Portland’s Community Sukkah

Did you know the Mittleman Jewish Community Center hosts the city’s community sukkah? A sukkah is a booth that we are commanded to live in during the holiday of Sukkot, which starts, this year, on the evening of October 9, 2022.

We are looking for volunteers to help us build the sukkah in the MJCC’s courtyard on Sunday, October 2. If you are interested in helping build the sukkah, please contact Saul Korin at skorin@oregonjcc.org.

It is customary to invite guests into our sukkah, and according to the Chabad Website:

 “Ushpizin is Aramaic for ‘guests,’ a reference to the seven supernal guests, ‘founding fathers’ of the Jewish people, who come to visit us in the sukkah (the branch-covered hut in which we eat our meals throughout the festival of Sukkot), one for each of the seven days of the festival:

Translated into English, the word ‘ushpizin’ loses some of its mystery and otherworldliness. Yet these ‘guests’ are indeed quite mysterious (at least until we learn more about them) and otherworldly (at least until we make them part of ours). We use the Aramaic term because our source of information about these mystical guests is from the Zohar, the fundamental Kabbalistic work written in that mystical language.” 

Jews from around the world invite their heroes (living or dead) to join them in the sukkah. Alive or dead, we can choose our own ushpizin and with pictures, invite their spirit to join us in this place. As this is Portland’s sukkah, we need YOUR help deciding whose pictures we should put in the sukkah. Personally, I think Damian Lillard is a good option, but who would YOU invite to the sukkah?

Click here to tell us who you would invite into the sukkah!

We hope you will join us for PIZZA IN THE HUT on October 12, 2022 at 6:00 pm.  You can register at oregonjcc.org/pizza