Cooks and musicians from Beit Shemesh-Mateh Yehudah offer tastings, live music, and insight into the experience of being young and Jewish at the forefront of the emerging Israeli cultural scene.

Sponsored by JFGW and Partnership2Gether project of the Jewish Agency

Sixth & I and Turner Memorial AME Church will join together to commemorate the spirit and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for the eighth annual MLK Shabbat service.

The service will be led by new Senior Pastor at Turner Memorial AME Church, Reverend William H. Lamar, IV who has recently moved to the DC area after spending a few years working at Duke Divinity School; Rabbi Shira Stutman, Sixth & I’s Director of Community Engagement; and Cantor Larry Paul. The night will include a performance by the liturgical dancers from Turner Memorial AME Church.

Dessert reception following the service.

WATCH A VIDEO of a past MLK service here.

If you are interested in an MLK Day vounteer opportunity with Yachad and Sixth & I, please click here.

In the heart of Tel Aviv, there is an exceptional school where children from 48 different countries and diverse backgrounds come together to learn. Many of the students arrive at Bialik-Rogozin School fleeing poverty, political adversity and even genocide. Here, no child is a stranger.

Strangers No More—2011 Academy Award winner for Best Short Subject—follows several students struggling to acclimate to life in a new land while slowly opening up to share their stories of hardship. With tremendous effort and dedication, the school provides the support these children need to recover from their past. Together, the bond between teacher and student, and amongst the students themselves, enables them to create new lives in this exceptional community.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A about the film and HIAS’s work with asylum seekers and refugees in Israel. Among the panelists will be Joel Moss, HIAS’s Representative in Israel and an expert in asylum law who is embedded in the Israeli Ministry of the Interior’s new Refugee Status Determination Unit. Film preview.

Layering traditional Hindu kirtan with melodies and modern instrumentation, Krishna Das has been called yoga’s “rock star.” With a remarkably soulful voice that touches the deepest chord in even the most casual listener, Krishna Das – also known as KD – has taken the call-and-response chanting out of yoga centers and into concert halls, becoming a worldwide icon and the best-selling chant artist of all time.

Sharon Salzberg, a leading meditation teacher and NY Times bestselling author, cofounded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, one of the most prominent meditation centers in the Western world. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, and was a contributing editor of O Magazine. She has been featured in Time , Yoga Journal, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Self, More and Shambhala Sun.

This event honors the Kalachakra for World Peace Empowerment in Washington, DC offered by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, July 6 – 16, 2011.

Co-sponsored by Grace Productions

Join us for the DC launch of the As We Forgive Rwanda Initiative (AWFRI), a new Rwandan reconciliation organization inspired by the 2008 Student Academy Award-winning documentary As We Forgive.

The screening includes a new 7-minute epilogue and a panel discussion with filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson, AWFRI Executive Director Andrea McDaniel, and Rwandan youth advocate Jean Michel Habineza.

A wine and appetizer reception follows, with proceeds supporting AWFRI’s efforts in Rwanda.

For the past seven years, actor and activist Ashley Judd has kept poignant journals of her travels into the world’s human-rights hot spots, where as a global ambassador for PSI/Youth AIDS, she waded into slums, brothels, and war-torn villages on four continents, advocating programs to improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people. As part of her journey to help these victims, Judd was forced to take a deep look at her own life, and at the damaging issues she had been wrestling with for years.

All That Is Bitter and Sweet is a highly personal and powerful memoir about change, hope, and human transformation. It tells the stories of the people Judd encountered and reveals her own personal demons—from depression to obsessive compulsion and codependency—unearthed as a result of her journeys. Judd recently received a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Watch the video trailer for the book. Book signing to follow.

When Cokie and Steve Roberts met in college, they believed their different traditions—she is Catholic, he is Jewish—would prevent them from getting married. Forty-five years later, they have learned not only to respect and reconcile the religious traditions they once thought might divide them, but to celebrate those traditions as well. Cokie and Steve host an annual Passover seder that has become a Washington tradition.

In Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families, they introduce the traditions they have developed to make Passover applicable to all religions. The book includes a guide to every element of a traditional Passover seder, Cokie’s Passover recipes, personal memories, and stories of contemporary and historical couples aiming to strike the right balance in their own interfaith marriages.

Cokie and Steve write a weekly syndicated column for USA Weekend. Together, they wrote This Day Forward, a New York Times bestseller about their own marriage and other marriages in American history. Book signing to follow.

Enjoy a festive Persian dinner and hamentaschen dessert in the land of Shushan where the story of Purim takes place. Storyteller Noa Baum will lead children in a Purim schpiel – a fun dramatization of the Megillah, Book of Esther.

Groggers and masks will be provided, and costumes are encouraged!

Time: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm
Location: 2500 Benning Rd NE
Washington, DC 20002-4806

There’s no better way to commemorate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than by engaging with your community and helping to improve DC public schools.

Join Behrend Builders of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center and the students of Spingarn STAY High School to refurbish the school building with some much needed paint, murals, and minor repairs.

Sixth & I and Turner Memorial A.M.E. Church invite you to celebrate the seventh annual MLK Shabbat service commemorating the spirit and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Musical accompaniment by Turner Memorial Choir and Rak Shalom, a University of Maryland a cappella group. Dessert reception follows the service.

Read Peter Edelman’s Keynote Address.

WAMU 88.5 is the official radio sponsor of this event.