Community programs at United Hebrew Congregation Terre Haute
Dr. Nancy Sommers, a native of Terre Haute and former member of United Hebrew Congregation, will be keynote speaker for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 5, at UHC.
Her subject will be “My Mother’s Story — Creating Light from Darkness and Optimism out of Tragedy”. Dr. Sommers’s mother is longtime UHC member Louise Levite Sommers, a Holocaust survivor and resident of Terre Haute.
The program is sponsored by UHC and CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
As mounting instances of identity-based violence arouse memories of historic, mass atrocities, alarmed communities across the U.S. increasingly counter with public vigils and calls for peaceful resolution to conflict.
Here in Terre Haute, UHC’s sanctuary provides a welcoming venue for such events. On April 7, the 25th anniversary of the day Rwanda’s Hutu majority unleashed a genocide that took the lives of 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, UHC welcomed survivor Emmanuel Habimana and the Terre Haute South Vigo High School STAND club to present a special program entitled #TogetherWeRemember.
UHC will once again welcome the community to its sanctuary when the Terre Haute South Vigo High School STAND club presents guest speaker and Rwandan genocide survivor Emmanuel Habimana, from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, April 7, at the Temple.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, when members of the Hutu majority murdered some 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority.
The event is part of #TogetherWeRemember, an “annual international campaign to transform remembrance into action to end identity-based violence for all humanity.”
The PBS program “There Are Jews Here” follows the untold stories of four once-thriving American Jewish communities that are now barely holding on. As communities struggle with aging congregants and dwindling interest, families are moving to larger cities with more robust congregations.
A portrait of people who are doing their part to keep the Jewish spirit alive, the film celebrates religious diversity in small-town America.
Beyond that description, I found the 90-minute show to provide an excellent representation of our own experience and many of the ideas we have tried or considered in order to encourage engagement.