As the year comes to a close, we’re taking a look back on a few of the cultural experiences offered by our Kultura partners in 2024. We’ve highlighted a few events from our 2024 archives.
Wishing you a safe, happy, healthy and creative 2025!
Kultura Programming
From November 20-24, 2024 UJA’s Kultura Collective, in collaboration with the Toronto Holocaust Museum and the Prosserman JCC, welcomed the LA-based theatre dybbuk to Toronto for a week-long residency of Jewish community building, professional workshops and performances, culminating in the Jewish Futures Arts and Culture Salon on November 24. The conference was designed for Toronto’s Jewish artists, cultural workers, patrons and arts enthusiasts to explore the future of Jewish cultural and artistic life. The program emphasized networking, communal learning, and the exploration of Jewish and artistic identity and practices. We are grateful to CANVAS, the Azrieli Foundation, the Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto, and the Covenant Foundation for their generous support of this programming.
We continued our Arts and Culture Schmoozes as a way for Jewish artists and cultural workers to come together and connect. We viewed exhibitions and chatted over wine and cheese.
We interviewed visual artists, curators, archivists, museums professionals, musicians, filmmakers and theatre producers on our blog! We love learning more about the artists who are contributing to Kultura programs.
Events, Festivals, and Performances
The 32nd Edition of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival returned from May 30 to June 9, 2024. TJFF 2024 featured the best in Jewish-content film from Canada and around the world including 82 films from 15 countries, 64 feature films, and 18 short films. TJFF also presented a special series that offered a cross-section of modern Israeli cinema, with special guests, discussions and a film masterclass.
Ashkenaz Festival returned to Earl Bales Park for the second edition of the Summer Jam FREE concert series, expanded this year to include four exciting and eclectic double-bill concerts on alternating Monday evenings! Each concert will feature a Jewish roots or related performance, paired with a rock or jam-band tribute act, attracting inter-generational fans from across the musical spectrum.
The 14th live edition of the Ashkenaz Festival took place place August 27 to September 2, 2024 at multiple venues across Toronto. The Festival celebrated Jewish musical and artistic creativity from across the globe, spotlighting diverse musical expressions of the Jewish experience, with everything from klezmer and Yiddish styles to Sephardic, Mizrachi, and Falasha music, and much more.
The Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company presented productions that celebrate the Jewish story – stories about our history, stories about our beliefs, stories about our struggles and triumphs. Through tears and laughter the original production In Seven Days explores what it means to live with grace and grapples with how we say goodbye to the people we love most. The Harold Green also presented The Shoah Songbook, Trayf, Cohen & King and the Words & Music series.
In November, the Toronto Holocaust Museum led a series of programs to learn, remember, and reflect on the history of the Holocaust together, and to commemorate the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Neuberger Holocaust Education Week (HEW) is one of the THM’s most well-known annual signature public events. For more than 40 years, HEW has provided high impact programming across the GTA to students, intercultural groups, and the general public.
The THM also created programming throughout the year to inspire connection and reflection. In Kneading History: An Intergenerational Challah Bake community members came together to preserve the tradition of making challah, the Shabbat braided egg bread, and connect with the rich history of prewar Jewish life. Led by Bonnie Stern and Anna Rupert, the mother-daughter cookbook co-authors helped participants braid their challah and reflect on the place and continuity of Jewish food traditions in our modern lives.
In honor of Trans Day of Visibility, LGBTQ+ at the J and the Ontario Jewish Archives presented The First Jew in Canada: A Trans Tale at the Al Green Theatre, written and performed by S. Bear Bergman. In 1738, a young transgender man named Jacques LaFargue set off from France to what is now Quebec City, determined to make for himself a new life. The First Jew In Canada: A Trans Tale is his largely untold story, embroidered onto the bones of nine verifiable facts about his life and existence, and interwoven with the modern experience of a trans and Jewish immigrant to Canada three hundred years later.
The rooftop of the Miles Nadal JCC welcomed Yiddish speakers and music lovers for the Yiddish Cafe. An homage to the great European Yiddish cafes and coffeehouses, the event featured live Yiddish music, desserts and conversation. Supported by the UJA Committee for Yiddish these events were a return to in person programming and a way to connect in Yiddish.
The Prosserman JCC and the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation presented the popular Israeli Film Series, showcasing the excellence of Israeli cinema. The Prosserman JCC was also home to conversations and delicious delights with their chefs series. Capping off the year, the 8 Gays of Hanukkah, a musical comedy special focused on queer Jewish storytelling, was presented in the Leah Posluns Theatre.
Exhibitions
I Will Relate to You by Meichen Waxer was presented by FENTSTER and the Ontario Jewish Archives. The multi-media exhibition mines one family’s experiences and archival treasures to explore the little known story of Jewish life in the far north of Ontario. For the FENTSTER window gallery, Waxer created an original installation informed by accounts in her late grandmother’s journals and inspired by the general goods store that her great-great-grandmother started in the north. The installation was accompanied by a historic capsule exhibition on the onetime Jewish communities around Kirkland Lake accompanied by images from the Ontario Jewish Archives.
Koffler Arts presented Botannica Tirannica by award-winning Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman. The exhibition explored how common botanical names both mirror and perpetuate societal prejudices against racial, cultural, gender, and social groups. Beiguelman was inspired to create this exhibition after receiving a gift of a Tradescantia zebrina seedling, commonly called “Wandering Jew”, a name referencing the 13th-century myth that recurred in Nazi propaganda. This led Beiguelman to investigate the complex, interwoven histories of botany, taxonomy and colonialism that often result in discrimination against specific groups of people.
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA) presented its newest exhibition, the OJA’s “50th Anniversary Scrapbook.” Through the beautifully illustrated display of archival records, the exhibition guides visitors on a journey to discover the diverse experiences and achievements of Ontario’s Jewish community, and to consider the central role of archives in preserving and connecting us to those stories. Now, the largest repository of Jewish life in Canada, the exhibition demonstrates the depth of the collection, and features fifty stories from the thousands of individual record donations that have contributed to the archive’s remarkable evolution and growth.
Celebrate our community’s history! Visit the OJA’s anniversary website to explore featured collections, at oja50.org
