Galilee Circus Comes to Town
from: jewishexponent.com
Greg Salisbury, Arts/Culture Editor
July 25, 2012
As anyone who has ever attended summer camp can tell you, there are times when it can get to be like a circus.
That was never more true than on July 19, when 250 campers and counselors at the Kaiserman JCC Day Camp in Wynnewood were treated to a performance by the Galilee Circus, a youth circus made up of both Jews and Arabs from the Galilee region of Israel. The circus came to the camp as part of its United States tour organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. The troupe played to numerous Delaware Valley audiences before leaving for a residency in St. Louis.
The circus is the brainchild of Rabbi Marc J. Rosenstein, the former principal of Akiba Hebrew Academy (now the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy in Bryn Mawr.) In the aftermath of the 2000 intifada, Rosenstein, the director of the Israeli Rabbinic Program of Hebrew Union College at the Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, knew that he had to do something to bridge the ever-widening gap between Jews and Arabs.
When asked why he chose the seemingly random vehicle of a circus, the 65-year-old Rosenstein says that he hit upon the idea because the circus is all about "overcoming fear, about trusting the other person implicitly. They don't have to speak the same language -- or any language. It's people from other cultures working together, it makes people smile, and it's a sport that's non-competitive -- there are no losers."
read more:
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/26316/Galilee_Circus_Comes_to_Town/
No comments:
Post a Comment