“If we don’t show them how we take their song to heart, they will have no reason to sing,” said Rabbi Allen Bennett of Alameda’s Temple Israel.
Some 70 people defied rainy weather to attend the third annual Berkeley Richmond JCC AIDS event Nov. 21. This year the BRJCC added a Resource Fair, where at least a dozen East Bay AIDS support groups distributed information. Barbara Roscoe, the BRJCC’s cultural arts events coordinator, organized the event, and Claire Rothenberg was program assistant.
It was truly an evening of song. Avni, an East Bay musician, turned Hanna Tiferet Siegel’s “El Na Refana La” into a medley with her own composition, “Help to Heal the World.”
“We’re going to help to heal the world,” sang the children, “Going to make it a better place to be/For our children, for each family/And for every living thing.”
Marcia Perlstein, director of the East Bay Volunteer Therapist AIDS Project, received an award for her years of AIDS activism. Perlstein said she had taken her father’s motto, “I can drive anything on wheels,” as a metaphor for her life.
Perlstein, also director of The Alternative Family Project of San Francisco, said her days were tiring, but she found ample reward. “You have soul moments of such deep energy that you know why you’re on this earth.”
Singer Hali Hammer, another East Bay musician, followed with a song she had written in memory of a friend who died of AIDS. The song spoke of how Jamie, a Vietnam veteran, turned from despair to activism after being infected with HIV. In the final verse, Hammer acknowledged the gift of his friendship.
“Everybody in this room has a story of why they’re here,” said Avi Rose, the HIV Service Manager of the Tri-City Health Center in Fremont.
Rose, who started his AIDS work in Los Angeles in 1985, said the staging of such an AIDS event at a JCC marked great progress.
In 1985, Rose said, he’d been looking for places to hold an AIDS support group, and approached a JCC. He was told that he could hold group meetings at the center as long as there were no signs advertising its true nature. Rose called the offer unacceptable.
A community candlelighting ceremony followed, in which audience members lit candles on stage in honor of their loved ones. As they approached the stage, some of the participants announced the names of those they were honoring.
Bennett then led a Kaddish, calling this prayer for mourning “the ultimate form of Jewish protest.” Given that death is never mentioned, he said, it is “that prayer in which…we express the chutzpah that it takes to praise God in the face of [death].”
The evening concluded with a healing service. Led by Alaiya Aguilar and Paula Kimbro of Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El, audience members stood in the light of the candles and blessed one another.
It seemed fitting to round out an evening called “From Commemoration to Action” with this, the most simple and beautiful of actions.