The High Holiday season has concluded at Adath Israel in Merion Station, and it was a time when the congregation was able to find deep spiritual meaning amid the yearly holiday arc, the news of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and the release of the remaining living Israeli hostages.
Adath Israel’s Rabbi Eric Yanoff said this year’s holidays were an important time for the Jewish community to come together. He added that the strength of community bonds has been vital.
“The culmination of that towards the end of the holiday season [was with news] of hostages being released. That only increased the importance of that and the emotion of it,” Yanoff said.
Yanoff said that, before Yom Kippur, the synagogue set the tone when several young women performed the Israeli Eurovision song entry, “New Day Will Rise.”
Yanoff added that the song lyric, “New day will rise, life will go on. Everyone cries, don’t cry alone,” symbolized how the congregation is feeling: acknowledging the current difficulties and some vulnerability but being able to find strength and unity through it all.
The rabbi said the timing of the release of the last 20 living hostages was striking to many in the congregation, coming one day before Shemini Atzeret, which was two years to the day on the Jewish calendar from when the hostages were taken.
“Our feelings and our emotions comparing those two [days], and even last year, when things were so tense and the Jewish community just needed one another, it was really powerful,” Yanoff said.
He explained that Adath Israel hosted Congregation Sha’arei Orah while the latter’s location at Gratz College was being renovated. He said it was “incredible” for members of the two congregations to all dance in the sukkah together during a time of celebration.
“Last year, we themed our Simchat Torah with the motto of the Nova [music festival] survivors when they say, ‘We shall dance again. We will dance again.’ And that still felt relevant this year. But by the time we got to Simchat Torah and the living hostages had been released, it felt like we were dancing again,” Yanoff said.
Yanoff also reflected on the progression of the holiday season and said there’s an element of being both exhausted and exhilarated with major holidays coming one after another for around a month.
The rabbi explained that the synagogue works to create an “emotional arc” of the holidays and have the congregants feel that as the month progresses. He said the intensity of the season culminates with Yom Kippur, and there’s a catharsis with the end of that holy day, one of the happiest moments of the year, that leads into the Sukkot season.
“What I try to do, both for my personal spiritual life and in my leadership of the Adath Israel community and beyond, is ride that wave, and capture that emotional arc, and invite people and educate people so that they can join in that emotional arc,” Yanoff said.
During the Sukkot season, Yanoff said the synagogue has a constant flow of events for people of all ages, including Pizza in the Hut, where kids make pizza bagels to eat in the sukkah. Yanoff added that the act of building the sukkah is an event run by volunteers.
Furthering the Israel connection, the synagogue hosted the Philadelphia community commemoration for Oct. 7 two days early, on Oct. 5, where participants remembered the lives lost and called for the release of the hostages. They held a separate event on Oct. 7 in the sukkah, where the congregation put 48 yellow ribbons on the walls to represent the then-remaining hostages, both living and deceased.
And now that the synagogue is winding down from the intensity of the holidays, Yanoff said it still has a packed schedule coming up.
He said the congregation will be hosting Israeli Eurovision singer Eden Golan on Nov. 2 for a performance, and multiple events each week, including a screening of the film “October 8,” about the new emergence of antisemitism on college campuses.
Yanoff said the end of the holiday season doesn’t equal a slowing down of
the synagogue’s activity. He said the congregation comes out of the holidays looking to maintain its momentum. “‘Let’s use this to carry us into the next month and the year ahead, and we’ve built up such a spiritual energy. Let’s not lose that,’” Yanoff said.
