Tisch PDX

In April we received a grant from the UpStart Emergent Support Fund (ESF)! The ESF is a responsive grant designed to provide rapid, flexible financial support to UpStart Network ventures navigating today's evolving landscape. This funding comes at a meaningful moment and will directly support our Cultural Shift initiative and our growing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) work — helping us continue to build a more inclusive and dynamic community. We are grateful to UpStart for their partnership and belief in the work we are doing!

We're thrilled to announce that TischPDX's Emerging Jewish Leadership Institute (EJLI) is relaunching!

Our curriculum and design team is hard at work, drawing on valuable insights gathered from past surveys to shape an even stronger program. Applications will be opening later this Spring — so stay tuned!

Programs like EJLI are only possible with your support. If you believe in developing the next generation of Jewish leaders, please consider making a gift today. https://tischpdx.org/donate

Our 2025 Annual Report is Here!

We're proud to share our latest Annual Report, highlighting the impact, growth, and stories from this past year. Take a look at all that we've accomplished together.
Check it out: https://tischpdx.org/annualreport/

Spring has arrived—bursting with blooms. This time of year always reminds me why I live in Portland: the gray lifts and becomes a soft backdrop for thousands of white, pink, and rose-colored blossoms.

Here at TischPDX, we’re feeling that sense of blooming too. We’re continuing to iterate on new projects and possibilities. This last month, we hosted our 2nd Annual Jews of Color/Latinx Seder (you can read more below), while also working toward the relaunch of our 6th cohort of the Emerging Jewish Leadership Incubator. At the same time, we’re exploring how arts and culture can play a deeper role in our programming, inspired by our friends at Bechol Lashon and their Hyphen project.

Purim and Passover have come and gone, and we are now in the Omer—the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot. This is a spiritually potent time, an invitation to slow down and notice each day. As we enter the fourth week of the Omer, we encounter netzach—strength, endurance.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand endurance as an essential spiritual trait in non profit and justice work. It’s what allows us not to give up, to keep the work going at TischPDX and in our lives and to continue navigating these challenging times with knowledge that the blooms will come again.

Eleyna Fugman, TischPDX founder

Check out our bi-monthly newsletter to find out more about what we're upto in this next season!

This year at our 2nd Annual JOC & Latinx Passover Seder, 21 people sat together — across three generations, many backgrounds, and many expressions of Jewish life — to celebrate joy, hold memory, and carry the story forward. 🕯️

L'dor v'dor. From generation to generation.

With kids at their own table and elders at ours, we felt the full arc of that tradition in the room. And as we opened the door — for Elijah, who denounced slavery in his own time, and for Miriam, our foremother of song, strength, and courage — we were reminded of what this gathering is really about.

Elijah and Miriam together are symbols of hope, freedom, and joy. They call us toward radical hospitality: the belief that no one is shut off from the rest of humanity, and that all people deserve to walk forward with dignity and pride into the making of their future.

That is the seder we are building. That is the world we are reaching toward. 🌿

This year at our 2nd Annual JOC & Latinx Passover Seder, 21 people from many walks of life came together — across generations, traditions, and backgrounds — to celebrate Jewish joy, sit with historic trauma, and affirm our collective resilience.

One of our favorite moments? The Four Questions.

At the Passover seder, the story of our liberation is told through questions and answers — and by tradition, it's the youngest person at the table who leads. This isn't an accident. The rabbis who shaped the seder wanted to make sure everyone belonged in the telling. Questions, after all, are at the very heart of Jewish life.

This year we honored the full breadth of our diaspora by including the Four Questions in four languages: Ladino, Yiddish, Spanish, and Amharic. Because our voices, our histories, and our languages all belong at this table. 🌍

Check out the pages from our Haggadah with the translations of the four questions in these languages.

This year at our 2nd Annual JOC & Latinx Passover Seder, 21 people from many backgrounds and traditions gathered to celebrate Jewish joy, honor historic trauma, and embody current resilience — weaving together rituals, song, and story from across our diverse community. 🍽️

And the food? It was a whole conversation in itself.

Our table was a beautiful reflection of who we are — featuring dishes from a range of cuisines, including Mexican gefilte fish and so much more. Each bite was an invitation to talk about flavor, memory, and ancestral roots. Food, it turns out, is one of the most powerful ways we carry our lineage forward.

The seeds of this seder were planted when our co-founder Sara came across Chef Pati Jinich's Mexican Passover recipes, shared by a Mexican-Puerto Rican friend. That spark of recognition — that Jewish food is so much more than the Ashkenazi-centered table many of us grew up with — became the foundation of what TischPDX has built here. A seder that makes room for all of us. 🌿

We hope you'll bring a bit of our Pesach Reader to your tables tonight. 🌿 This new 36-page collection from SVARA traces the spiraling journeys we take across a lifetime, inviting us to recall being children, to remember things that have not yet happened, and to meet the future as something already in formation.

Explore powerful writings from SVARA teachers and students alike: Emet / Ari. L Monts, Rabbi Becky Silverstein, Rabbi Benay Lappe, Binya Kóatz, Chava Shapiro, and Rabbi Lauren Tuchman. A digital booklet and a screen-reader version are now available in the SVARA library.

✨PESACH READER: https://svara.org/library

ID: The cover page of SVARA's Pesach Reader, which bears green text over an image of the crest of a tree-covered hilltop. The text reads, "We Have Been Here Before: A SVARA Reader for Pesach."