As a quarter-million people descend on the annual Alaska State Fair, Chabad is on hand, providing Yiddishkeit for the fairgoers for 14 hours every day.
Held every year in Palmer, Alaska, the Alaska State Fair draws visitors from across the state and many tourists as well. The fair features giant vegetable exhibits, and thousands of exhibits in categories including art, baked goods, canning, clay arts, crops, fiber and fleece, flowers, handwork and needlework, home brew, honey and bee products, livestock, photography, poultry, quilts, sewing, and woodworking. And now, they feature Chabad as well.
Local shluchim Rabbi Mendy and Chaya Greenberg, together with a group of bochurim who are studying in the Yeshiva at the Ohel, are manning a Chabad pavilion at the fair from 10:00 AM to 12:00 AM every day, offering the tens of thousands of visitors a chance to put on tefillin, receive an ARK Tzedaka box, or just speak about Yiddishkeit.
Each visitor, and especially children, are invited to drop a coin in a “Kindness generator”, where they watch how the coin spins its way down and “generates kindness”. They then each received a tzedaka box called ‘ARK’, an acronym for Acts of Routine Kindness. Thus, thousands of adults and children are introduced to the mitzvah of tzedaka, and encouraged to continue it on a regular basis.
The pavilion, which opened this week, will remain open for the entire three weeks of the fair, and thousands of visitors are expected to pass through.
“It is worthwhile to note that the pavilion at the state fair is the only one of its type in all 50 states of America,” says Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, Head Shliach to Alaska.
