A sukkah party at Christie Pits connected a group of Jews who work in social services in Toronto

Ola Skudlarska has worked for years in homeless shelters, and has had lots of conversations about faith at work—but rarely have those discussions been with other Jews.

So, they decided to throw a sukkah party in a downtown Toronto park, to help fellow staffers from shelters, soup kitchens and hospices connect with each other in a festive context.

Held on the fifth day of Sukkot, the event started with a land acknowledgment workshop led by Hope Adler, who is Jewish and Indigenous. But when a participant chimed in and said that Palestinians should be added to the introductory statement, Adler quickly shut the suggestion down—saying the acknowledgement is about Indigenous peoples and their experience in North America. To hijack the Indigenous narrative smacked of colonialism, Adler added.

Then there was food and music, a short Kabbalat Shabbat service—because it was Friday afternoon—and lots of shmoozing, too.

And, because it was held on the site of a 1933 riot pitting Jews and their allies against Nazi sympathizers, it seemed an appropriate place for political organizing on the side.

“I want the Jewish community to do more, I want us to not let people fall through those cracks,” Skudlarska said, speaking from inside the sukkah that had been erected in the Christie Pits park that day.

“There’s people who feel they can’t access Jewish services because they don’t realize it’s open to everybody, because they don’t feel like they’re Jewish enough because they feel like they’re not middle class, because they feel like they’re not not white, because they feel like they can’t walk into the JCC because there’s a guard sitting at the front desk, because they’re not allowed to eat their lunch sitting on the front steps, and I want us to be doing better than that.”

The event was called Lovely Tents, after a verse recited daily in Jewish prayers, first uttered by a man trying to curse Israel.

“The Ma Tovu prayer is the only prayer in the Jewish liturgy that’s told by a non-Jew and it’s told by somebody who was once an enemy. I wanted this event to be a space to talk about that… and to talk together more and to connect,” Skudlarska told the group.

For Emily Zimmerman, who has spent years working in community kitchens and helping low-income people access food, the event was a welcome chance to connect with old friends.

“I’m just in love with meeting lots of other people, who are of mixed backgrounds, people whose Judaism translates into the idea that building community is not optional,” she said.

Many members of her extended family work in social services and she says, “I really thought, possibly falsely, that’s what Jews do, because that’s what the ones I’m related to do.” But she rarely finds herself working alongside other Jews.

Zimmerman says she is open about her Jewish identity at work, and says clients have often disclosed to her that they too are Jewish, but ask her not to share the information, because they are worried for their own safety.

“I know that when I am present, it makes a safe space for Jews who are nervous, as well as frankly, for people of other minority religions.”

Zimmerman said she draws on her experience of celebrating Shabbat the way her extended family did, as a “healing ritual.” But for people who have been in prison, hospital or foster care, communal meals often are a negative memory, she said.

“Communal meals were a thing that messed with their sense of food as a necessity, as a luxury, as a pleasure. One of my main jobs as a host was to reintroduce the idea that eating together was a good thing.”

Adriana Tugg, a resident of Moishe House, helped build the sukkah used for the day’s event.  

Tugg, who until recently was a nurse at a hospice for homeless people, said they met few other Jews at work. Once, a meeting at the hospice started with a study of the New Testament, until Tugg objected.

“I’ve had to develop my own spiritual resiliency and figure out a framework for myself, so I don’t burn out,” Tugg said. “For me, that comes from Judaism, and doing my own independent learning about end-of-life views of Judaism.”

Skudlarska, a participant in the Miles Nadal JCC’s Queer Incubator—where she planned the program—watched with pleasure as conversations bubbled around her. She hopes that the sukkah party is the first of many events that bring together Jews, as well as Jewish agencies, that are on the front lines of anti-poverty work.  

“In Jewish spaces I was having really having really wonderful conversations about social justice and really wonderful conversations about meaningful work and the Jewish role in building a new world… but I was finding I was missing that piece of doing that concrete, frontline, messy, tangible, ugly work,” they said. “I was finding a gap and this project comes out of wanting to bridge that gap.”