Rabbi Yehuda Weg is looking forward to the High Holidays. As executive director of Tulsa-based Chabad-Lubavitch of Oklahoma, he maintains year-round communication and involvement with Jews in both his immediate area and those scattered throughout the state. But for the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur after that, everyone comes together like family to celebrate the holidays with familiar faces. They trek in from towns like Bartlesville and Poteau, and even from nearby Missouri, to participate in traditional services and meals.

“We make arrangements for people who would like to stay for the entire holiday, so that they can sleep at Chabad or nearby hotels,” said Weg. “In addition to the regular community that we serve over here, we also make a point of reaching out and providing opportunities for people that are otherwise isolated.”

They fill the hospitality rooms and hotels within walking distance, hold services at the Jewish Community Center and go out to visit those who can’t make it to services to make sure they get to hear the blasts from the shofar, a ram’s horn always blown on Rosh Hashanah.

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“For some reason we usually manage to bump into Jews along the way,” said Weg, adding that it’s not necessarily an everyday occurrence where he’s from. “Somehow every year it happens. We find someone on the street and blow the shofar for them.”

Weg is also eager for this year’s new beginnings, which for his community include a post-holiday cycle of adult education classes and a Hebrew school that started last week – the community’s first new group of students in recent memory. For their first class, the children learned a song about apples and honey, a traditional dish eaten on Rosh Hashanah as portending a sweet new year, and about how the shofar, which represents the cry of the soul to repent, is the most important New Year custom.

The children’s smiles will add so much to the community’s holiday experience, added Weg. “Somebody’s got to make noise” at services,” he said.

(To locate High Holiday services and associated programs in your area, click here to access a worldwide directory of events maintained by the Judaism website Chabad.org. For more information about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, including inspiring videos and informative guides, click here.)

Hope and Meaning

Over in Buffalo Grove, Ill., students from the local Chabad Hebrew School will come to High Holiday services with special prayer books they made themselves, said Rabbi Shmuel Katz. In addition, his community has already gotten into the spirit of the approaching New Year, having gotten together for a Friday night dinner under the stars that drew about 100 people.

Over the coming days leading up to Rosh Hashanah – a two-day holiday that begins this year the night of Sept. 28 – Katz will be running a shofar factory that will teach Hebrew school kids, their parents, and the Jewish community at large about how the ram’s horn is fashioned and used. Participants will even get to make their own shofar.

“When they go to shul on Rosh Hashana, the shofar is not going to be something very abstract,” said Katz. “They’ll feel connected to it.”

Rabbi Yossi Shemtov, of the Chabad House of Toledo, Ohio, will be welcoming a Detroit cantor who will lead the High Holidays prayer services, as well as a new couple who will spend the coming year in Toledo conducting programs for the Jewish community.

Last week, Shemtov brought in a beekeeper to show Jewish kids in the area how honey is made. They left with jars full of honey and heads full of holiday knowledge, he said.

This week, the rabbi will hold a spiritual gathering full of songs and stories to help people get into the proper mindset for Rosh Hashanah, and on the holiday itself, he’ll run a learner’s service to help people understand the meaning behind the cantor’s melodies and the Hebrew prayers.

“The focus is to bring hope and meaning to the holiday,” he said. “We try to inspire our people to be more hopeful for the next year to ensure that it will be a sweet year.”