Baking Hamantashen for Save a Child's Heart

            

Joseph, Rebecca and Matthew rolling and cutting the dough

            As I am sure you must know, an important Jewish holiday, Purim, is coming up this Saturday/Sunday. Purim is the story of Ester and her uncle, Mordecai, saving many Jews from Haman, a royal advisor who sought to eliminate all the Jews in Persia. This is one of the happier holidays that we celebrate because a great tragedy was stopped before it actually happened and we celebrate by making noise with graggers, or noisemakers, when we hear Haman’s name read in synagogue. We also eat hamantashen! Hamantashen are triangle shaped pastries filled with poppy seeds, prunes, chocolate, apricots, etc. and are shaped to resemble the three-cornered hat that Haman wore.

            So, in light of the upcoming holiday, the Montréal Diller Teen Fellows Cohort decided to go to the Shaar Hashomayim to make some hamantashen with Eve Rochman, which she sold to raise money for Save a Child’s Heart , a charity based in Israel that helps children with cardiac imperfections in developing countries get the heart surgery they need to survive. The charity performs over 200 surgeries a year and is truly a worthwhile charity to support. Save a Child’s Heart is motivated by the age-old Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world – which is also one of the five pillars of Diller, and they are dedicated to the idea that every child deserves the best medical treatment available, regardless of the child's nationality, religion, colour, gender or financial situation.

Being somebody who has issues cutting straight lines, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to fare in the crafting of delicate pastries. At first we were asked to construct boxes for the hamantashen, which was easy enough; however, the real challenge was what came next: making the hamantashen. While the dough and fillings (poppy, cinnamon, chocolate and prune) were made before we had arrived, we still had to cut circles of dough, fill them and transform them into triangles before they went into the oven. While my first few turned out lopsided and flimsy, by the end I was actually making decent pastries. I can honestly say I enjoyed the experience and so did all the other fellows who were there with me, and I am happy I got to support Save a Child’s Heart because they do such great things.

Written by Joseph Wiltzer

Joseph admiring his handiwork