An upcoming town festival in northwest Baltimore is stirring up more than community spirit.

Jewish residents have mixed reactions to the 39th annual Reisterstown Festival and Parade, which coincides with Rosh Hashanah.

Scheduled for Sept. 12-13, the festival will run from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the second day.

The event features a parade marching down Main Street to Hannah More Park, food, live music and a beer garden. Fireworks are scheduled the night of Sept. 12.

Caren Leven, the executive director of Baltimore Zionist District, expressed disappointment with Reisterstown Festival organizers in a Sept. 1 post in the United Against Jew Hatred Facebook group.

“For me, if you’re going to call it a community festival, the community should actually be able to show up,” Leven wrote.

Commenters on the Reisterstown Festival’s Facebook post urged event organizers to check their calendars to avoid scheduling community events on major Jewish holidays.

“This is so inconsiderate that I’m blown away. Why in a neighborhood where there are a large number of Jews would you have a festival on two of the holiest Jewish days of the year? Shame on you.” one commenter wrote.

Reisterstown sits within the heavily Jewish northwest Baltimore metropolitan corridor. Three-quarters of the Baltimore area’s Jewish residents live in five ZIP codes in the northwest corridor, according to The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore.

“Worse representation of thought having a festival at the time of Rosh Hashanah,” another wrote.

A commenter who identified herself as Jewish disagreed: “People need to stop being angry with them because the festival that has been on the same weekend for almost 40 years is falling on Rosh Hashanah. It’s not a personal slight against anyone.”
Reisterstown Festival organizers addressed the conflict in a Facebook comment on Sept. 1.

“The Festival is lucky to be held in such a culturally diverse and inclusive community,” the organizers wrote. “We love all of our patrons and that of course includes our Jewish friends and neighbors. We wish you a happy Rosh Hashanah and a wonderful new year. We hope you have a wonderful celebration and for those of you we won’t see that weekend we hope to see you again next year at our 40th on September 11th and 12th, 2027.”

They added that the annual festival is held the first weekend after Labor Day every year, and has been for the past 39 years.

“Due to the changing nature of the holiday this has happened before and luckily, based on our research, won’t happen again until 2040,” the festival organizers said.

Pikesville resident Joanne Wigod called the scheduling “exclusionary” to the Jewish community.

“I understand that the Reisterstown Festival has historically been the weekend after Labor Day weekend,” Wigod told Baltimore Jewish Times. “However, I know that in the past, at least once or twice, it had been changed because of the High Holidays. And even if it hadn’t, I think that would have been beyond a good gesture to say, ‘We’re moving the date in order to include our Jewish friends and neighbors.’”

Leven wasn’t satisfied with the organizers’ response either.

“That is just unbelievably tone deaf,” she wrote in her post. “If you know your event is going to shut out a significant part of the community on one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, maybe ‘that’s the weekend we always use’ shouldn’t be the end of the conversation.”

Leven took to the United Against Jew Hatred Facebook group to gauge the community’s thoughts on the situation: Should the festival have changed its date to avoid falling on Rosh Hashanah or is it suitable to keep the post-Labor Day weekend date?

The responses were mixed. Some members of the group opined that the Jewish community has “bigger fish to fry” and that the timing of the festival date wasn’t made maliciously toward the observant Jewish community.

“Given the changing nature of the holiday [festival organizers] don’t have a lot of choices,” a commenter wrote.

Another commenter pointed out that had the festival pushed its date back to Sept. 19-20, it would interfere with Yom Kippur. The week after that is Sukkot, followed by Shemini Atzeret. Holding the festival during Labor Day weekend wouldn’t be feasible because many people travel out of town, a commenter noted.

American Jews can’t expect community events to cater to the Jewish calendar, another said.

“When I lived in Israel, I never had to worry about events being held on Jewish holidays. But we don’t live in Israel,” he wrote.

Wigod, who has attended the Reisterstown Festival in previous years, disagrees.

“Basically the entire Jewish population in Baltimore County cannot attend,” she said.

Editor Steve Schuster contributed to this report.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com