JANUARY

• More than 300 guests fill the Performing Arts Center at SUNY Purchase on Jan. 25 for an elegant gala honoring Rabbi Mitchell M. Hurvitz for his 25 years as spiritual leader of Temple Sholom in Greenwich.

MARCH

• The Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, in collaboration with Madison residents Bob and Amy Stefanowski, create “Masks for Heroes,” a grassroots, volunteer effort to deliver surgical masks to hospitals, nursing home residents and caregivers, medical personnel and first responders, in over 125 towns throughout Connecticut. More than 500,000 masks are given out. 

• In an effort led by the Jewish Federations Association of Connecticut (JFACT), the Connecticut state legislature approves $5 million in state bonding to allow religious organizations to seek a competitive state grant to help them protect against terrorist attacks and hate crimes.

• French Cleaners, a Jewish-owned family business founded in 1911 in West Hartford, embarks on a mission to make masks for those battling COVID-19 on the frontlines.

• Israel’s Young Emissaries who serve in Jewish communities across the state, strengthening Connecticut’s ties with the Jewish state, are forced to return home as the pandemic spreads through the U.S. and Israel. Later, plans to bring a new group of emissaries to Connecticut in the fall are also cancelled.

• The Young Israel of West Hartford was scheduled to celebrate the Orthodox synagogue’s 50th anniversary with a gala dinner to be held at Tumble Brook Country Club, but the event was cancelled as the pandemic spread, and the special evening was instead held virtually at a later date.

• Trinity College Hillel and the Trinity’s Women and Gender Resource Action  Center [WGRAC] are named recipients of the Trinity College Most Innovative Program of the Year Award for their co-sponsorship of a week of International Women’s Day events, with guest chef/entrepreneur Naseba Alkesh, a Syrian Druze woman from Israel’s Golan Heights. 

APRIL

• News of shots fired at the Westville Synagogue had New Haven’s Jewish community concerned, until it was learned that the bullets weren’t bullets at all. They came from a BB gun and the act wasn’t one of antisemitism.

• Anne Norman-Schiff, who is completing a Ph.D. in religious studies at Yale, joins the professional staff of Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) as youth and family programming director.

• Three Jewish groups team up to launch a $10 million fund to provide no-interest loans to Jewish communities around the world that are struggling due the COVID-19 crisis.

• Bi-Cultural Hebrew Academy junior Ben Marcus is among a select group of tens from across the country chosen to participate in the prestigious Yale University Discovery to Cure High School Internship Program. Unfortunately, the program is cancelled owing to the COVID-19 crisis.

• Elizabeth Rose assumes her new role as executive director of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford — just in time for the pandemic. “My first job was really to cancel everything we had planned for the spring, but then we started to think about what we could do,” she says.

MAY

• Owing to the dangers of COVID-19 behind bars, Rabbi Daniel Greer, convicted last fall of sexually assaulting a teen at his New Haven yeshiva is temporarily moved from prison to house arrest.

• West Hartford native Dore Gold, former Israel Ambassador to the United Nations, is named a recipient of the 2020 Sylvan Adams Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize, presented to Anglo-olim (immigrants to Israel from English-speaking countries) for their outstanding contributions to the Jewish state.

• Camp Laurelwood is among dozens of Jewish overnight camps nationwide selected to receive a matching grant from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which has committed up to $10 million to the “All Together Now” matching grant program.

• In her debut novel The Yellow Bird Sings, Weston native Jennifer Rosner writes about a mother and child hiding from the Nazis during World War II.

• Close to 250 teens take part in the BBYO Connecticut Valley Region’s first virtual Spring Convention, which had teens taking part in annual rituals and traditions and engaging with their peers in new and creative ways.

• In an effort to aid first responders and medical personnel dealing with the pandemic, high school students in the New England Jewish Academy’s (NEJA) Curtis Robinson Center (CRC) for Business and Innovation create disposable face shields using clear binder covers, weather-stripping and ribbon. While the West Hartford students work hard at home on their face shields, NEJA science teacher Zach Towne, who is head of the CRC creates reusable face shields using the CRC’s 3D printers and laser cutters. 

JUNE

• Hebrew Senior Care opens the doors to its newly expanded behavioral health hospital, specializing in the care and treatment of those experiencing mental health issues.

• Jonathan L. Green who, with his father Samuel Green, is a funeral director at Abraham L. Green & Son Funeral Home in Fairfield, is elected as an alternate member of the Executive Committee of the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association.

• Gideon Reiter of Woodbridge is among a select group of 26 11th-graders from all across North America chosen to make up the 34th cohort of The Bronfman Fellowship, a year-long experience of study and conversation centered around pluralism, social responsibility and Jewish texts.

• Teen participants in JTConnect’s Teen Leadership and Philanthropy Initiative (TLPI) wrap up their year by awarding three grants totaling $3,800 to local Jewish organizations to help them respond to the COVID-19 crisis. 

• Edina Oestreicher is named the new executive director of UConn Hillel. A UConn alumni, Osestreicher previously served as vice president of student affairs and dean of students at the University of Bridgeport.

JULY

• UJA-JCC Greenwich launches “Dignity Grows,” a project created by the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford that supplies bags of toiletries, including menstrual products, to women in need.

• Bi-Cultural Hebrew Academy in Stamford launches the Center for Community Learning, an initiative that aims “to establish Stamford as an educational center for Modern Orthodoxy and a resource for community members to increase the level of scholarship and learning across a broad spectrum of topics relevant to the Jewish world.”

• A swastika discovered spray painted on the sidewalk outside the Jewish Federation and JCC of Greater New Haven, comes on the heels of an act of vandalism at a New Haven church. 

AUGUST

• Fifty years after Miriam Schreiber of West Hartford survived the horrors of the Holocaust, the West Hartford woman realizes her life-long dream to become a high school graduate — thanks to students at New England Jewish Academy (NEJA).

• When author Daphne Geismar presented sketches from her grandfather’s Holocaust journal at a virtual Voice of Hope meeting, hackers drew swastikas on the screen and a voice told the group of second-generation survivors, “Ha ha, the Holocaust never happened.”. Over the past several months, virtual events hosted by a number of Connecticut synagogues and Jewish organizations experienced similar incidents.

SEPTEMBER

• It is discovered that New Haven and state officials have green-lighted up to $900,000 in tax breaks for businesses that donate to nonprofit organizations controlled by imprisoned Rabbi Daniel Greer — organizations Greer has been accused of using to funnel money to himself and to avoid paying over $20 million to a former student he sexually abused.

OCTOBER

• Residents of a New Haven neighborhood with sizable Black and Orthodox Jewish populations confront police officials about rising crime — some of it violent —in the area.

• “Dignity Grows,” a project launched by the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford’s Women’s Philanthropy, that aims at empowering women in need by providing them with essential hygiene supplies, branches out nationwide, with the help of the Jewish Federation of North America.

• Three cantors from Connecticut — Deborah Katchko-Gray of Congregation Shir Shalom in Ridgefield, Luis Cattan of The Conservative Synagogue in Westport, and Sandy Bernstein of Temple Sholom in Greenwich — are among 100 cantors and Black ministers to release a solidarity music video to benefit a Black music school in Pittsburgh. 

• Alan Lazowski of Hartford is honored by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the “What You Do Matters” 2020 New York Tribute virtual event. 

• Through their COVID-19 Response/Maimonides Fund, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and Jewish Foundation of Greater New Haven distribute $281,600 in emergency grants to local Jewish organizations and synagogues, helping them to provide critical aid to families and individuals in need.

NOVEMBER

• Abel Caterers, a second-generation kosher caterer in New Haven falls victim to COVID-19 and, after 45 years in business, is forced to shut its doors. Abel was the last kosher meat caterer in the area.

• Sharon Reisman Conway, coordinator of the Israeli Southern New England Consortium’s (SNEC) Young Emissary program, announced her retirement as head of the program.

• Camp Laurelwood, Connecticut’s only overnight Jewish camp, is selected to participate in the inaugural cohort of JFAM, a new initiative of the Foundation for Jewish Camps (FJC) that provides overnight camps with financial and programmatic support to launch or expand their family camp offerings to provide Jewish experiences for families with young children.

• Three separate antisemitic incidents occur in the month of October on the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut residential complex. When the school’s administration fails to condemn, nor address the antisemitic acts, students — both Jewish and non-Jewish — take action.

Main Photo: Medical personnel and first responders show off the protective masks they received from Masks for Heroes, a joint initiative of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and Bob & Amy Stefanowski.