EJC Klezmer Jam

The people have spoken and what they've asked for is a Klezmer jam at Eastside Jewish Commons! Let's have one on a Sunday afternoon. Bring your instruments, sheet music, heart and soul, and don't worry about ability--this is a (facilitated) jam for all. We'll settle in and play for a couple of hours. Once you sign up, materials from the other jams will be sent to you and perhaps even new material! If you have a song to share, please bring it! Also if you play an instrument that is non-concert, i.e. Bb, you'll have to be ready to transpose or make your own versions (don't worry if you don't know what this means; it's mainly for clarinet and trumpet players who read sheet music). 

Feel free to eat here (maybe it will start to become a Klezmer brunch), just no pork or shellfish. N.B. this is not a show, so while you might have a family member or two with you this is really not a place to listen to music but rather it’s a place to participate.

Ages. Free, but please consider making a donation at checkout. Register Here

Please join us for a poetry reading in celebration of the publication of the chapbooks: Other Dances, David Rutiezer, Handtype Press, Squares and Rebels Series 2025.

The Book of Fire, Carter McKenzie, above/ ground press, 2024.

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Free/All Ages Registration RequestedRegistration Requested

Enjoy our free monthly concert series with top Portland musicians! Pack a lunch or stop by one of the many pods at NE 24th and Glisan, bring your food in (no pork or shellfish please) and come and hear the music! Small concerts that are semi-acoustic and always enlivening. All are welcome. What better thing is there to do on a Friday afternoon?!

This time we're joined by the untamed and inimitable Jet Black Pearl, who comes from the port of Amsterdam and spent many years in the south of France before settling in Portland in 2014. She has performed on more than a thousand stages all over the world. Jet is a creator of alternative worlds filled with surreal humor and wry observations. Intelligently zany, her songs are a mad hatter's European party with a funky attitude. With her loop station, she records grooves and layers of flute, vocal percussion and harmonies while squeezing one hot accordion.

FREE. No RSVP needed. Learn more at jetblackpearl.com. Check her out on OPB Art Beat (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZcuJpUFNE&feature=youtu.be

MINDFUL COLLAGE
Join us for an afternoon of creative exploration

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring collage more deeply or discovering it for the first time. We will work with a wide assortment of colored and textured art papers, scraps of paintings, old book pages, and personal items you choose to add. Collage allows for spontaneous and layered work that can be beautiful, personally meaningful, fun, and easy to do.

I provide cues to help us focus and get started and materials for inspiration. I also share ideas about my process, examples of collage styles and design concepts to help form your pieces.

$65; most materials included, Register Here

What previous students shared…
“The vibe you created helped keep my inevitable self-judgment at bay.”
“Wonderful support and sharing of work and ideas”
“Great, inspiring atmosphere!”

Char Breshgold has been a working and exhibiting artist for 40 years. She paints, often from photos, using her art to tell stories. She incorporates collage in handmade books and multi-layered paintings.

Char is a longtime meditator who finds awareness of her breath to be helpful in creating art. She was a member of The Girl Artists, a collaborative group whose records have recently been acquired by The Smithsonian Archive of American Art. She is currently at work on a graphic memoir in paintings and stories about the AIDS crisis years. Her first published hybrid writing and painting pieces were in Prism, International last fall. 

Join us as EJC celebrates its 4th birthday with a South American brunch and and an appearance by Pink Martini’s China Forbes plus a special surprise performance!

Featuring captivating music, delicious food, and yummy mimosas in an intimate setting, EJC Unplugged is unlike any gala you've ever been to. Just ask anyone who came to last year's celebration!

All ages; limited seating.  Dress: Casual and Joyful! Purchase Gala tickets here

Childcare is also available for $18 (+ service charge) via our ticketing website.

If you would like to purchase a discounted table of 8 for $800 please email howieb@ejcpdx.org

We can't wait to see you!

TICKET REGISTRATION HERE

Nu to Nigun: A Musical Chassidic Workshop 

First timers and tzadikim welcome. Learn Chassidic history and stories of the Great Masters alongside their transformative and uplifting musical tradition. Each workshop session will focus on a particular Chassidic master or theme, learning text alongside singing. The first session will focus on the Ba'al Shem Tov and specific themes in his teachings that relate to making your daily life a bit more magical. You do not have to be a good singer! You just have to have a soul and some curiosity. 
Free/All Ages

Register Here

Who can attend?

PDX Nigun Circle is open to all! No Jew is too young, old, religious or secular to attend. While the art of nigun was started by and is kept alive by Hasidim, all can find strength and meaning through the practice. Most importantly, you do not need to consider yourself a good singer, let alone a singer at all! The nigun is an act of vocalizing the needs of the soul, so quality is not a factor in having a meaningful experience.

Is it free to attend?

Yes! Donations are accepted and appreciated to compensate for kosher snack procurement and space rental costs.

Will there be others?

Yes! This is a monthly gathering. Follow @pdxnigun circle on Instagram for updates, or get in touch via email: aidenkent13@gmail.com.

a poetry reading in celebration of i have wrestled with the way clouds weep by Judy Nahum   

Readings by:

Judy Nahum
Ahuva S. Zaslavsky
Daniela Naomi Molnar

Free/All Ages, Registration Required

Judy Nahum lives and writes in Portland, OR. Her poems have been published in The Muleskinner Journal, Yes, Poetry, and Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, among others. I have wrestled with the way clouds weep is her first chapbook.
ahuva s. zaslavsky lives and works in Portland, Oregon. she is a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, printing, sculpture, and writing. Her art explores the connections between space, memory, and trauma, focusing on how people and places influence one another. She investigates themes of displacement, belonging, and power dynamics, while also examining the cyclical nature of creation and destruction, and the potential for transformation.
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her paintings are created with pigments she has made from plants, bones, stones, rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the pigments and paintings; the practices overlap and influence each other, creating new ecologies. Her debut book CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her next book PROTOCOLS: An Erasure will be published in June 2025 by Ayin Press.Registration Required

Part of The Portland Jewish Music Festival!

All aboard!! Join with some of Portland’s finest musicians in an exciting exploration of klezmer and Yiddish song, Romanian and Hungarian fiddle virtuosity, mystical Hasidic chant, raucous songs of drunken exuberance in many languages, and much more!
Carpathian: Our repertoire draws from the Yiddish- and Hungarian-speaking world of our grandparents, with echoes of Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and elsewhere.
Pacific: We live in Oregon in the early 21st century. We play what we hear.
Express: More direct than the Local.

All Ages/$22 Tickets HereTickets Here

About Yankl Falk

Jack (Yankl) Falk is best known for his years as singer/clarinetist with the Budapest-based Di Naye Kapelye, with whom he recorded three albums of Jewish roots music from the Carpathians. Falk’s instrumental and vocal repertoire draws from the Yiddish- and Hungarian-speaking world of his childhood, offering musical sustenance for the truly bizarre times in which we now find ourselves.

Part of The Portland Jewish Music Festival!

Saturday night Klez with internationally renowned violinist Jake Shulman-Ment performing with oudist and guitarist Yoshie Fruchter. Seattle based duo Brivele opens.

All Ages/ $22 Tickets Here

About Jake Shulman-Ment
Brooklyn-based Jake Shulman-Ment is among the most highly regarded klezmer musicians performing today. He tours and records internationally as a soloist, and with Midwood, Daniel Kahn, Joey Weisenberg, Abigale Reisman, Pete Rushefsky, and many others. Past collaborators have included The Painted Bird, Di Naye Kapelye, The Brothers Nazaroff, Frank London, Sanda Weigl, Adrian Receanu, Duncan Sheik, Francesca Ter-Berg, Laurel Premo, Ali Dineen, Michael Alpert, Fleytmuzik, MetroFolk, and Romashka.

Jake performs tonight with Yoshie Fruchter. Yoshie Fruchter is a guitar, bass and oud player. Fruchter is notable for his work in composing and interpreting Jewish music, and has forged new directions with his performance, regardless of genre. His current project, Sandcatchers, in which he plays oud and is joined by lap steel player Myk Freedman and Erik Friedlander on cello, explores the sounds of the Middle East combined with the American South.

Brivele is a Seattle-based duo who braid together Yiddish song, anti-fascist and labor balladry, folk-punk, and contemporary rabble-rousing in stirring vocal harmony. Brivele is touring in support of their forthcoming album, “Khaveyrim Zayt Greyt,” which will be released on May 1, 2025 through Borscht Beat records.

In Yiddish, Brivele (בריוועלע) means "little letter." Like letters, songs travel — through time and over borders. They pick up dirt, aromas, fingerprints. They are sent to lovers, they foment revolution, they get stolen and censored, burned and salvaged, sewn into our clothes.

Brivele is Maia Brown and Stefanie Brendler, who journey into the archives of Yiddish anti-fascist musical tradition, bringing together anti-authoritarian satire, mournful remembrances, and the disguised political commentary in folk ditties and theater classics. These songs are a correspondence: ancestors' voices speaking clearly and uncompromisingly, sometimes sweetly, to the present moment.

The Magid Ensemble: Join us! – for a musical crankie storytelling adventure titled ‘Shterna and the Lost Voice’ – a new folktale by A.C. Weaver that brings together mythical stories of Elyahu Hanovi with traditional motifs of Yiddish folklore. Drawing inspiration from S. Ansky’s ethnographies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the turn of the 20th century, 'Shterna and the Lost Voice' follows the quest of a young woman from the realms of the dead to the celestial gardens of the immortal – all to restore her friend's lost voice. Our narrator guides listeners on Shterna’s epic adventure, accompanied by live original klezmer music, all while the narrative unfolds through a papercut crankie. This dynamic performance is geared towards audiences of all ages!

$22/All Ages Tickets HereTickets Here

Shterna and the Lost Voice is the debut theatrical project of the Magid Ensemble, transporting audiences into the rich world of Yiddish folklore. Developed through rigorous research on Eastern-European Jewish folklore, this immersive storytelling production follows Shterna on an epic hero’s journey, through the living world, the underworld, and the immortal world, in order to retrieve the lost voice of her friend. Narration unfolds alongside a stunning papercut crankie (a long scroll wound onto two spools that illustrates the story as it unwinds) and is accompanied by a live original klezmer music score. Shterna and the Lost Voice is a highly engaging 50-minute storytelling performance suitable for audiences of all ages!

Shterna and the Lost Voice is presented by The Magid Ensemble (magid, meaning “storyteller” in Yiddish) – a new collaboration featuring award-winning klezmer musicians and composers Mattias Kaufmann, Raffi Boden, and Rachel Leader, Yiddishist and storyteller Weaver, and visual artist Kiah Raymond. The Magid Ensemble explores the interplay of sound, story, light, and shadow to create expressive and immersive storytelling landscapes.

Part of The Portland Jewish Music Festival!

Join congregation P’nai Or's Kabbalat Shabbat Service along with Portland Nigun Circle to celebrate Shabbat with chanting, singing, live music, movement, meditation, storytelling and more. 

Free/All Ages Register HereRegister Here

P’nai Or (Faces of Light) celebrates the Divine reflected in everyone – LGBTQ+, interfaith, Jews by birth, Jews by choice. We are a vibrant, egalitarian congregation founded in 1991 by Rabbi Aryeh Hirschfield, z"l. Our inspiration comes from Torah, Kabbalah, the teachings of the Chassidic masters, and Jewish and non-Jewish contemporary sources.

PDX Nigun Circle is a monthly gathering where we sing, socialize, and learn the beautiful history of Jewish mysticism as communicated through the art of the nigun. Participants are encouraged to bring a nigun to share if they know one.

PDX Nigun Circle is open to all! No Jew is too young, old, religious or secular to attend. While the art of nigun was started by and is kept alive by Hasidim, all can find strength and meaning through the practice. Most importantly, you do not need to consider yourself a good singer, let alone a singer at all! The nigun is an act of vocalizing the needs of the soul, so quality is not a factor in having a meaningful experience.

What is a nigun?

A nigun is a primarily wordless melody. Emerging out of the 18th century Ashkenazic mystical revival movement called Ḥasidut (Chassidism), nigunim (plural) have been passed down to us today through a long oral tradition. Nigunim are vocal outpourings of all the ranges of human emotion: joy, suffering, piety and yearning, and have carried the spirit of the Jewish people though generations of exile.

The nigun has the potential to uplift and transform the individual and communal experience of spirituality and the Jewish tradition. Nigunim are said to carry and evoke the spirit of their composers. While a nigun might emerge as a cry from the lonely heart, when we gather in song, we cultivate a sense of unity and belonging that feels ecstatic, vulnerable, nourishing and decidedly rebellious.

Part of The Portland Jewish Music Festival!

Join us for a noon concert with world-class cellist Diane Chaplin as she plays a solo concert spanning her repertoire of music by Jewish composers, Klezmer and Jewish concert music and more!

Free/All Ages Register here

About Diane Chaplin

Diane Chaplin is a world-class cellist and nurturing music educator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She appears often as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber music artist, and tours around the US as a featured member of the Portland Cello Project. For the 2024-25 season she is the Cello Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara; she also has a large class of private cello students, both in-person and on zoom, and teaches students all over the world through the Cello Refinery. Since the spring of 2020, Diane has been performing monthly livestream concerts of solo cello music, and has learned more than 250 pieces of solo repertoire during this time.

Sklamberg Lurje Judelman Trio, Songs of Resilience

Kickoff to week two The Portland Jewish Music Festival!

Featuring co-founder of The Klezmatics, Lorin Sklamberg (NYC), darling of the international Yiddish scene, Sasha Lurje (Riga/Berlin), and renowned globe-trotting fiddler Craig Judelman (Seattle/Berlin) this new transatlantic collaboration is thrilled to present their latest program, Songs of Resilience. After decades spent immersed in the Yiddish culture of Ashkenazi Jews and the cultures of their European neighbors, this band presents Yiddish culture at the highest level, ranging from folk to art song, as well as theater, spiritual and dance music

All Ages/ $22 Tickets here

Indie Lens Pop-Up, presented by ITVS, INDEPENDENT LENS, EJC and OPB wrap up its 2024-25 season of amazing documentaries with "Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer's"

"Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s" is an intimate portrayal of three families confronting the unique challenges of Alzheimer’s and how this progressive neurodegenerative disease transforms roles and relationships. Whether it's a partner caring for a loved one or an adult child shifting into being their parent's caregiver, these stories show how families evolve when a loved one is diagnosed.

EJC is wheelchair accessible and the screening is open-captioned. The talkback following the screening will be ASL interpreted.

Watch the trailer here

All ages, free but please register here, as seating is limited.

Community Partner: Alzheimer’s Association