Joker-like laughs and holding signs that said “United by Genocide,” a play on the Eurovision Song Contest’s slogan. “United by Music.”
For a contest that insists on being apolitical, Eurovision had become unmistakably political.
I didn’t care much for the music, but world events were unfolding here in Vienna, and I wanted to see them up close.
Israeli singer Noam Bettan was the third to perform. As he got on stage and started singing “Michelle,” a couple of people in the crowd I was standing in started shouting “Free Palestine” at the screen. The chants weren’t loud enough to drown out the performance
Then, someone in front of me raised a keffiyeh, stretching it between both hands and waving it in the air. It blocked my view. I considered asking him to lower it. But did I really want to risk a confrontation? Instead, I stepped sideways – slightly annoyed, but telling myself this was the price of tolerance.
Only later that night did I begin to wonder whether tolerance was, in fact, a shared value.
Back home, I watched the voting. Just before 1 a.m. the audience vote catapulted the Israeli act into the lead. In the previous two years, Israeli entries had also performed strongly with viewers, placing first and second in the public vote without winning overall. The reasons have been debated: diaspora support, savvy promotion, or simply songs that fit the Eurovision formula — catchy, theatrical, sung with a powerful voice. (Israel has won the competition four times, most recently in 2018.)
Israel’s promotional efforts have drawn criticism, but no evidence of manipulation has emerged, and the public broadcaster KAN has responded quickly to European Broadcasting Union reprimands.
It didn’t matter. Social media filled with accusations that Israel had cheated. In the arena, just before Bulgaria’s points were announced, the booing aimed at Israel’s entry grew so loud it was clearly audible on the broadcast.
Bulgaria won, Israel came in second, and I felt something close to relief. At a time when several countries had already stayed away and others were wavering, it seemed less like a celebration than a breaking point. I wouldn’t want to witness what would happen if Eurovision were to be held in Israel next year.
It had been easy to move when the keffiyeh blocked my view. One step to the side, and the problem was gone. However, there was no stepping aside from what came later. Freedom of speech is about making space, but it can also be used to close it.
The post At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Noam Bettan takes 2nd at Eurovision, buoyed by scrutinized public vote
(JTA) — The Israeli contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest won second place for the second year in a row, drawing a strong public vote despite protests over Israel’s inclusion in the contest.
Noam Bettan and his song “Michelle” ranked third in the public vote and eighth in the jury vote, which combined to give him second place behind the entry from Bulgaria, which won the contest for the first time.
Bettan thanked his fans in a post on Instagram after leaving the stage.
“I’m still processing everything and trying to find the words for this incredible journey. You guys are amazing and this is all because of you. I love every single one of you!” he wrote. “This is just the beginning, there are so many amazing things in the way! 🤍Am Israel Chai!!!”
Five countries boycotted the contest this year over Israel’s inclusion, citing Israel’s military operations in Gaza. After the competition, a spokesperson for VRT, Belgium’s national broadcaster, said the country was unlikely to participate next year unless the European Broadcasting Union, which runs the contest, makes “a clear statement against war and violence and for respect for human rights.” Belgium came in 21st of 25 competitors in the final.
Bettan faced a smattering of boos both during the semifinal on Tuesday and during the final on Saturday in Vienna, as well as when Israel briefly led the leaderboard during the announcement of the audience votes. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the final that he believed he had more fans than detractors and that he would focus on them.
Israel scored 220 points in the public vote after drawing a formal warning from the EBU for its campaign urging supporters to send all 10 of their votes to Bettan. Israel’s broadcaster called off the campaign after being told it was “not in line with our rules nor the spirit of the competition.”
Israel also drew 123 points from national juries, more than twice what it earned last year when 22 countries awarded Israel no points at all in a result seen as driven in part by political tensions.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Noam Bettan takes 2nd at Eurovision, buoyed by scrutinized public vote appeared first on The Forward.