In this issue: Sukkot starts Friday night. David Sussman takes us to the Nova festival site on October 7, live from southern Israel. We need volunteers going into the fall. And a stranger in Kansas found one of our ducks at four in the morning.
Chag sameach.
Sukkot starts Friday night. We put up a room with a roof you can see through, we eat in it for a week, and we bring people into it — the ushpizin included, guests who come whether or not we know their names. A week of deliberately sitting somewhere flimsy, with the door open.
Our ducks have been running a smaller version of the same errand all year, and one of them made the point for me this week. Somebody left one on a utility cabinet in Pratt, Kansas, before the sun came up. Three days later a stranger found it at four in the morning and wrote to tell us where. Two people who will never meet, and a duck in between them. That is hachnasat orchim with a bill and a kippah.
October 7 falls on the Wednesday after Simchat Torah this year. David Sussman is taking us to the Nova festival site that morning, live from southern Israel — the same David who guided us across the country in 2022 and sat us down for a barbecue at his house in Efrat at the end of it. He has been taking people through that ground since the months after the attack.
Three years. Long enough that some people have started to file it away. We are not going to.
Details below, on that and on where we need hands. Come sit in a sukkah this week, and come with us on the seventh.
Chag sameach to you and yours.
— Cheryl Dorchinsky, Executive Director
Live virtual tour · Free to attend · On Zoom
Remembering October 7: A Live Virtual Tour of the Nova Festival Site
Wed, Oct 7 · 9:00 AM ET · Live on Zoom
Three years to the day, David Sussman takes us across the ground where it happened — the Nova site, and the communities along the Gaza border that were attacked at dawn that Shabbat.
He has been guiding missions through it since the months after the attack: to the people who live there, the soldiers who were there, and the families who came back to rebuild. He takes questions throughout, and he does not rush them.
David has been guiding AIC audiences since 2020 — two tours of the Old City that December, two five-part virtual series after them, and all ten days of AIC's first in-person mission in 2022.
Free to attend, with an optional contribution at registration. Register even if you cannot make the hour: the program is recorded, and every registrant is sent the recording afterward.
AIC runs on people who show up.
We are grassroots, all-volunteer and self-funded. Nobody here draws a salary, so every speaker who comes to Atlanta, every briefing and every delegation happens because somebody picked up a piece of the work and carried it.
Going into the fall we are short on hands, and these are the pieces that need them: tabling at events, hosting a visiting speaker, getting invitations out, photography, social media, the webinar series, and the logistics behind a mission. Most of it is a few hours tied to one event.
Tell us what you are actually good at and how much time you actually have, and we will match you to something real instead of adding you to a list.
MITZVAHS THAT FLOAT
A stranger found one at a Casey's in Kansas, four in the morning
Somebody left a kosher duck on a yellow utility cabinet in Pratt, Kansas. Three days later, at 4 a.m., a stranger walking into the Casey's found it, took its picture and put it on the map.
The map is past a hundred sightings now, in twenty countries. Australia, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Poland, Qatar, Thailand, the Bahamas, the US Virgin Islands.
Want them landing where you live? Start a chapter. A charter is $180, one time: eighteen kosher ducks, your own co-branded tag design and QR codes, the drop playbook, and your chapter's own page on the site.
Left along the way: a fuel pump in Flagstaff, Arizona · a fence post at dusk in Casa Blanca, New Mexico · a steel table in Higginsville, Missouri