Tikkun Olam Monthly Report – April 2025

By Janet Strassman Perlmutter,
P for Tikkun Olam, TikkunOlamBE@gmail.com

Cantor Vera, surrounded by Beth El members, holds up her award at the New England Jewish Labor Committee’s Labor Seder. (Click image to enlarge)

It was a pleasure to be part of the robust Beth El contingent who attended the New England Jewish Labor Committee’s Labor Seder on March 30. Mazal tov to Cantor Vera, who was honored for her history of dedicated social action work, and to Carl Offner and Michael Jacoby Brown, who served on the host committee for the 25th annual event.

It was also uplifting to run into many Beth El folk who “prayed with their feet” on this recent Shabbat, standing up at rallies to support vulnerable people throughout our country.

I’m often struck by the intersection of our congregation’s many efforts. While the highly successful “Wise Aging” series has been ably sponsored by our Adult Ed committee and our clergy, the content includes many tikkun olam themes, particularly surrounding inclusion, and the community support themes addressed by Hevra Mishpacha. It was my honor to facilitate the most recent session on “Dealing with Loss and Finding Light.”

I was pleased to share inspiring Passover guidance from Rabbi Joshua Lesser entitled “The Art of the Seder: Eight Ways to Gather Like You Mean It.” It’s based on Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, a modern guide to hosting with purpose and presence. The social action-oriented post is available here.

Antiracism Working Group

Contacts: Judy Goldberg and Karen Blumenfeld (antiracism@bethelsudbury.org)

• Antiracism Working Group members and others in the Beth El community continued to participate in a biweekly service opportunity at Greater Framingham Community Church, the largest predominantly African American church in the Metrowest area. Every other Friday, we work alongside members of the church and others to pack grocery bags for low-income families in the area — folks who might be on food stamps or who need a little extra assistance. 
• In partnership with Jewish Learning Opportunities for Teens (J-LOFT) and First Parish of Sudbury, we are organizing an educational program at Beth El featuring Jane Sciacca, author of Enslavement in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Sudbury and Wayland, Massachusetts. Sciacca’s groundbreaking research sheds light on the presence of slavery in New England, and challenges the common misconception that it was solely a Southern institution. Program details here. 
• We are in the early stages of planning a workshop series on showing up in multicultural/multifaith/multiethnic spaces. We are seeking a consultant to help us deepen our abilities to hear, respect, and understand those with perspectives different from our own.

Blood Drive

Contact: Shirley Hui

We held our first blood drive of 2025, collecting 123% of the drive’s goal! We have a wonderful group of volunteers who staff the registration table and the canteen, along with support from the office and Josimar. Many thanks to all involved, including the donors. We have two more drives scheduled for the year in July and November.

CAST

Contacts: Martin Brauer and Roberta Unger

In addition to the continual sharing of relevant news and learning / discussion opportunities, CAST this month has continued developing our programming, and publicized an outline, and invitation to participate, to the congregation.

Meanwhile, at the American Heritage Museum’s Holocaust exhibit, we have taken a second (Sudbury Chabad) and a third (Kerem Shalom) group of students on a focused tour, taking advantage of the recently installed Virtual Reality (VR) survivor story. Both groups provided very positive feedback on the experience, and several respondents to the questionnaire indicated an intention to act differently as a result. Our next scheduled group visitors using the VR capability will be from a public middle school, challenging us to make the experience personal for kids mostly without family connections to the events. 

Green Team

Contact John Harper to connect with a Green Team member. Join their listserv by emailing greenteam-subscribe@members.bethelsudbury.org.

Inclusion Committee

Contact: Maxine Haron or Carrie Fuchs

• We held a video and book discussion on the work of Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, author of Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Awareness of Loving Ourselves Whole.
• The community celebrated Alex Kaner’s 90th Torah reading. Members of our committee ushered, cooked and supported his mother Cat, as did other members of the community. We also bought a chair and foot rest, with funds still in our account, from past grants for anyone needing a chair with both neck/head support and foot support. We’ll discuss where the chair will be kept and how to gain access to it with Beth this month.
• We are in discussion with a member (daughter) and her mom, also a member, as to how to accommodate people who are not so sure on their feet, to allow them to continue to come to services and not stay home. This raises issues of how to accommodate walkers and wheelchairs in the sanctuary and throughout the building, as well as building awareness within the community.
• We sent out Passover resources to Bboards from Gateways: Access to Jewish Education.

Sanctuary Committee

Contact: Carl Offner

We’ve been gradually expanding the work we have been doing with CASA (the Metrowest Workers Center in Framingham). Currently we are participating in “accompaniment” — this amounts to driving people to various official appointments they need to keep regarding their immigration status.

We also periodically ask people to urge our state and national representatives to support and pass legislation supporting immigrant rights. On a state level at least, this should not be a big deal, but it nevertheless is, and we will keep working at it. Stay tuned…

We also urge people to join the weekly Friday standouts in Sudbury Center in front of Town Hall. One sign that has been widely appreciated by passing motorists is “We are all immigrants.” Our stand-out is very popular with those who are driving by during rush hour. They really appreciate seeing us, and clearly we are validating thoughts and feelings that they have and are happy to see. We are giving people hope, and giving them the courage to raise these issues in the public sphere.

And it really does have an effect: last week, one man who was stopped at the light rolled down his window and said to us, “You probably don’t like me [by which I assume he meant he had voted for Trump], but I’m starting to agree with you.” This is all part of a larger project, of which the massive April 5 demonstrations were a great example. Let’s continue to build on all this!

In addition, we are starting the process of helping to support CASA in some other important ways; in particular:

• Driving children to and from school. This is a continuing problem in
• Raising money to enable CASA to support undocumented families in their efforts to avoid deportation and achieve legal status here. This has always been a real problem, and as we all know by now, it has become much more severe recently with the actions of the current administration.

We will be sending reports to the congregation of what we are doing in these areas, and the ways in which we hope to get people involved.

Tzedek Scholarship Fund 

Contact: Janet Buchwald

The Tzedek Scholarship Committee is in the process of interviewing a new candidate for our help. Watch for updates in the near future.