Fair Trade Your Jewish Holidays

Shabbat – Weekly day of rest

• Use fair trade made candlesticks
• Cover your challah with a handmade fair trade made textile
• Serve fair trade certified chocolate as a way to start/end the week on a sweet note
• Decorate your Shabbat table with Fair Trade flowers

Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot – Jewish New Year and Harvest Holiday

• Serve Fair Trade honey with your apples
• Send fair trade made cards with your L’shanah Tovah greetings to friends and family
• Bake your honey cake with fair trade certified honey, sugar, coffee, and vanilla
• Decorate your sukkah with fair trade banners, textiles, and rugs

Chanukah – Celebration of Religious Freedom

• Light a menorah made by fair trade artisans from around the world
• Serve fair trade certified kosher Chanukah gelt
• Light your menorah with fair trade candles or Fair Trade  olive oil
• Decorate your home with fair trade banners
• Fry your latkes (potato pancakes) in fair trade certified olive oil
• Play with fair trade made dreidels

Tu Bishvat – Jewish New Year for the Trees

• Host a Tu B’shvat Seder focusing on the environmental benefits of fair trade;
  Use this Fair Trade Seder created by the Reconstructionist Synagogue of North Shore,
  and a How to Guide developed by the Hazon CSA of Long Island
• Use fair trade certified dried dates, almonds, and walnuts at your Tu B’shvat Seder

Purim – A holiday of reversals

• Bake your hamentashen with fair trade certified sugar, vanilla, etc.
• Give fair trade certified kosher chocolates, dried fruit and nuts in your mishloach manot (Purim gift basket)
• Deliver your mishloach manot in fair trade baskets

Passover/Pesach- Celebrating our People’s Freedom

• Place Kosher l’Pesach Fair Trade Chocolate on your Passover Seder plate and talk about child labor as a modern day form of slavery
• Read this Passover Seder Supplement to highlight the labor issues related to chocolate
• Give fair trade certified chocolate as a gift for finding the Afikomen (we’re working on finding a Kosher for Pesach fair trade chocolate bar!)
• Choose fair trade certified quinoa or rice for those who observe Sephardi Passover dietary traditions

Shavuot -Holiday Celebrating Receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai/Revelation

• Use fair trade flowers to decorate home and synagogue
• Drink fair trade coffee for Tikkun Leil Shavuot (all night study!)