When Devorah Canter visited Manny’s in June after yet another incident of antisemitic vandalism at the cafe, she decided that this area in San Francisco’s Mission District could use a pick-me-up.
She had the perfect spot for it: the ceramics studio where she works just around the corner.
Ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel that started the ongoing war, Canter and Peter Altman, her friend and fellow ceramicist, have thought about hosting a Judaica workshop at RedBrick Ceramic Studio, a nonprofit artist collective where Canter is manager and director. The incident at Manny’s spurred them to act.
On Aug. 31, Altman taught 15 participants how to handcraft Judaica pieces including mezuzahs, seder plates and ornamental honey jars for Rosh Hashanah, all without using a pottery wheel. With enough interest, Canter hopes to repeat the workshop.
“We’re going through a hard time, us Jewish people, and we wanted to create a community where we can maybe forget about the war,” Altman said. “I thought, if we could just do some art and clear our minds and have something positive, what better way is there than making ceramic Judaica together?”
RedBrick opened in 2008, and Canter started visiting there regularly a year later. Over time, she became more involved in the daily operations and became manager in 2021.
RedBrick began offering monthly beginner-friendly workshops as part of its efforts to recover from the pandemic when it lost a significant number of members, as well as the fees they paid to rent space to work and store materials.
Those workshops consistently fill up each month, Canter said. So Canter and Altman saw the potential of hosting one focusing solely on Judaica.
Altman himself has been a regular RedBrick member for the past four years. After working in Israel advocacy for more than two decades in the Bay Area — including as director of the then-Jewish Community Federation’s Israel Project — he retired during the Covid-19 pandemic knowing he wanted to find an artistic outlet. He previously dabbled in Hebrew poetry and in oil painting, but eventually he landed on ceramics.
Now Altman considers ceramics to be his primary mode of creative expression, as well as an avenue for finding community and an opportunity to make cultural artifacts that he hopes will turn into pieces of family history.
“One thing I like about ceramics is that you get to leave it behind. People who knew you, the younger generation, will have something to remember you by,” Altman said. “I really like the fact that it’s something I can pass down that’s meaningful to someone.”
One workshop participant, Nicole Freeling, created a seder plate.
“We have a lot of our own little family traditions around Passover, so it seemed like … having a homemade plate was particularly apt,” said Freeling, who runs a college consulting business in Berkeley. “It was really cool to see all the different types of Judaica that really lend themselves very well to hand-building and ceramics.”
Freeling became interested in ceramics years ago. After the Judaica workshop, she said, she “totally caught the bug again.”