By Reporter staff

A variety of Jewish groups are offering educational and recreational online resources. Below is a sampling of those. The Reporter will publish additional listings as they become available. 

ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal will hold the virtual program “Systems, Patterns and Relationships: Judaism for Ecological and Social Healing” on Wednesdays, August 17, 24 and 31, at 7:30 pm. The program will explore the book “The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey Into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking” by Rabbi Natan Margalit. It will speak to what Margalit calles the “3 Mems” – minyan (emergence), mikdash (nestedness) and mitzvah (tipping points). To register for the program, visit this link. 

The Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy will hold a variety of online programs this fall: “The City of Dreams: Part One of a Three Part Series About Jewish Odessa on Zoom” on Tuesday, September 13, from 7-8:30 pm (buy tickets); “Jewish Intellectuals of Odessa” on Wednesday, September 21, from 7-8:30 pm (more info here); “Odessa During WWII” on Thursday, October 20, from 7-8:30 pm (register here); “This is NOT the Borscht Belt: Resorts of the Early Jewish Catskills: Part 1 of 2” with urban historian Justin Ferate on Wednesday, October 26, from 7-8:45 pm (more here); and “This IS the Borscht Belt! Resorts of the Jewish Catskills Part 2 of 2 on Monday, November 7, from 7-8:45 pm (see event info). 

The Yiddish Book Center will hold a virtual program about “Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel” by Ida Maze, translated by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, on Thursday, August 4, at 7 pm. Taub will discuss the book and answer questions. For more information or to register, click here.

The Center for Jewish History will hold the virtual program “Family History Today: Finding Overlooked Clues in German Records,” featuring Alex Calzareth, on Monday, August 15, at 5 pm. Calzareth, director of the JewishGen German Research Division, will share his strategies for correlating evidence and making sense of ambiguous records. For more information or to register, visit their event page.

ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal will hold the virtual program “The Needs of the Griever” on Sundays, August 14, 21 and 28, at 7:30 pm. The cost to attend is $54. The program will look at the needs of grievers and a discuss of the grieving process. To register, see here.

Qesher will hold a variety of online Jewish tours and program. All programs will begin at 1:30 pm and all talks will take about 90 minutes: “A Tale of Three Kingdoms: The Jews of Andalusia, Morocco and Gibraltar” on Thursday, August 4 (learn more); “Jewish New York: A Virtual Tour of Harlem” on Thursday, August 11 (see event page); “Jewish Africa: A Photographic Journey” on Sunday, August 14 (available here); “Vilnius: The Jerusalem of Lithuania and the city of my family” on Thursday, August 18 (see here); “The Jews of Bahrain: A Resilient Community in the Persian Gulf” on Sunday, August 21 (register here); “The 3K Virtual Tour of Jewish Lithuania: Kaunas, Kedainiai and Kalvarija” (view tickets); and “Finland: Home of kosher reindeer and Kabbalat Shabbat at midnight” on Sunday, August 28 (learn more). 

Hadar, in partnership with SVIVAH, HerTorah, the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and the JTS Hendel Center for Ethics and Justice, will hold the virtual program “Real Torah / Real Life: Abortion, Beyond Law” on Tuesday-Wednesday, August 2-3. To receive information about when registration opens, visit ticket page.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will hold the virtual and in-person “Saving Freud” book launch on Tuesday, August 23, from 7-8 pm. Andrew Nagorski, author of “Saving Freud,” will discuss his work that tells of how in 1938 Sigmund Freud was persuaded to leave Vienna and emigrate to London. Sylvia Nasar, Knight Professor Emerita at Columbia Journalism School, will moderate the program. For more information or to register, visit this link.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will hold the virtual and in-person book talk “Researchers Remember” on Tuesday, September 6, from 1-2:30 pm. Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and Shmuel Refael, editors of “Researchers Remember: Research as an Arena of Memory for Descendants of Holocaust Survivors,” will discuss how when “descendants of Holocaust survivors who became researchers and scholars, whether they devoted their professional lives to the Holocaust or to other topics, the Holocaust often accompanies their professional lives like a shadow.” Jacqueline Heller, Dan Carter, Dorota Glowacka, Sam Juni, Abraham J. Peck, Liat Steir-Livny, Zehavit Gross and Eva Fogelman will also discuss how their parents’ or grandparents’ Holocaust experiences affected their personal and professional trajectories. For more information or to register, follow this link.

Maven will hold “The Pope at War: Saving the Catholic Church at the Expense of the Jews” on Thursday, August 11, from 3-3:45 pm. David Kertzer will discuss his book, for which he looked at “thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States... paint[ing] a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews.” For more information or to register, visit this page.

The Keshet Leadership Project partners with leaders of national and local Jewish organizations such as synagogues, day schools, JCCs, youth groups and summer camps to teach community leaders the tools, skills and confidence to put LGBTQ equality into practice. For more information on the project, click here.

For additional resources, see previous issues of The Reporter or our other Jewish Online Resources here.