Music, both sacred and joyous, floated on a summer breeze across a field in West Tisbury Monday night as attendees of all ages mingled in tents dotting the field during Chabad on the Vineyard’s fourth annual Jewish Culture Festival.
The festival, which took place at the residence of David and Deborah Reed near the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, brought together about 400 people, according to Chabad on the Vineyard Co-Director Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz.
“Jewish life on Martha’s Vineyard is thriving,” Alperowitz said. “Being Jewish should be a joyful experience, and that’s what our goal is with this festival. To bring some joy, energy, spirit, and vibrancy.”
The rabbi’s hope seemed to be brought to life at every turn, with arts and crafts, and workshops on everything from weaving challah bread to tracing one’s ancestry all taking place around a bountiful table of delicious Jewish food. It culminated in a dialogue with Lior Raz, a star Israeli actor in the streaming series “Fauda,” as he shared insights and stories that reflected the complexity of the show, which is enormously popular not only in Israel but across the Middle East and around the world. But Raz and the show are not without their critics, and a small group of protesters showed up at the gate.
Staged in the center of the field, a rotating sculpture of a Kiddush cup dripping in vibrant paint slowly spun. Titled “Overflowing Blessings,” the interactive exhibit invited festivalgoers to say something they feel grateful for before dumping a small cup of colored paint on top of the sculpture.
Rabbi Yitzchok Moully said that the exhibit was inspired by the Shabbat custom of overfilling the Kiddush cup with wine to bless the day.
“This is a visualization of those overflowing blessings. We’re just taking it one step further, and everyone’s invited,” Moully said. “Of course, it’s not Friday night tonight, but it’s always a good time to think about one thing that you’re grateful for in life and to pour.”
Moully explained a common Yiddish saying, “S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid,” which translates to “It’s tough to be Jewish.” And he hastened to refute it.
“It’s a joy to be Jewish,” he said. “We’re here today celebrating the joy of Judaism, the joy of community, the joy of the culture, and the joy of the ceremony.”
Nearby, Rabbi Dovid Gutnick led a Havdalah set-making workshop in his tent, which consisted of creating a braided beeswax candle and personalized spice blend in a glass jar.
Gutnick explained how Havdalah, a ritual marking the end of Shabbat, involves the lighting of the candle to symbolize the creation of the first fire and the smelling of the spices to comfort the soul.
“On the Sabbath, you get a second soul. It’s like a friend that comes to hang out. When Sabbath goes and finishes, that soul leaves … so your regular soul gets sad,” Gutnick said. When smelling the spices, “you take a deep breath. You go, and you say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll come back next week.’ It calms the soul down, and it’s able to go into the week like that.”
At the Makor Map station, festivalgoers could mark the regions where their ancestors originated on a shared virtual map of Central and Eastern Europe. Jewish genealogy experts Sallyann Amdur Sack and Marlis Humphrey also guided participants through a questionnaire to learn about their family history.
Sack recalled believing as a child that she couldn’t learn about her family’s history, an idea she said that many Jewish Americans believe.
“For years and years, most Jewish people in the U.S. thought that they couldn’t learn anything about their ancestry,” Sack said. “I heard about family trees at school. I asked [my mother], and she said, ‘Oh, nothing to be learned. Hitler killed everybody. It’s all gone.’ So I grew up thinking Jews didn’t have family trees.”
Over time, Sack said, she has noticed increased interest in family history among the Jewish community. “It’s an amazingly enriching topic, and with each passing year, it becomes more active,” Sack said. “People realize that they can learn about their past and their families.”
Stars in the Arts, a coalition of Jewish and Israeli artists formed in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, displayed their art. Co-founder Annette Back said that she launched the coalition to depict Jewish happiness in the wake of the attacks. “We wanted to bring positivity and Jewish joy into the world and into your eyes,” Back said.
Baker Mandy Silverman performed a live demonstration of baking challah bread. Silverman, who baked a variety of loaves ranging from cookies and cream to apple fritter, said that Jewish culture unites people of all practicing levels. “No matter what we’re doing, we’re all sort of interwoven together,” Silverman said. “It’s like challah. We’re all interwoven, and we love to eat.”
Beneath the main tent, more Jewish flavors could be found. From a rich chicken matzo ball soup to brisket and babkas, the array of cuisine highlighted Shabbat meal staples from across the diaspora.
The evening culminated with a conversation between “Fauda” star Raz and reporter Maya Sulkin from the Free Press. The show explores the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and draws from Raz’s time as an undercover commando in an elite unit of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). He recalled a conversation he had with co-creator Avi Issacharoff in Ramallah about writing the show to depict the psychological toll of the conflict felt by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. “‘Yes, Avi, I have a dream. I want to write something about those kids that we see now in front of us doing crazy things. But not just about them, but about the mental price that they are paying, and that their friends and families are paying, for what they’re doing exactly right now,’” Raz said.
Raz, whose father is from Iraq and mother is from Algeria, reflected on how his father reminded him about his mixed identity as both Arab and Jewish.
“He said, ‘In our house, you will listen to Farid al-Atrash, but also to Bach and Tchaikovsky and Mozart,’” Raz said. “‘The culture that you have is mixed. It’s Arab culture but also Israeli culture.’”
Raz, who was in Romania when the Oct. 7 attacks began, recalled receiving a frantic phone call from his sister, who was trapped in a shelter and holding a knife to protect herself, and how he scrambled to fly back to Israel.
“It was very hard to catch a flight to Israel on Oct. 7, because in Israel it’s the opposite of any other country in the world,” he said. “When there is a danger, instead of people running out of Israel, everybody wants to come back to Israel.”
Raz expressed his hopes for the upcoming season of “Fauda,” which focuses on the aftermath of Oct. 7, to offer his audience a chance to better understand the Israeli response to the attacks through the character, Doron.
“This season is going to be the hardest season ever, but it is such an important season, because there are hundreds of millions of people who are watching ‘Fauda’ in the world,” Raz said. “When you see Oct. 7 through the eyes of Doron, a woman from Colombia who’s watching ‘Fauda’ loves Doron. In Lebanon, she will see him going through Oct. 7 … she will feel for the Jewish people and for Israel.”
In regard to the attacks of Oct. 7 by Hamas in Israel along the border with Gaza, Raz also expressed his uncertainty about the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine. “It changed because you see how vicious they are, and how it’s going to be very hard to have peace,” Raz said.
During his talk, Raz gestured with his middle finger in a crude expression of his feelings about a small group of demonstrators across the street from the event; they also demonstrated at the West Tisbury Town Hall. The group, which comprised roughly 15 people, who said they were protesting in opposition to Raz headlining the festival due to his IDF background, carrying placards that read “Jewish culture? Yes! IDF? No!”
“I hope that everyone that went through those protesters, and you did something like that,” Raz said, after lowering his middle finger.
Following the talk, the audience rose for the recitation of the Tefillah L’Chayalei Tzahal, a traditional Jewish prayer that asks God to protect and bless the soldiers of the IDF. As the attendees left the tent, Shulem Lemmer returned to the stage to sing more.
Standing outside of the tent as Lemmer sang “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, Brookline-based Rabbi Mayshe Schwartz, whose brother was a festival organizer and whose sister was visiting from Israel, emphasized the rarity of safe spaces for Jewish people like the festival.
“We thought it’d be a fun thing to do, be with 500 Jews, enjoying life, celebrating, not living in fear,” he said. “Today, that’s a big commodity in America, and I wanted to take advantage of that and be a part of that.”
