Tending to the Ashkenazi Jewish Ancestral Pain-Body on Yom Hashoah 5783

Community Chanting, Prayer, and Listening-Sharing on Holocaust Memorial Day, Tuesday 4/18/2023 7pm ET, Online

Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, 2014, Photo by the author

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust memorial day, gives rise to a particular pain, felt individually, but shared, collectively, between those who identify as Jewish Ashkenazi or having a jewish Ashkenazi experience, and subtle in others.

Musical Prayer.
Listening Practice. Inquiry.

• What is a collective pain-body? What is the Jewish one?

• How do we experience grief? Yearning? Our ancestors?

• What does it mean to bear witness?

• What would it mean, and take, to release, nurture, heal, be with our collective pain-body? 

• How do we relate to other ancestral heritages and their pain-body?

• How to open to a greater intimacy with ourselves, those around us, this universe?

• How do we not indulge in nostalgia, stay trapped in trauma responses, or dissociate? 

• How to orient towards a consciousness of the Ancestral:Emergent :

  Deep Time. No Time.

  Deep Space. No Space.

  Ancestors. Still Consciousness.

The Ancestral:Emergent is informed by Rami Avraham Efal’s experience with collective trauma, bearing witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Israel-Palestine, with the Lakota Native Americans and in Bosnia-Herzegovina as the former executive director of Zen Peacemakers and attendant to Zen teacher Bernie Glassman; Undergoing monastic Zen Training; Studying cross-cultural peacebuilding with Dr. Paula Green and Jewish mysticism with her brother visionary Rabbi Art Green; Offering pastoral chaplaincy at a trauma 1 regional hospital; bearing witness with Andes indigenous and participating in entheogenic plant medicine ceremonies; by his rabbinic and cantorial studies at Aleph Ordination Program, being a Jewish prayer leader and visual artist. Rami is Israel-born descendent of Polish and Hungarian holocaust survivors; he served in the IDF as a criminal investigator of soldiers, has organized dialogues of Israelis and Palestinians in Brooklyn, NY and is ongoingly supporting peacebuilding in Israel and Palestine. Rami is the creator of Ancestral:Emergent, Tohu Wisdom School of Jewish Nonduality, Nazir: Temple of One, and Hebrew Peacemaker.

Who is welcome?

- If you Identify as Jewish or as one who has a Jewish experience, you are welcome and belong here.

- If you identify as not-Jewish, you are most welcome and also belong here. The presence of those outside of the particular collective pain-body, or a related pain-body, is paramount to engaging with ancestral tendrils. This space will be a ritual period for a particular pain-body, Jewish. While all are welcome, the ratio of Jewish and not-Jewish participants will be kept in mind, to allow space for a majority of Jewish participants. Please accept that registration may be capped on a first-come-first-serve basis, and that you may be asked to miss it.

Self-identification during the time of the event itself is voluntary. Your answer here will be kept confidential. No one will be pressed to identify publicly.

Suggested donation: $25, via Venmo: @Rami-Efal (use 9556 if prompted for confirmation) or using PayPal here. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Learn what your financial contribution supports.

Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, Poland, 2014, Photo by the author