Congregation for Humanistic Judaism

Shabbat Program - Members' Seder Memories
2025-04-25 19:30 (America/New_York) | Zoom
After lighting of the sabbath candles, members will talk about their past seder memories.
Watch the listserv for the Zoom link.

Celebrate Israel
2025-04-27 14:00 - 17:00 | JCC, 1035 Newfield Ave, Stamford
For more information and tickets click jewishfestivaloffairfieldcounty.com
Let’s join together to show our solidarity with the Jewish people and support of Israel. Am Yisrael Chai!

Book Club - The Heaven and Earth Grocery Story by James McBride
2025-05-03 08:00 - 17:00 | Fairfield
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood’s quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town’s first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill’s residents—roused by Chona’s kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
New CHJ participants are always very welcome; All CHJ members are invited.
Let rhonarobbin@yahoo.com know if you are planning to attend, or if you want to be put onto the CHJ Book Club mailing list.

Forum on Israel and Anti-Semitism
2025-05-04 13:30 - 15:00 | TBA
These groups are organized by Loretta Jay, Michelle Tomarkin and Jessica Wolf for CHJ members to have a safe place to talk about Israel, anti-Semitism and other related topics and how we are affected. George Rockmore
has volunteered to serve as a back-up facilitator.

See listserv for venue.

RSVP forum@humanistcjews.org.

Shabbat Candle Lighting
2025-05-09 19:00 - 19:20, 2025-05-16 19:00 - 19:20, 2025-05-23 19:00 - 19:20, 2025-05-30 19:00 - 19:20, 2025-06-06 18:30 - 19:20, 2025-06-13 18:30 - 19:20, 2025-06-20 18:30 - 19:20, 2025-06-27 18:30 - 19:20 and 4 more dates
Zoom opens at 6:30pm just to kibbutz.
At 7pm we light candles with a short service. We listen to music and short lectures. Watch for the Zoom link on the listserv Friday afternoon.

Board Meeting
2025-05-13 19:00
We will begin work on the year’s programs and any activities of specific interest.
Please send me subjects of interest you wish the Board to consider in order to prepare the agenda.
Open to all CHJ members. Request the Zoom link from Previn Patel.

Visitation and Memorial Service for Ellie Shafer
2025-05-18 10:00 - 12:00
Long-term member, Ellie Shafer, passed away peacefully at home on April 5th. A visitation and memorial service will be held on May 18th in Fairfield from 10AM to Noon. The Congregation wishes to express our extreme sadness at her passing and convey our condolences to her family for her loss. May her memory be a blessing. Her obituary can be viewed here.

Open to those who knew her and her family.

RSVP for CHJ 2025 Annual Meeting
2025-06-01 13:00 - 17:00 | Marilyn Brownstein’s Apartment Building
Sunday, June 1, 1:00-5:00 PM
Bridgeport, CT
Open to all CHJ Members
A catered luncheon will be served.
See the website directory or your downloaded PDF for Marilyn’s address.
Please RSVP below for an approximate number of attendees:

Person One

First

Last

Email One

Person Two

First

Last

Email Two

NumberPlease enter a number from 1 to 5.

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Men's Rap
2025-06-08 09:30 | Member’s residence
Come and join us for kibbitzing and noshing.
Noshing starts at 9:30am.
Meeting at 10am.
RSVP – danapreis@gmail.com
Watch the liserserv for venue.

Jewish Journeys - Modigliani and Soutine ****CANCELED**********
2025-06-14 13:30 - 15:00 | Brooks Place,Westport Library, Westport, CT
********************CANCELED**********

Book Club - Trust by Hernan Diaz
2025-06-15 10:30 | Member’s residence
All CHJ members are invited to discuss Trust by Hernan Diaz at a member’s residence. See listserv for address
There are four sections to “Trust,” a novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Hernan Diaz. The first is a novel itself, a fictionalized life of a legendary and enormously successful 1920’s financier in New York City and his wife. The second is an unfinished memoir by the financier presumed by everyone to be featured in the novel. The third is the memories of the unknown young woman hired to help the financier write his memoir. The last is a short story about a woman who could be the wife. Each of them explores the human cost of wealth, especially in the reality-bending world of capitalism.

Book Club - Table for Two by Amor Towles
2025-06-16 08:00 - 17:00
Join us for a discussion of Table for Two by Amor Towles.
The author writes of this book:
Table for Two includes six short stories and a novella which I wrote in the last ten years. The six stories, all set in New York, mostly take place around the turn of the Millennium. So, unlike my novels, they represent a time and place that I have witnessed firsthand, albeit through the eyes of a fabulist.
————–
When I finished assembling the collection, it occurred to me that in most of the pieces, a critical moment involved a pair of family members or strangers facing each other across a kitchen table to confront some new reality in their lives. I wasn’t conscious of this while writing the stories, but it must have sprung from a conviction in my subconscious that our lives can often change materially due to a single conversation at a table for two.

Havdalah at the Beach
2025-06-21 18:30 | Sherwood Island Park Westport
Bid Shabbat farewell at the beach with fellow members, friends and guests on Saturday June 21, 6:30 p m at the Compo Beach in Westport as usual.
Desserts, drinks and parking compliments of CHJ, bring your chairs and dinner.
Please RSVP programming@humanisticjews.org in order to plan for desserts and drinks.
Ask for CHJ parking at the gate. See you there.

Women's Rap
2025-06-29 10:30 - 12:30 | Member’s Residence Fairfield
Come join other CHJ women to talk about a topic to be chosen at the meeting. It’s a great way to get to know one another.
RSVP: rcfnpl2@gmail.com

Forum on Israel and Anti-Semitism
2025-06-29 13:30 - 15:00 | Fairfield

Board Meeting
2025-07-08 19:00 | Zoom

Book Club - Table for Two by Amor Towles
2025-07-12 10:30 | Member’s residence
Join a discussion of Table for Two by Amor Towles
Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.
The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how one of Towles’s most beloved characters, the indomitable Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility, crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of 1930s Los Angeles.
