SUCCESS ON THE GRIDIRON — Junior Aaron Bigus was the Blue Valley North football team’s leading rusher for the 2012 season. The son of Ruth and Larry Bigus, he carried the ball a total of 47 times for 225 yards. At the year-end football banquet, Mustang Coach John McCall presented Aaron, a three-year letterman, with the Mustang Football Leadership Award.
BLITT PAINTING TO BE FEATURED IN PARIS — Rita Blitt is one of 33 international artists selected to join in the OperArtCode Paris 2012 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, which opened Tuesday and continues through Dec. 2. Blitt’s “Dancing with Beethoven” painting will be on display within the Grand Palais at the Salon des Artistes Indepéndants (Society of Independent Artists), a Salon created in 1884 from a small group of innovative artists that included Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Pisarro.
THE BEST LITTLE KLEZMER BAND IN TEXAS — Janet Price recently returned from Houston where she saw “Ketubah” at the Houston Ballet. Music was provided by The Best Little Klezmer Band in Texas. Kansas City native Marcia Plaut Sterling, and Price’s cousin, serves as the band’s director as well as plays violin and sings. When she lived in Kansas City, Sterling was the youth choir master under the auspicious of Rose Levine at Congregation Beth Shalom. She and her husband Dan Sturba founded the non-profit The Best Little Klezmer Band in Texas in 1993, which is dedicated to the presentation, preservation and revitalization of Yiddish culture through live performance. Sterling’s parents were Rudy and Blanch (Planzer) Plaut, of blessed memory, who also lived in K.C. Price said the Klezmer music at the ballet was superb.
FAIR TRADE CHANUKAH GELT — Rabbis for Human Rights–North America is partnering with Fair Trade Judaica to bring slavery-free Chanukah gelt to synagogues around the world. The gelt is kosher (Triangle K), comes in dark and milk chocolate and is child-labor free. The gelt we eat on Chanukah is a sweet reminder of the freedom our people won many years ago. In his book “Holidays, History and Halakhah,” Eliezer Segal argues that the earliest sources that mention gelt on Chanukah are about students in Europe giving gelt to their teachers, inspired by the linguistic similarities between the Hebrew word Chanukah (dedication) and the Hebrew word chinnukh (education). Divine Chocolate is co-owned by Kuapa Kokoo, a fair trade cooperative in Ghana. The organization is democratically run, and their children attend school rather than work in the fields. The gelt can be purchased at http://shop.divinechocolateusa.com.