Jewish community to host interfaith brunch

The 36th annual Bergen County Interfaith Brotherhood and Sisterhood Brunch will take place on Presidents Day, which falls on February 16 this year, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The featured speaker, Rabbi Allyson Zacharoff, associate director for interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, will speak on “The Creation and Creativity.”

The interfaith committee includes representatives from nine faiths: Bahai, Hindu, Islam, Jain, Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Sikh, and Unitarian Universalist. Rabbi Wallace Greene, representing the Jewish community, explained that each year a different faith group organizes the brunch, providing an opportunity to showcase elements of their beliefs and customs. This year, the Jewish community is hosting.

“The Brotherhood and Sisterhood committee is a wonderful group of people who are interested in making the world a better place by talking to each other, and we don’t discuss theological issues,” Rabbi Greene said.

Since this is the brunch’s 36th anniversary, Rabbi Greene and the Jewish brunch committee felt they should highlight the special meaning of the number 36 in Jewish tradition. Rabbi Greene explained that there is a mystical belief that every generation has 36 anonymous righteous people, the so-called lamed-vavniks, whose goodness sustains the world. Neither the rest of the world nor the lam vavniks themselves know who they are.

The brunch committee nominated 36 Jews, both historical and contemporary, to honor. Posters featuring Jewish nominees will be displayed at the brunch. “It is a very variegated list,” Rabbi Greene said. “There were a lot of other people we would like to have included.” The alphabetized list is wide-ranging and discipline-hopping and includes both the living and the dead — ranging from Bella Abzug and Isaac Asimov at the beginning to Elie Weisel and Mark Zuckerberg at the end.

Rabbi Zacharoff grew up in an interfaith family on Long Island. Her father was an Ashkenazi Jew and her mother was a Puerto Rican Catholic. She was raised in the Jewish tradition and celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah. “A lot of my peers were from interreligious families,” she said.

Rabbi Zacharoff said that she is deeply committed to multifaith dialogue and has been involved in interreligious work for her adult life.

After graduating from the College of William and Mary, Rabbi Zacharoff spent a year at Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome as a Russell Berrie fellow in interreligious studies. She also spent a year in Israel as a conflict resolution fellow at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and was an international peacemaking program fellow at the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace in Hartford, Connecticut.

Rabbi Zacharoff was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and participates in several national and international interfaith dialogues in the United States and abroad. She is affiliated with both the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. She was the rabbi at Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Summit for two years before moving to the American Jewish Committee.

In October, Rabbi Zacharoff was one of several Jewish representatives who met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican in celebration of the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the foundational document put out by the Catholic Church condemning antisemitism.

Rabbi Zacharoff noted the significance of hosting the brunch on President’s Day, highlighting America’s longstanding religious pluralism. She cited President George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue in 1790 as an affirmation of this principle. The brunch “celebrates both shared values and differences,” she said.

She chose to talk about creation and creativity because of the power of words in creating the world, and how Judaism explores that connection. Rabbi Zacharoff is amazed by the creative ways that young people can make interreligious engagement work; she feels that just as visual artists and musicians leave legacies of innovation and creation, so too can young people “using creativity in interreligious work leave a positive legacy characterized by constructive disagreement, respect for others, and profound love.”

The brunch also will feature a musical performance by the Barack Orchestra. Rabbi Greene expects about 200 participants, including local officials and clergy,

Kosher food will be available on request. Admission is $65 for adults and $40 for children under 12. Checks should be made payable to the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey. The program is supported by the Russell Berrie Foundation and assisted by the JFNNJ. For more information, call Gale at (201) 819-7297.