Olam Haba Community Quilt Showcase

Join us for a presentaion of the Olam HaBa Community Quilt from Minneapolis artist Sophia Alhadeff, Sophia Munic and collaborators. We encourage questions and conversations about how slow handwork and communal art practices hold importance in a time of urgency and crisis. This event is at Interfacing Studio, a second-story walk-up with a single bathroom, masks-required with a capacity of 40 attendees and mixed seating options- please RSVP.

Olam HaBa Community Quilt statement:

In mid October of 2024 Sophia Alhadeff and Sophia Munic met at Jewish Voice for Peace meeting and began the process of making a community quilt. This quilt is a site to bear witness to the genocide, to hold our collective grief & to dream Palestinian liberation, stitch by stitch.

Olam HaBa translates to the world to come. This quilt acts as a communal practice of envisioning the world we wish to live in and create with our communities. We invited anyone who identifies as anti-zionist to respond to the question: How is Jewish safety and Palestinian liberation inherently intertwined?

After putting out the call for quilt blocks at the end of November 2024, we received 36 blocks from the US and Canada. Quilts blocks were made at workshops in Minneapolis & Chicago as well as individually. One by one they each arrived, an act of solidarity and a small piece of building the world to come.

Many hands made this quilt. Over the course of the spring and summer, a group of antizionist artists gathered at Spill Paint Not Oil in St. Paul hosted by Donna Goodlaxson. Together, in community, we decided how the quilt would come to be - the arrangement of the blocks, the technique of assembling the pieces, the poem, the color of sashing and borders.

The quilt was completed on Thursday August 8th 2024. The Olam Haba Quilt received 4th place in the Minnesota State Fair Creative Arts Division.

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POEM

Together we are doing what we know how to do, what we can do to grieve:

each stitch is a prayer

each seam is refuting imperialism

and instead calling for liberation

steadfast

what does devotion mean when showing up to your values everyday?

i’ve often heard the phrase, it’s a marathon not a sprint.

what does it mean to sustain showing up when there is very real urgency for the palestinian people?

Ceasefire now. Ceasefire is just the beginning. Land back, from the river to the sea. We will see Palestine liberated in our lifetime.

Host or Publisher queer quilting Chi