In collaboration with the Moorestown Jewish Association (MJA) and MooreUnity, the Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown hosted a Purim celebration earlier this month.
“It’s such a wonderful way to use the arts to share stories, and to engage people,” said Kahra Buss, executive director for Perkins. “There’s a lot of different components to the day that are very important to the story, and also become part of the experience in this event.”
According to jewishvirtuallibrary.org, Purim commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in Persia were saved from extermination. The story told in the Bible’s Book of Esther celebrates heroes Esther, a young Jewish woman living in Persia, and her cousin Mordecai, who raised Esther as though she were his daughter. The villain of the story is Haman, an arrogant, egotistical advisor to the king.
It is customary to hold carnival-like celebrations on Purim, to perform plays and parodies and to hold beauty contests. Perkins’ event, held for the second consecutive year, included craft making; a Purim play; and tri-cornered pastries known as Hamantaschen.
“I think the one thing that we were all so really happy about and really excited about was the multigenerational aspect of the event,” Buss noted of last year’s celebration. “We had three or four generations of families coming and attending and participating in all the activities, and it’s such a nice opportunity to see the multigenerational and the intergenerational interactions, and the passing down of traditions and stories and participating in the activities.”
Brooke Mailhiot, president of the MJA, and Karen Reiner, president of MooreUnity, noted the importance of all three organizations coming together to host a celebration for the Jewish holiday, one open to all of Moorestown’s residents.
“I think one of the wonderful things about collaboration with these two organizations that can help us commemorate Purim is really to stress the survival of the Jewish people, and that Purim reminds us that we have the courage to stand up to injustice,” Mailhiot said.
“ … I think the resources that both the Perkins Center and MooreUnity create really connects with that, meaning the inclusivity, and the positive community involvement in bringing people around the globe to learn and expose themselves to new things.”
“From my perspective, from a MooreUnity perspective, our goal is to celebrate holidays and bring awareness and understanding to people about holidays that they may not be familiar with, and beliefs and faiths and cultural traditions that might be new to them,” Reiner observed.
“I think when we celebrate these kinds of holidays together, we understand each other more and we become more connected to one another.”
According to Buss, Perkins and MooreUnity started working together in 2019 to bring more diverse community programming to Moorestown. Both the MJA and MooreUnity approached Perkins last year with the idea of the Purim celebration.
“The Perkins Center’s mission is to provide arts experiences that enrich lives and encourage lifelong learning,” she said, “and what better way to do that than to partner with other community organizations and help share knowledge, help create community connections, help engage people in areas where they may not know a lot, but are encouraged to learn.”
Buss looks forward to more Perkins’ events with the MJA and MooreUnity.
“We may be the art experts, but we’re not the experts in everything, so we want to be supportive and contributory, but with the community’s guidance,” she explained. “It’s not our show to run; it’s the opportunity to support others in the work that they’re doing.”
