Shoreline Jewish Festival Aug. 1
By Cindy Mindell

GUILFORD – Chabad of the Shoreline will host its fifth annual Shoreline Jewish Festival, featuring bands, vendors, children’s activities, and kosher concessions, on Sunday, Aug. 1, 12 noon – 6 p.m., on the Guilford Green.

“The festival celebrates Jewish life and living,” says Rabbi Yossi Yaffe, director of Chabad of the Shoreline. “People of all ages and backgrounds enjoy the music, food, and entertainment, and have come to regard it as a Shoreline summer tradition.”
This year’s musical lineup features Pey Dalid, The What’s Up Band, the Klezmenschen, the Third Temple Band, and the Robert Rogers Puppet Company.
Pey Dalid blends roots, rock, and reggae with traditional Jewish music to create a unique sound. The band’s upbeat and funky melodies, sung both in English and Hebrew, create an energy that gets the audience up on its feet.
The Stamford-based What’s Up Band is known for its “Jewish-American Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Lead singer Jeff Richter, otherwise known as Bobby DooWah, is one a popular children’s entertainer in the tri-state area. The What’s Up Band strives to inspire and unite Jewish communities with songs of peace and hope.
The Third Temple Band creates what leader Richard Gans calls “musical prayer.” The young musicians, students at the Makom Hebrew High School of Greater New Haven, play original compositions, adaptations to traditional liturgy, nigunnim (wordless melodies), and Hebrew chants. Special guest performer Mike Michaels will join on guitar, vocals, and harmonica.
The Robert Rogers Puppet Company performs stories from Jewish tradition, holidays, and history.
Back for a second year is The Klezmenschen, a freylekhe, or spirited, big band from Eastern Connecticut. Led by Roz Etra, the group of brass, strings, and woodwinds plays lively traditional Yiddish and Israeli folk melodies.
Etra, a Norwich native, has taught music in the Colchester school system for more than 35 years. She has played piano and accordion since childhood, performing “for every audience and at every synagogue in eastern Connecticut,” she says.
Etra also volunteers her talents at many civic and charity groups across the state, among them soup kitchens, Girl Scouts, Rotary, and Hadassah.
Over the years, musicians would approach Etra, asking about starting a band. “We are people, ‘menschen,’ from the entire eastern Connecticut area – Norwich, New London, Waterford, Mystic, Groton – so we became known as the ‘Klezmenschen,'” she says.
All band members have day jobs, but they share a love of music and Yiddishkeit, Etra says. The band includes a humanities professor, a marine scientist, a rabbi, an attorney, a dry cleaner, and a few engineers and healthcare professionals.
Faye Ringel, a retired professor of humanities at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Groton, researches Yiddish folklore. She and Etra have sung and played the Yiddish songs they learned from their mothers.
“Love of the sounds of Klezmer brings us together, including the music of the state of Israel as well as the shtetls of Eastern Europe,” says Etra. “It’s Jewish soul music.”-
Vendors include Israeli and local artists, selling a variety of Judaica, jewelry, artwork, and unique Israeli products, as well as books, videos, and games of Jewish interest for both children and adults. Children’s activities include moonbounces and a variety of themed arts-and-crafts projects, and shofar-making presentations, with opportunities to make a shofar for the High Holidays. Admission to the festival is free.
For more information: www.jewishoreline.org

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