Women Share Joy and Wisdom at ‘Ikar at the Alcove’

Ikar at the Alcove’s Winter Season Sunday finale, Simcha in Adar!, was a wonderful exchange of wisdom and enrichment and loads of fun for the women who attended.

Gitty Stolik, author of It’s Okay to Laugh, Seriously! humorously opened her talk with a terrific line about gearing up with gratitude instead of schlepping around with griefcases. From there she delved into a discussion about simcha, its intrinsic place in the Soul and the way in which it serves as a direct conduit to HaShem. Simcha, the Rebbe has said, is key to getting us over the last frontier of Golus and into the Geula Shleima!

Did you know, as Leta Lenik pointed out in her well-researched and engaging talk about Comedy and The Human Condition, that, while it takes 72 muscles to produce a frown, only 14 are needed to switch on a smile!

In his best-selling book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins, wrote about using humor and laughter to help him to recover from the painful joint disease that afflicted him.
Watching reel after reel of Groucho Marx and other comedians, he quickly discovered, brought him hours of relief after every laugh.

Indeed, bringing a smile to another person’s lips and sharing a hearty laugh truly raises a person’s spirit and well-being not to mention the one bestowing such joy!

What a contrast, Leta pointed out, to the malevolent smirking the Nazis would sport when humiliating their Jewish victims.

Charlie Chaplin, one of film’s early geniuses in caricaturing life’s inanities, surely infuriated the Nazis when he released his masterpiece The Great Dictator in 1940. Exposing the Nazis for the lunatic brutes they were, Chaplin sought to shake up the World from its foolish acquiescence to Hitler’s demands.

Chaplin’s warning is one that should have been taken to heart long ago in the State of Israel where today, against all common sense, a degenerate pack of wild beasts dictate our borders, security and sovereignty, r”l.

Still, with a mega dose of simcha buoyed by the Rebbe’s directives for true peace, no doubt we can restore sanity to the Land of Israel and by extension to the world.

On the lighter side of things, we enjoyed a fabulous culinary class with professional food stylist and chef Solange Defrancesco.

Demonstrating the art of how to peel and chop garlic, among other kinds of vegetables, and yes it really does make a difference, along with how to use an array of helpful kitchen tools, I’ve no doubt those in attendance will soon be buying themselves a good quality steel mandoline and new knives for Pesach!

Solange prepared a colorful and tasty tian dish and zucchini stir fry for us and shared the story of her adventure into the business where she has worked with celebrities like Martha Stewart. Solange is definitely on the calendar for future cooking classes at Ikar’s Spring and Summer programs.

We ended the day with a most enjoyable round of simcha dancing to help along Devorah Leah bas Yaffa Lieba’s recovery.

UP NEXT at Ikar is our Lecture and Supper event beginning with guest speaker Chana Sharfstein. Scheduled for March 8, 2022, Chana will inaugurate our Reflections and Recollections from the Post-War Period of Recovery series featuring talks by women from our community who survived the Holocaust as children or young teens.

Soup, salad and gourmet sandwiches will be served followed by Chana’s lecture and Q & A. We will also be showing Passage to Sweden, a documentary Chana helped produce that covers the incredible rescue by Sweden of thousands of Jews in the final year of the War.

Reservations for this $10 event are required by March 6th. RSVP to [email protected] or call 718-705-4206.

On March 22, 2022, Ikar at the Alcove will host Flower Essence Arts’ highly successful shidduchim workshop called Finding Our Bashert in the Flower Essence Garden.
For more information about our March events and Ikar’s Spring season beginning in May, contact Tamar Adelstein at [email protected] or call 718-705-4206.

‘Paper Alive’ has closed at The Juneberry Tree Art Gallery. Artists looking for exhibition space can also contact us at [email protected].