Past Recipients
2024-2025 Award
Dr. Heather Kaplan
Dr. Heather Kaplan, Sculpture and Makerspace Practices and Problem Solving in a Jewish Elementary School. Proposal: A research study on the intersections of makerspace curriculum and sculpture for elementary learners at the Cherry Hill School in El Paso, TX. The proposed purchase of materials and the hiring of undergraduate research assistants will not only support the research study but also the education of Jewish children in the areas of art and engineering. It contends that these art and engineering practices promise to last longer than the life of the study and will make lasting impact on the school and the community it serves through the mindsets and dispositions learned in the practices and in a community space that includes teachers, students, researchers and undergraduate research assistants.
DR. Melissa Melpignano
Dr. Melissa Melpignano, Choreographing Holocaust Remembrance: The Process for the El Paso Performance What Once Was… Proposal: Funds awarded will support the historical and creative research for the artistic project to be performed for the El Paso Jewish Community at the Plaza Theatre on January 27, 2025, for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The movement-based play revolves around the themes of remembrance, resilience, and hope. Dance scholar Rebecca Rossen, Associate Professor in Performance as Public Practice in the Dept. of Theatre and Dance at UT Austin, and author of the forthcoming Moving Memories: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Dance (OUP) will be a guest speaker for this project
Julio Barrera Moreno
Julio Barrera Moreno, Creation Workshop Based on Archival Material. Proposal: An artistic creation project with the Jewish community of El Paso, to review, catalog and reflect on the personal and collective archives of the community, in a desire to meet and reinterpret the memories that are hidden behind the archives and, from this review, to create new memory devices. Based on the collection and cataloguing of the archive, workshops will be held to understand its forms and creative possibilities in order to generate artistic works, such as poems and essays, photographic series, collages, drawings or audiovisual experiences. The creative experiences will be grouped and catalogued in a foldable booklet, printed and digital, where interested participants can exhibit the results of their process as a compilation of collective and individual memory.
Crystal Najera
Crystal Najera, Sharing the Benefits of Jewish Somatic Practices. Proposal: A research on Jewish-Somatic literature and practices to include the established method of Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984), and the groundbreaking work of Rabbi Diane Elliot, choreographer and dance scholar Cia Sautter, Ohad Naharin of the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company, Annick de Souzenelle. Further sources of Jewish corporeal knowledge are available at the UTEP Library and Special Collections as well as at the Temple Mount Sinai’s library. Based on this research, Crystal Najera will craft a series of 60-minute practical Somatics workshops for the Jewish community of El Paso.
2022-2023 Award
Chavah Schwartz
Chavah Schwartz is already making important contributions to the field of Jewish Studies. She has been teaching Introduction to Judaism since 2015 for the Religious Studies program. Chavah was awarded the Wechter Fund so she can re-establish the Jewish Studies program at the University of Texas at El Paso. The program was paused after its former director, Dr. Ezra Cappell, accepted a position at the College of Charleston in 2018. Chavah will coordinate the program starting in the Fall 2023 with the aim to re-establish the minor in Jewish Studies at UTEP. In addition, she will use the Wechter fund to complete her dissertation and attain a doctoral degree in Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. As she stated in her proposal, her work seeks to “capture a sense of community that has been overlooked in much recent ethical thought and practice, and it presents Judaism as a topic worthy of academic study within the field of contemporary ecology and environmentalism.” She looks forward to present the results of her research to a diverse audience in El Paso
Natalia Soriano Moreno
Natalia Soriano Moreno, is a Creative Writing student working towards the completion of the MFA program at UTEP. She is receiving the Aaron and Sylvia Wechter Family Excellence Fund, to conduct seven creative writing workshops “that promote the writing of testimonial texts” that reflect the diverse experiences of the El Paso Jewish communities. According to Natalia, “the idea is to open a space in which the participants can write their experiences” building a collective story that will preserve the uniqueness of each person’s testimony.” Natalia’s project includes the creation of a digital literary journal which will link the creative testimonies to a map of El Paso “in which the memories of each participant will be located to think about the relationship between memory and territory.” As is the case of Chavah Schwartz, Natalia Soriano Moreno will present the results of the workshops with the community in at least one event, open to the public.
2021-2022 Award
Dr. Kenneth C. Yang
Dr. Yang’s research project is titled “Using live streaming platforms and influencers to engage Jewish and non-Jewish communities with Jewish cultural heritage in the Greater El Paso Region”
His study examines whether live video streaming platforms can function as a viable communication tool that could have a significant impact on the sharing of cultural heritage among young users from the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in the Greater El Paso Region. Dr. Yang’s research is situated within the influence marketing, uses and gratifications, and live streaming platform literature that has shown the employment of the live video streaming celebrities in changing users’ communication behaviors in various contexts (Lee, 2018; Olenski, 2017).