Request:
The TAS Purim Carnival Planning Committee is looking for a few more members. Expectations for committee members include attending four or five planning meetings with other TAS and TRZ committee members between now and March 24th. The Purim Carnival is a joint event by TAS and TRZ and will be held on Sunday, March 24, 2019 at Temple Ramat Zion. If you are interested in helping to plan this fun event please contact Rabbi Dalia Samansky at TAS.

Upcoming Events:
We are so excited about our February meeting!  On Feb 21, bring one of your treasures to our meeting, and Lori Tucci, a highly experienced appraiser and owner of Estate Sale Angels, will look at our items and appraise their value. It will be a lot of fun to find out what our special items are worth and tell their stories! As always, the $5 admission is waived for Sisterhood members and Friends of Sisterhood.

Thinking about ancient treasures, here is the story of Jodi Magness, and how good fortune can sometimes have problematic side-effects. Jodi Magness is an archaeology superstar who has published on excavations in Jerusalem, Qumran and Masada. Dr. Magness has participated on 20 different excavations in Israel and Greece. In 2012, Magness’s team on the Huqoq excavation uncovered stunningly preserved mosaics in a fifth-century C.E. (late Roman) synagogue. This one-of-a-kind find has completely changed Magness’s life for better and for worse.

“These discoveries have complicated my life in unexpected ways, some of them good, and some not-so-good,” Dr. Magness reflected in her Archaeological Views column A Lucky Discovery Complicates Life in the March/April 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
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“On the good side: The mosaics are truly spectacular and exciting and have attracted much media attention and interest. On the not-so-good side: The excavations have become a much longer-term project than I originally planned, and the cost of uncovering and conserving the mosaics has far exceeded our original budget, so that I must scramble to find new sources of funding each season."

​I hope to see you at this Thursday's Sisterhood meeting. Our guest speaker, Rabbi Keara Stein, is fabulous and you will not regret coming to hear her speak on Interfaith families. As usual, the meeting starts at 7pm, and costs $5, although the fee is waived for Sisterhood members and Friends of Sisterhood.

While you are checking your calendar to make sure you are free Thursday, why not mark down our February events?  Thursday, February 21 is our antiques show and Saturday, February 23 is the ever popular Bingotini. 

To RSVP for Bingotini, send a check payable to Sisterhood care of Sue Cohen, 22349 James Alan Circle, Chatsworth, 91311. Bingotini is $30 for RSVPs before Feb 17 and $36 at the door.

Remember that, if you want to know what Sisterhood events are on our calendar, you can always go to tassisterhood.org. Click on "Events & Programs" on the menu bar or dropdown, and then "Upcoming Events".

Did you know that Bingo was named and popularized by a Jewish immigrant from Poland? When the game reached North America in 1929, it became known as "beano". It was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, renamed it "bingo" after he overheard someone accidentally yell "bingo" instead of "beano." 

Lowe hired a Columbia University math professor, Carl Leffler, to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards. They were developed so there would be fewer non-repeating number groups and conflicts when more than one person got Bingo at the same time.

Not only did Lowe's company produce bingo cards, he also developed and marketed the game Yahtzee, for which he bought the rights from a couple who played it on their yacht. His company was sold to Milton Bradley in 1973 for $26 million.

​New Year's celebrations are over and the kids are back to school. Now on to a new year full of great Sisterhood events! Our first event of the year, "An Interfaith Conversation" will be on Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 7pm in the Social Hall, and will feature a guest speaker, Rabbi Keara Stein, Director of InterfaithFamily/LA. So mark your calendar - you won't want to miss this. Click here to see the flyer.

In the spirit of the upcoming interfaith event, this week we're featuring Carolivia Herron, an American writer of children's and adult literature, a scholar of African-American Judaica and a convert to Judaism. Carolivia was born Carol Olivia Herron to Oscar Smith Herron and Georgia Carol Johnson, in Washington, D.C. on July 22, 1947. Herron converted to Judaism in adulthood, and later discovered that she had Jewish roots.
Herron has a BA in English from Eastern University in Pennsylvania. She earned an MA in English from Villanova University in 1973, and an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Herron spent a year of postdoctoral research at Brandeis University studying African-American Jews. She has taught literature at many institutions, including Harvard University, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, and Marien N'Guabi University in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. Carolivia is a founding member of "Jews of African Descent".
Herron's writings include: her debut novel, Thereafter Johnnie, a semi-autobiographical portrayal of African-American life; her critically acclaimed but controversial picture book Nappy Hair, a call-and-response story based on her own experiences as a child; a children's book, Always an Olivia which recounts the coming of Herron's Jewish ancestors from Tripoli, Libya, to the Georgia Sea Islands in the Americas: and her latest book, Peacesong DC, a fictionalized autobiography.