Photos

Who makes the best hummus?

 

Children’s author and TV host, Alice ‘In Frames’ Zaslavsky, can’t wait to get her carrot stuck into a plate of hummus at the In One Voice Jewish street festival in Elsternwick on Sunday 19 March.

Zaslavsky, who wrote Alice’s Food A-Z and hosts Crunch Time on 9Go!, is judging the hummus competition organised by Caring Mums, the organisation which supports new mothers across Victoria.

“At last year’s In One Voice festival I judged the cheesecake competition and was consumed by cheese dreams for the following week. That’s why I suggested hummus for this year’s competition,” Zaslavsky said.

“Hummus is a great equaliser. Everyone thinks they’ve got the best recipe. Hummus is popular right across the Jewish community. It’s also something kids can whip up – hummus is such a great addition to lunch boxes – just add carrot or celery sticks.”

Zaslavsky says the key to a good hummus is getting the right balance between the ingredients.

“Hummus needs the right acidity – just enough lemon juice to cut through the richness of the tahina and chickpeas. Personally, I prefer a good hit of garlic – something that practically clears the nostrils!,” she said.

One of the many virtues of hummus is that it encourages us to eat fresh vegetables, Zaslavsky said.

“Hummus is both delicious and nutritious,” she reckons. “It encourages us to make salads and move beyond the meat and three veg approach to meals. And, remember, hummus is just one step away from a falafel ball.”

Zaslavsky found judging the 2016 cheesecake competition challenging.

“I judge a lot of cooking competitions and usually it’s behind closed doors, not in front of the entrants. Having to look all those Yiddishe mamas in the eye was quite an experience. On the other hand, it was refreshing to give real-time feedback to all of the cooks involved. Each of the cheesecakes had something special.”

It costs $15 to enter the hummus competition, with all fees going to Caring Mums:  http://www.ncjwavic.org.au/event-2317024

 The hummus competition will be held from 2-3.30pm in the Nosh Tent which is where festival-goers can also see demonstrations of Indian Jewish cooking by Esther and Ken Daniels, Rebecca Joseph and Ronny Judah. They’ll be joined by Linda Weidenfeld cooking vegetarian food Mish Arndt baking Irish bread.

Hummus is popular right across the Middle East. It is a common part of everyday meals in Israel. One reason for its popularity in Israel is that it is made from ingredients that, following Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws), can be combined with both meat and dairy meals. Both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs relish the dish.

In 2012, Australian filmmaker Trevor Graham released a documentary, Make Hummus Not War, on the political and gastronomic aspects of hummus.

According to ‘Spoon University’, hummus is also rumoured to be an aphrodisiac.

 The In One Voice Jewish street festival is presented by the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library and SKIF.

Alice ‘In Frames’ Zaslavsky @aliceinframes

 

Festival Manager Judith Weizman on 0413 415 539; judithlweizman@gmail.com; www.inonevoice.org.au

 In One Voice Jewish culture street festival,

11am-5pm, Sunday 19 March – Sinclair and Selwyn Streets, Elsternwick

Rabbi Ralph Genende

---

“I must remember there’ll be days like this when no one steps on my dreams.
There’ll be days like this when people understand what I mean.
There’ll be days like this when you ring out the changes of how everything is.
Well my mama told me there’ll be days like this.”

The lyrics are from Van Morrison’s 1995 album by the same name. But they could have come out of the life of the young Biblical Joseph. Yes, the same Joseph of the Technicolour Dreamcoat.
At the cusp of his adulthood, full of hope and promise, supremely confident in his own capacity – as only a young man deeply loved by his parents can be – the young Joseph dreams great dreams.
He imagines this as “one of those days”, to share the dreams, to ring out the changes.

ויחלום יוסף חלום ויגד לאחיו
And Joseph dreamed and told the dream to his brothers.

Listen to this dream:
“There we were binding sheaves in the field when mine stood up and all of yours gathered around and bowed low to mine.”

Undeterred by his brother’s outraged reaction to this dream (not the best way to win friends and influence people), he dreams again and again insist on sharing it:
ויחלום עוד חלום
And Joseph dreamed another dream.
This time, the sun, the moon and eleven stars are bowing down to him…

Eminent 20^th century scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Soleveichik suggests that Joseph was able to see beyond the present moment, to intuitively sense the winds of change, to grasp that different days were coming.

Of course, we know how right Joseph was, how he saved the embryonic Jewish people from destruction. If not for Joseph, Israel would have been history, just another page in an ancient document.
We adapted, we changed.
In fact, in Gandhi’s memorable phrase – we became the change. We were the change.

And we, the Jewish people, became the agent provocateurs, the game changers again and again.
Like Joseph’s brothers, we stand on the cusp of a new digital age. We have every reason to be fearful and anxious about the tsunami of change transforming our world. The rate of change in one year now eclipses the cumulative change of centuries.

Journalist and social commentator Thomas Friedman suggests that we’ve got two choices about how to react: We can become “wall people” or “web people.”

Wall people build bigger walls to keep out the chaos, to stop the unruly tides of chaos.

Web people embrace the change and focus on empowering people to compete and collaborate in a world without walls, to become more flexible, more agile, to learn how to transform yourself and your environment.
Joseph’s brothers opted for walls. Joseph chose the web.
Neat as this is, it’s a little too simplistic: The truth is, the world still needs some walls. Even the world-wide-web needs to protect itself with fire-walls. We need walls to protect our way of life.

Despite this, there’s a magic and a wonder to the web and it’s actually linking and transforming us in untold and enthralling ways.

It’s giving us more access to knowledge than the most brilliant minds that ever roamed our vast and wonderful universe ever had access to.

It’s giving us the freedom to explore ideas and identities, and to reach out to others in countless new ways, too.

It’s a disruption of centuries of behaviour, a disjunction of routine, a challenge of habit.

In a sense, it’s Teshuvah on a universal scale.

For what is Teshuvah – Repentance –  if not breaking the back of the old, כח ההרגל, the rut of routine.
We Jews have always been better ‘webbers’ than ‘wallers’, disruptive rather than docile, questioning rather than quiescent.

From Abraham destroying his father’s idols to Moses taking on Pharoah, from Spinoza confronting authority to Freud challenging convention, we have been at the forefront of change, a nation that prefers to start up, rather than shut-up.
And that’s why we as Jews and Israel as a nation are ideally placed to ride this tiger into the future.

But it’s paradoxical that we can’t seem to shed our webbed feet when it comes to the critical challenges of Jewish identity today. That we lose our nerve when trying to adapt to changes in the makeup of our community.

I remember living in South Africa as the apartheid government began to realise they would never be able to stem the winds of change and freedom that were sweeping across the country.
Pik Botha, then FM of South Africa made the famous statement “adapt or die”.

We as a proud and strong diaspora community need to say to the Ultra-Orthodox (Chareidi) Rabbinate of Israel: adapt or die.

We need to join the Rabbinic Council of America in their condemnation of the Charedi men who, on pseudo-Halachic grounds, disgracefully refuse to sit next to women on El Al planes and say: “adapt or die”.
And we need to ensure that we as a community are recognizing that you can’t assume that the next generation are going to come to synagogue, support our organisations and schools, and give charity to our traditional charities.

The times they are changing and we need to become more agile and flexible in the way we keep Jews Jewish.

We need to reach out and be part of the change.

We need more openness to those who are different whether they are gay, or whether they are women seeking greater involvement in their community.
Our community.

We need to ensure we’re part of the multicultural and multifaith face of Melbourne, because that’s the changing face of our globe.

As Jews we’ve always understood that to be open, doesn’t mean you stand for everything.

We’ve always known that only the sure of faith, with confidence in themselves, can afford to be open.

The stronger we are as Jews, the more we will have to offer.

So stand strong, deepen your Jewish knowledge, expand your Jewish practice, be a literate Jew, be a serious Jew, because only then can you be a serious Jewish contributor to the revolution which is already here.

Change is inevitable and change is constant.

“Change,” said John F Kennedy, “is the law of life. And those who only look to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

Stay with us, stand with us ,join us, as we help lead the change here in Melbourne.

Stay with us, stand with us, join us, as we continue as we have for the past 10 years to transform our community.

Be part of the change.

After all, my mum told me there will be days like this:

When people share the dream, when they ring out the changes.

I have to remember days like this.

---

Rabbi Ralph Genende
Rabbi of Caulfield Hebrew Congregation
Melbourne, Australia

Adapted from his First Day Jewish New Year sermon 2016
Rosh Hashana 5777

This is an edited and updated version of the speech given by Leeor Chabat at the Caulfield Synagogue Second Night Seder, April 2016.

Leeor is the founder of J-Seek and works as a freelance Community Liaison Consultant.

---

The central theme of Pesach is freedom.

Literally defined freedom is “the power or right to act, speak or think as one wants.”

I have luckily been brought up in a country, society and community which all have fostered this idea, and made it fiercely known to me the value of such a privilege.

I was taught at school about the oppression of my ancestors, and the adversity they endured.

Tonight, we look down at our plates and see symbols. These symbols are representative of the pain, suffering and oppression our ancestors faced.

As we reflect on this holy holiday, the most important question to me is how we move forward from those times.

A couple of months after graduating Bialik College in 2014, I found myself sitting on a rock on cold and windy Brighton Beach thinking about my life’s purpose. And what impact, what difference I wanted to make in this world around me.

Somehow, the cold and the wind had an effect, and I left the rock with an understanding from that day on, that now impacts on my decision making, my reactions and my analysis of situations that arise.

It’s what now drives me on a day-to-day basis: to do the best and be the best person that I can be. I walked away from that rock knowing that a simple philosophy heard so many times was now my own.      “If you want to, you can”.

In a nutshell: the belief in self is the most powerful asset that you have the ability to control.

And so walking away from the cold beach that day, in my t-shirt, shorts and thongs, I decided then and there that to the best of my ability I will try to somehow, some way make a difference of my own.

---

The first step was identifying problems. My first port of call was my community, as it is the one that I am most affected by. Next was understanding why those problems existed and then, what I could do about it to try and solve them.

Every day I would be thinking, what can I do? How can I fix this? Is it worth fixing?

And then one day in August 2015,  it happened.

I was searching for a platform that would provide me with a simple word-of-mouth recommendation for a service I required. Simple, yes? Especially in my own community?

I was hit with a brick wall, nothing existed. And so, Jseek was created.

A simple Facebook page, where people could ask their own community members for advice, suggestions and references for reputable businesses and services. No request too large or small.

This simple page became an instant “Community Centre Online”.

7 months later, with in excess of 10,000 members (20% of the Melbourne Jewish population),  Jseek has changed the way we as a community communicate, care, and most importantly Support each other.

This idea of support is not only ingrained in the core values of our culture and religion but in the make up of our being. Whether it be thousands of years ago aiding survival in the desert or helping somebody find a plumber today, we love helping our own.

---

And this is why, today, as Pesach marks the birth of the Jewish nation, we focus on our Jewish unity and by way of contrast, our Jewish identity.

We know from multiple studies that though our community is so large and diverse, we aren’t as unified in the same ways as in the past. Engagement in Jewish activities, communal gatherings and events and Jewish retention rates have all declined.

Whilst this may seem a cause for concern, I see it as an opportunity.
Because the internet can bring people together from their desks and their phones.
By understanding the needs and wants of today’s generations we may be able to define why, what and how we are able to solve the ‘problems’ that we face as a community, together.
To me, Jseek is the primary case study.

Creating this online platform has sparked an interest amongst many individuals to create similar platforms both here and abroad, importantly, for our community and by our community.

I’m incredibly proud of that.

If we, as a community, can find ways to keep opening multiple lines of communication, this will have a multiplying effect.
I believe that we need to do everything in our power to encourage individuals to continue to create initiatives that will work towards this goal.

Our aim should be multigenerational engagement, a stronger sense of Jewish identity, and in the spirit of Pesach, a more unified Jewish community.

“If you want to, you can”.