MELISSA SHIFf (1967-2025)
A retrospective exhibition will be announced.
Times Square Seder
Times Square Seder, Featuring the Matzah Ball Soup Kitchen
(2002) is a public art/social action event that mobilizes art in service of activism using the ritual of the Jewish Passover Seder. Conceived by Shiff as a multimedia event, it consisted of readings, performances, video projections, art installations, and a “Matzah Ball Soup Kitchen” to feed the homeless. Shiff took the Passover Haggadah’s mandate to "let all who are hungry come in and eat” as a call for social action and to a place where New York’s hungry and homeless had been most visibly banished, Times Square.
The United Nations gives Rabbi Arthur Waskow the honorific of being one of the worlds Wisdom Keepers.
Photos by Joan Roth (click on image to enlarge)
Times Square Seder was held on March 30, 2002, on the fourth night of Passover. The event took place in three distinct spaces all on the same block of 42nd Street just steps away from Times Square. Two storefront window spaces and one interior space were transformed into the Matzah Ball Soup Kitchen. The performance began in front of the first window, then continued inside this storefront window space, moved onto the street, and then to the nearby soup kitchen. Meanwhile, an interactive video installation played throughout the evening in the second storefront window. Along with sculpture and video art, the Seder featured symbolic actions performed by political and religious leaders known for their concern with social justice. The former Manhattan Borough President and director of The American Jewish World Service, Ruth Messinger, helped to officiate. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, leader of the famous Freedom Seder in the 1960s and Director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, was also a participant in the Seder performance.
In April 2004, Melissa Shiff published an article in Tikkun Magazine entitled “Times Square Seder: Happening for Homelessness”.
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Credits
Artist: Melissa Shiff
Curator: Anita Durst
Participants: Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, Cantor Mark Perlman,
Videographers: Ellen Zweig, Peter Shapiro
Sponsors: Manischewitz Matzo