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In Queens, a Jewish mourning ritual inspires a performance about memory
(New York Jewish Week) — What happens to the places that are no more? To the people who have died? To the events that meant so much but cannot ever reoccur? Is there a way to bring the intangible power of vanished spaces into the physical world?
On Friday, May 19, dancers, musicians, orators and spectators will come together for a performance of “Site: Yizkor” at King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens to explore these and other questions.
The brainchild of multimedia artist Maya Ciarrocchi and composer Andrew Conklin, the performance takes its name from the Jewish memorial service that is recited on major holidays. It combines live and pre-recorded readings with improvised music and dance, encouraging the performers and audience to summon their loved ones into the room, to commune with them in an intimate and visceral way.
“It’s about trying to make roots in a place, to map it, and also to honor the dead and the ghosts — not just the ghosts of people, but the layers of buried history, too,” Ciarrocchi told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s like, if you go to a small chapel in Italy and then realize it’s on three layers of pagan temples [and other] sacred sites.”
Ciarrocchi, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish and Italian descent, has long contemplated the spaces her own family lost and how that loss has impacted her lived experience as a queer Gen X New Yorker. “My grandparents were immigrants who tried to establish a home in the new world. My mother has had difficulties finding a place [within the] establishment,” she said. “Plus, growing up on the tail end of the AIDS plague, I really didn’t have any queer mentors. It did create an unmooring, a feeling of being ungrounded.”
Multimedia artist Maya Ciarrocchi. (Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
The impetus for this specific piece was a confluence of events — people and places disappearing while remaining present in Ciarrocchi’s consciousness. In 2015, she lost both her mother-in-law and an elderly neighbor, the 1930s radio star Elia Braca Rose (aka Lynne Howard). “I was thinking a lot [during that time] about the things we leave behind,” said Ciarrochi. “Especially as I witnessed my neighbor’s apartment [getting] dismantled. I was grieving. Her children took things, the neighbors gathered things, the [demolition] team came in. There was something so devastating about all her history being sucked out of the apartment.”
She and her wife moved a year later, emptying out the apartment she had been raised in, a space in the Westbeth artist’s community. All this upheaval summoned grief and thoughts of the power of rites and ritual.
Yizkor, which means “may [God] remember” in Hebrew, is traditionally performed four times a year — on the three pilgrimage holidays of Shemini Atzeret, Passover and Shavuot, and on Yom Kippur. The communal Yizkor service includes a moment of private reflection during which worshipers can read a prayer that includes the name of a lost loved one and their relationship to the person praying.
“This particular viewpoint is inherently Jewish, but it’s a universal experience of displacement, loss, grief,” Ciarrocchi said. “Really, we’re doing a ritual together. And it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from; we’re doing this together. Hopefully it brings everyone in, and we can have feelings together. The best way to connect with people is to have conversations with them, to open up space for people to hear each other. I hope that this project can do that.”
Each performance is site specific: Previously, “Site: Yizkor” has been performed at the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver and at the Roza Centre for International Art and Cooperation in Ruszcza, Poland, a short distance from where Ciarrochi’s grandmother’s house was burned to the ground during a pogrom.
For the New York iteration, the artist has created a series of videos incorporating drawings and maps specific to King Manor Museum, the former country estate of Rufus King, a 19th-century politician and early abolitionist. The museum says its mission is to highlight King’s antislavery activism and to “promote social change in today’s world.”
“Site: Yizkor” began taking its latest form a few weeks ago with a writing workshop, viewed by the artists as integral to the creative process. Participants were invited to respond to prompts such as “describe a vanished place of personal importance” and “describe your dreams of the future.” The artists then take these reflections and incorporate them into the performance.
The music, born of Conklin’s extensive work in the worlds of folk, bluegrass and traditional music, is improvised live from a graphic score. Similarly, the choreography contains specific modules and instructions but remains open to the interpretation of the performers.
“We come up with a score together but it’s a really open structure,” Ciarrochi said. “An element of a score for dancers might be to ‘walk the periphery of the house connecting with each other.’ You can do a lot of things inside of that, but that is the structure. Because these are skilled improvisers, they’re going to make that happen.”
“This particular viewpoint is inherently Jewish, but it’s a universal experience of displacement, loss, grief,” Ciarrocchi said of the piece. “Really, we’re doing a ritual together.”
“Site: Yizkor” will take place at King Manor (150-03 Jamaica Ave.) in Jamaica, Queens on Friday, May 19 at 8:00 p.m. Register here.
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The post In Queens, a Jewish mourning ritual inspires a performance about memory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Yeshiva issue that won’t go away
A backroom deal to gut oversight of private schools – specifically to bail out yeshivas that fail to teach basic subjects, condemning tens of thousands of Hasidic students to illiteracy and choking off the chance to participate in broader society – is coming back to haunt its architects. New York’s Governor and the Legislature likely assumed they secured a political win that would quickly fade from public attention.
They were wrong.
The state was forced to justify its actions before a judge in a pair of hearings in April as part of a lawsuit challenging the rollback that was filed last September. As a longtime attorney, I can tell you that the language of small-minded politics translates poorly to the courtroom. The state’s lawyers were forced to advance arguments that legitimize educational denial and forced insularity. And in doing so, they mar our state’s tradition of protecting individual rights.
Renowned education attorney Michael Rebell was leading the suit on behalf of Hasidic and Haredi students who have been harmed by the dismantling of standards. The plaintiffs argue that the state abandoned its obligation to ensure all children receive a “sound basic education,” a constitutional floor for schooling recognized by the Court of Appeals.
To justify the evisceration of standards, the state claims our guarantee of a sound basic education does not apply to students of nonpublic schools. It strikes at the foundation of New York’s educational system, which was codified in the State Constitution’s Education Article through a Constitutional Convention more than 130 years ago.
The Article’s framers made their intention clear: to ensure all children are prepared for engagement in civic life, whether they attended a public or nonpublic school. As one delegate of the Convention avowed, “there can be found no man in this Convention who will say that there are children of the State that ought not to be educated.”
The principle is simple: While parents may choose religious or private education, the state still bears responsibility for ensuring all children receive the basic tools necessary to function as citizens. But to defend last year’s rollback, state lawyers argued that parents are “free to opt out” of public schools, even if the alternative schools deny students the tools to understand the world around them. The state’s position, taken to its logical conclusion, permits nonpublic schools to teach children anything, or nothing at all.
This becomes even more troubling as New York expands support for nonpublic education. Through its recent opt-in to the nonprofit scholarship tax credit program, New York will see billions more dollars in donations toward private school tuition. Establishing baseline standards for curriculum is essential for producing an informed citizenry — that becomes significantly more difficult when our tax system props up institutions without meaningful oversight.
The state’s arguments also undermine New York’s reputation as a national leader in protecting individual rights.
State officials have aggressively defended voting rights protections, reproductive freedom, and anti-discrimination laws against legal attack. As a rogue White House tramples upon our rights, our Governor, Legislature, and Attorney General have gone to great lengths to fortify our protections.
Yet in this case, the state was effectively arguing that tens of thousands of children can be carved out both from the guarantee of a right and the opportunity to participate in society. State lawyers even contended that students denied a basic education possess no actionable deprivation of liberty or property rights.
This is a glaring departure from the contentions our state makes for the preservation of individual liberties against violation from the government. How could we credibly argue, for example, that immigrants should be able to sue ICE agents over due process rights if students can’t sue the state over their constitutional guarantee to an education? It’s a slippery slope: Deny one group legal protection against harm from the state, and you imperil the sanctity of all those protections.
The lawsuit over last year’s budget deal is still ongoing. A decision may come down any time now, but certainly is likely before the end of the year. An appeal by the losing party is all but certain. That means New York’s lawyers may continue to be forced into defending arguments that sanction students’ educational deprivation and societal isolation, and, in the process, irreparably damage our status as a bulwark for individual liberty.
The political architects of this deal may have hoped the issue would quietly disappear. Instead, the consequences are only becoming harder to defend.
The post The Yeshiva issue that won’t go away appeared first on The Forward.
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The Netherlands will return to Eurovision after boycott over Israel
(JTA) — The Netherlands will return to the Eurovision Song Contest, overriding a broadcaster that withdrew over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, said on Wednesday that it will take over the country’s entry to Eurovision after Avrotros, the broadcaster that usually takes part in Eurovision for the Netherlands, pulled out of the 2027 event in Burgas, Bulgaria.
Avrotros said last month that it withdrew because the event “can no longer be considered neutral,” citing Israel’s inclusion amid “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Avrotros dropped out of the most recent contest in May 2026, and the Netherlands did not participate after the NPO ruled out identifying another broadcaster. Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia also boycotted this year’s Eurovision. Israel’s participation in the world’s largest music contest has become a source of intense controversy, sparking mass protests. The contest drew 35 million fewer viewers this year.
For the next Eurovision, NPO is assigning the broadcaster NOS to provide coverage of the event and an “independent team of experts” to select the Dutch act.
“We understand that participation in the Eurovision Song Contest evokes mixed feelings in the Netherlands,” said Jet de Ranitz, the chairman of the NPO’s executive board. “We have explicitly asked the [European Broadcasting Union] to once again make the unifying character of the festival an important part of the event, in recognition of a time of geopolitical unrest, war, and polarization.”
The NPO added that the EBU, which owns the contest, has “taken significant steps regarding the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest.” The EBU introduced changes in August that included barring countries involved in armed conflict from hosting the competition. It also made adjustments to the voting process after accusations of politically motivated voting.
Avrotros said the new rules were not sufficient to ensure that Eurovision remains “independent and neutral.”
Martin Green, the director of Eurovision, said in a statement that the contest was “delighted to welcome the Netherlands back” in 2027.
Ireland is set to boycott Eurovision again in 2027 after RTÉ, the national broadcaster, said last week that its position “remains unchanged.”
RTÉ cited “the appalling and ongoing loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk,” adding that it was “deeply concerned by the continued denial of independent access to international journalists to the territory.”
Spain could also stay out of Eurovision next year. José Pablo López, the president of Spanish broadcaster RTVE, announced at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that he supported a continued boycott, saying it was “painful that Israel continues to participate.”
Meanwhile, Belgium confirmed its participation despite calls for a boycott by its public media unions.
“Participation is in no way an endorsement or normalization of what is happening in Gaza and the rest of the world,” said Frederik Delaplace, the CEO of the Flemish broadcaster VRT. “We do note, however, that the EBU is no longer shying away from these difficult societal and geopolitical issues.”
The post The Netherlands will return to Eurovision after boycott over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Police label shooting in Belleville, Ontario, a hate-motivated attack against the Jewish community
(JTA) — TORONTO – The shooter who opened fire on a Belleville, Ontario, synagogue Sunday evening committed an anti-Jewish hate-motivated offense, according to the city’s police chief.
“This was a deliberate attack directed at members of the Jewish community during one of the holiest observances of the year,” Belleville police chief Murray Rodd said at a press conference on Thursday, adding that the shooter had combustible materials, including gasoline, in his truck.
He said the threat posed to Jewish communities required increased alertness on the part of Canadian law enforcement. Police stationed outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue had engaged in a shootout with the assailant, Sean Ward, that prevented him from entering the building as members of the congregation were about to begin Yom Kippur services.
Rodd noted that the force had a long-time relationship with the Jewish community that involved “our proactive pre-positioning of on-duty staff” to ensure the safety of Jewish worshippers. “One of the messages to my colleagues around the province and the country is: It is clearly time that we all be proactive.”
Rodd said the efforts of Constables Jeff Smith and Michael McCurdy prevented the attacker from using the explosive materials he had with him, as well as a “significant” amount of ammunition.
Smith, who was stationed outside of Sons of Jacob to provide security, remains in critical condition but is making progress, according to Rodd. Ward later died of his wounds from the exchange with police.
“[The shooter] had the means, the mechanism, and the motive to perpetrate a greater act. The only thing that stopped entry into the synagogue to execute the intent were the two officers,” said Rodd. “He was equipped with other weapons and the means to carry on a gun battle for a long period of time.”
The CBC reported that police obtained a video of the attack in Belleville, a town over 100 miles east of Toronto on the north shore of Lake Ontario. On the video, Ward is heard shouting. Police report he is saying, “You are going to die for the Jews.”
Rodd confirmed that before Ward targeted the Sons of Jacob, he scoped out the synagogue grounds. “We know that there was a reconnaissance in the presence of our officer, but nothing that would have alarmed him or would have triggered him to be on the defensive,” Rodd said.
Ward was a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces. Rodd noted.
“He was shot multiple times in multiple places,” Rodd said. “He has everything extending from fractures to wounds, and is still bearing shrapnel.”
The post Police label shooting in Belleville, Ontario, a hate-motivated attack against the Jewish community appeared first on The Forward.
