Grief During the Days of Awe

A Program Co-sponsored by the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center and Congregation Shir Hadash.

The High Holidays are a time for families and friends to reconnect around the table and for congregations to come together in the sanctuary reciting powerful prayers about both life and death. But when someone close to you has died the empty seat left behind is a glaring reminder of loss and these days can be particularly painful moments of grief.

This hour-and-a-half workshop on Wednesday, September 12 at 7 pm, will focus on holiday-related grief experiences and on tools for coping and finding comfort during the Days of Awe. There will be an opportunity to share our stories and learn from each other as well as from Jewish traditions around mourning and healing.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla is on the staff of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center where he provides spiritual care to those coping with illness, grieving or dying, and where he also co-directs the Kol HaNeshama Jewish volunteer hospice program which offers end of life care in collaboration with The Jewish Home of San Francisco. Rabbi Kukla's articles appear in numerous magazines and anthologies and he is a regular guest lecturer on issues of spiritual care, illness and diversity across the country. He also has served as adjunct faculty in Pastoral Care at the Graduate Theological Union of UC Berkeley. Elliot trained in chaplaincy at the University of California at San Francisco and was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in 2006.