NFRS

Passover
2026-04-01 - 2026-04-09

Walk The Fork
2026-03-29 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
NFRS family members and friends are welcome to join a walk at one of our East End scenic locations at 1:00 pm. Optional meet up for brunch beforehand at 11:00 am. Details to be sent via email and please RSVP if you plan on attending.

Flicks and Friends
2026-03-14 17:00 - 19:00 | In Person
Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel along with Editor-in-Chief John Walcot, played by Rob Reiner, and the legendary war correspondent Joe Galloway investigate the U.S. government’s claims of Iraq stockpiling weapons of mass destruction following the 9/11 attacks.
While most news agencies accept the Bush Administration‘s rationale for military action against Saddam Hussein, the Knight Ridder team uncovers mounting evidence suggesting the administration’s motives may be deceptive and that such weapons do not exist. The story follows the reporters’ pursuit of the truth highlighting their efforts to challenge the prevailing narrative.
“Shock and Awe” feels more timely now than it might have a been a month ago.
The location for this event will be sent via email. Potluck dinner will be served.
More details to come via email.

Board Meeting
2026-03-08 09:30 - 11:30, 2026-02-08 09:30 - 11:30, 2026-01-11 09:30 - 11:30, 2025-12-14 09:30 - 11:30 | Via Zoom

Purim
2026-03-02 - 2026-03-03

New Member Mix and Mingle
2026-02-25 17:00 - 19:00 | Suhru & Lieb Vineyards, 13050 Oregon Road, Cutchogue, 11935
New members, join us at Suhru & Lieb Vineyards! Please RSVP by February 13 to northforkreformsynagogue@gmail.com or text Barbara Sheryll 631-921-3354. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Kay's Book Club
2026-02-21 11:00 - 12:30 | Via Zoom
The selection for February is the 2001 Pulitzer Prize Winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 novel about two Jewish cousins, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, who create comic books in New York City during the Golden Age of comics, set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust.
The story follows their creative partnership as they develop characters like The Escapist, blending their personal lives, dreams, and fears with their superhero creations, spanning from Brooklyn to Prague and the Arctic.
“The depth of Chabon’s thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.” (NYT)

ZOOM: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83650424999?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 836 5042 4999
Passcode: [REDACTED]

President's Day
2026-02-16

Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
2026-01-19

SAVE THE DATE - FEBRUARY 7TH - FLICKS AND FRIENDS
2026-01-13
SAVE THE DATE
A TRIBUTE TO ROB REINER
Flicks and Friends
Saturday, February 7 at 5pm
Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel along with Editor-in-Chief John Walcot, played by Rob Reiner, and the legendary war correspondent Joe Galloway investigate the U.S. government’s claims of Iraq stockpiling weapons of mass destruction following the 9/11 attacks.
While most news agencies accept the Bush Administration‘s rationale for military action against Saddam Hussein, the Knight Ridder team uncovers mounting evidence suggesting the administration’s motives may be deceptive and that such weapons do not exist. The story follows the reporters’ pursuit of the truth highlighting their efforts to challenge the prevailing narrative.
“Shock and Awe” feels more timely now than it might have a been a month ago.
As in the past, we will meet at a member’s house. Potluck dinner will be served.
More details to be sent via email.

New Year's Day
2026-01-01

Christmas
2025-12-25

Hanukkah 2025
2025-12-14 - 2025-12-22

Menorah Lighting
2025-12-06 15:30 - 16:00 | Cutchogue Village Green, 27320 Main Road, Cutchogue, NY, 11935, United States
Join us as our member, Barbara Sheryll, will be lighting the menorah on the Cutchogue Village Green.
In addition, the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council & Museums presents their annual Christmas Tree lighting on the Village Green, this year with a Victorian-Dickens theme. Singers in Dickens’ era costumes will be roaming the grounds and caroling, with treats in the garage, followed by the Mattituck High School select chorus singing carols around the tree before the lighting. A visit from Santa is expected and there will be tours of the Old House and the Christmas pop-up in the Carriage House gift shop.

Thanksgiving
2025-11-27

Kay's Book Club
2025-11-15 11:00 - 12:30 | Via Zoom
NOTICE: CHANGE IN DATE
If you’re unable to find this book, there may be an extra copy available. Contact us at northforkreformsynagogue@gmail.com.
This session’s book is Home Ground by Lynn Freed.

First published January 1, 1986. Format 288 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 1987 by Penguin Books
ISBN 9780140089486 (ISBN10: 0140089489)
The adventures of the Franks are seen through the eyes of the family’s youngest daughter, Ruth, who gives a powerful perspective on her family and on South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.
Story Line Press, 1999 – Fiction – 273 pages
This coming-of-age story was selected as one of the Notable Books of the Year (1986) by The New York Times Book Review. In its review earlier that year, The Times said Freed’s guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa. The Washington Post remarked “Here’s a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true … that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny.”

NOTICE: CHANGE IN DATE
Lynn Freed is a South African novelist and academic.
She came to the U.S. first as a foreign exchange student, and then went on to receive an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. She taught at Bennington College, Saint Mary’s College of California, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, the University of Montana, and the University of Texas in Austin. Ms Freed’s short fiction, memoirs and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s,[1] The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Tin House, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Mirabella, House Beautiful, House & Garden, and Vogue Magazine. Her work is widely translated and anthologized, and has been listed in Best American Short Stories and in The O. Henry Award Prize Stories.
Ms. Freed is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Northern California.

I asked Gail Kriegel, our member, to say a few words about Lynn Freed who died this past May. These are her comments:
“Lynn was a dear friend of mine. She was terrifically funny! She had something to say, in her elegant South African accent, about everything and everybody. She mostly wrote about her very unusual family – she was always miming her mother and father so we all had a very clear portrait of what her eccentric parents were like. Because they were theatre people, and she knew everything about the theatre, she was enormous help to me because at the time, I was going into the premiere production of my play ON THE HOME FRONT . She accompanied me many times to the theater for pre production business meetings and helped me work out script problems and my relationships with the producers and director. I attribute the very great success the play had there to her devoted help and friendship. Lynn was a beautiful human being – smarter than anyone I’ve known, a brilliant wit and very, very funny.”

NOTE: Our local Suffolk County Libraries do not stock this. It is available on online book sellers such as Thriftbooks, Abe Books etc.

Zoom instructions sent via email.

Kay's Book Club
2025-09-20 11:00 - 12:30 | Via Zoom
The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
The Director is a visionary novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to return to his homeland to create propaganda films for the German Reich.

An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

A Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club Pick

“Nothing short of brilliant.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A surpassingly gifted storyteller” – The New York Times

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84708963788?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 847 0896 3788
Passcode: [REDACTED]

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Notice of Annual Meeting 2025
2025-08-17 10:00 - 11:30 | Peconic Lane Recreation Center, 970 Peconic Lane, Peconic, NY, 11958, United States
We are looking forward to seeing you at the Annual Meeting of the North Fork Reform Synagogue. We will elect new officers for 2-year terms and a trustee for a 3-year term. We will have reports on the past year’s activities and discuss plans for the future. Bring your ideas for the coming year.
Breakfast will be catered by Main Road Biscuit.

Please review the officer and trustee slate prior to the meeting. Please click here for the slate of Officers and Trustees.

If you are attending in person, please RSVP by August 9th to margery.auerbach51@gmail.com and we will see you at the meeting.
If you are not attending, please return the proxy form via email or complete it online no later than August 15th. You can access the form here.
Please reach out to Margery with questions at margery.auerbach51@gmail.com.

AGENDA
Welcome – Geri Armine-Klein
State of the Synagogue – Geri Armine-Klein
Nominating Committee – Ken Sonnenfeld
Financial Report – Wendy Friedman-Kolsin
High Holidays/Rabbi – Ellen Zimmerman
Membership Committee – Barbara Sheryll
Program Committee – Barbara Sheryll
Foodie Tour – Ellen Zimmerman
To add to the agenda, please contact Geri Armine-Klein at geriarmineklein@gmail.com.

Kay's Book Club
2025-07-26 11:00 - 12:30 | Via Zoom
JUDAS By Amos Oz
Translated by Nicholas de Lange
305 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Review by Emily Barton
In a 2005 interview, George Saunders remarked that “all moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns.” He argued for specificity over vagueness — for its ability to make us feel compassion, and for thoughtful fiction’s ability to frame a complex political argument through aesthetic means.
The Israeli author Amos Oz has been publishing fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s. Outspoken about politics, he has always supported a two-state solution in the Middle East, regardless of any given Israeli government’s policies. American readers may be most familiar with his 2004 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which tells Oz’s coming-of-age story against the backdrop of his mother’s suicide and the state of Israel’s founding. (Natalie Portman’s movie version was released this summer.) Oz’s new novel, “Judas,” rendered in sumptuous English by his longtime translator, Nicholas de Lange, similarly exemplifies Saunders’s notion of a relationship between the moral and the aesthetic.
“Judas” concerns Shmuel Ash, a student in Jerusalem who leaves his studies in the winter of 1959-60 “because his relationship had broken down, because his research had stalled and especially because his father’s finances had collapsed.” Oz describes Shmuel’s character and physiognomy in loving, if not always flattering, detail — descriptions that weave with subtle variation through the novel. He walks with his “bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared around the next corner.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/books/review/judas-amos-oz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.N08.9-EB.9mOAjydRt_VX&smid=url-share
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/books/amos-oz-on-his-novel-judas-which-challenges-views-of-a-traitor.html?smid=url-share

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87889082532?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 878 8908 2532
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/keJRcywzfI

150 Years of Jewish Community on Long Island - Presented by the Jewish Historical Society of Long Island
2025-06-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Suffolk County Historical Society Museum, 300 West Main Street, Riverhead, New York, 11901
Opening Reception

Celebrate 150 years of Jewish communal gathering in Nassau and Suffolk counties by visiting this stunning exhibit of historic Torahs, books, documents, and artifacts collected from around Long Island and presented by the Jewish Historical Society of Long Island.
Light refreshments will be served.
The opening reception is free, but please RSVP to (631) 727-2881
The exhibit is in the Weathervane Gallery from June 8th through November 2025.

Bat Mitzvah
2025-05-31 10:00 - 12:00 | NFRS Synagogue, 27245 Main Road, Cutchogue, 11935, United States
Heidi will be called to the bimah as a Bat Mitzvah.
Those of you who are unable to attend in person may attend via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88402464283?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 884 0246 4283
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Mitzvah Project
Heidi committed to the mitzvah of helping others. Heidi observed kids at school who were struggling, treated poorly by their peers, and may have problems at home or at school. At school, Heidi advocated for an education program about healthy relationships. Heidi brought educators in from a local nonprofit, The Retreat, whose mission is to provide safety, shelter and support for victims of domestic abuse and to break the cycle of family violence. The educators led a multi-day workshop, “Respect in Relationships: Setting and Respecting Boundaries”, during health class for all junior high students. The workshop was well-received by students.

To help The Retreat continue their important work, Heidi is raising money for the organization. To make a donation, visit https://allagainstabuse.org/ways-to-give/donate/
When donating Please write “Heidi Erwin” in the field, Honoree Full Name.

Kay's Book Club
2025-05-17 10:30 - 12:00 | Via Zoom
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War by Matti Friedman

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
“A top-notch account of this under-analyzed war, persuasively arguing that it heralded a new style of combat in the Middle East, though no one knew it at the time.” (NYT)
Zoom: Kay’s Book Club
Meeting ID: 831 2499 2920
Passcode: [REDACTED]

The Yellow Candle Project Holocaust Remembrance
2025-04-23 19:30 - 21:00 | Via Zoom
The Yom HaShoah Yellow Candle Project encourages us to pause and reflect on the Holocaust and the six million who were lost. To that end, Congregation Tifereth Israel is holding a Holocaust Remembrance service on Zoom and you can use a regular yahrzeit candle if you would like to participate. Donations to Tifereth are appreciated and will be used to underwrite bus transportation for the 10th grade world history class at Greenport High School to visit a Holocaust museum.

For more information, call 631-477-0232. You can make a charitable contribution online at tiferethisraelgreenport.org or by mail.

If you wish to attend, please go into your Zoom account, click on “Join” and enter the following information when prompted:

Zoom meeting ID: 230 626 645 and Passcode: [REDACTED]

Bat Mitzvah
2025-04-05 10:00 - 12:00 | NFRS Synagogue, 27245 Main Road, Cutchogue, 11935, United States
Celebrate Orly’s Bat Mitzvah.

Kay's Book Club
2025-03-15 11:00 - 12:30 | Via Zoom
The Night Watchman is a novel by Louise Erdrich.
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
“In this era of modern termination assailing us, the book feels like a call to arms. A call to humanity”. (NYT)
In 2021, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Due to local Jamesport events on 3/15/25 causing traffic snarls, we will only have this session of Kay’s Book Club online.

Zoom: Kay’s Book Club
Meeting ID: 838 6542 7759
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Meet The Author: The Apothecary's Wife
2025-03-01 15:00 - 16:30 | Floyd Memorial Library, 539 1st Street, Greenport, New York, 11944
Join Karen Bloom Gevirtz (daughter of our members, Susan and Steven Bloom) as she discusses her book, The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became A Commodity. This book was named by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best non-fiction books of 2024, “A lively medical, scientific, and economic history.”

The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should see a physician. And yet between 1650 and 1750, doctors became the trusted medical authority and women, who had treated the ill and injured for centuries, became the unreliable, even dangerous caregiver. The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity explains how this incredible reversal took place, transforming medicine from household goods into something to be bought and sold – and sometimes priced out of reach.

Karen Bloom Gevirtz writes about the history of science. After 30 years as an English professor, she left the academy and publishes for a general audience. The author of four books and the co-editor of one, she is internationally recognized for her research and has been interviewed by the BBC, Talk Radio Europe, the Wall Street Journal, and Huffpost. She can be found at www.karenbloomgevirtz.com.

Walk The Fork
2025-02-16 12:00 - 14:00 | In Person
Join NFRS members and friends for a walk at one of our East End scenic locations. Location and details to follow via email.
