Please enjoy this charming presentation of “The Overpriced Sabbath,” extracted from RUACH’s video production-in-progress, “Tales that Unite and Delight: A Jewish Story Project.”

© RUACH, Inc. 2010

This animated collaborative community video initiative, which reached its peak during the past year, is an outgrowth of two RUACH programs that were melded together:

* The 2009-2010 Visual Arts Residencies/Workshops, generously supported by the Mary Nohl Fund and the Helen Bader Foundation

* The 2009-2010 “Creative Arts in the Community” Initiative, generously supported by the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin.

RUACH worked with constituents from nine varied Milwaukee Jewish community agencies to create depictions of nine Jewish-themed stories. These images are being brought to life through animation and other video techniques as part of this multimedia production, musical elements for which have yet to be integrated.

RUACH has employed the visual arts as a great common denominator in its innovative workshops and residencies, and the production builds on an important, successful lesson RUACH has learned from those experiences: Art can be used as a tool for uniting Milwaukee’s Jewish community and beyond, even if not all participants are working in the same room at the same time.

As the culminating DVD production creatively fuses diverse agencies’ work, the entire premise for this project, then, was community collaboration, albeit in an unconventional way.

The artwork and narration for “The Overpriced Sabbath” was created and contributed by residents of Chai Point, a division of the Jewish Home and Care Center, under the supervision of artist-educator Sally Duback.

Production of the video has been led by Pessa Kayla Finn and Hillary Griffin Richman, with contributions from Sally Duback and Karen Reiffman.