Daniel Toretsky’s Tower for the Sacred and the Ordinary (on view now at FENTSTER) is designed as roving ritual for the year 2221 in a post-apocalyptic reality. But in 2021, we took the tower for a spin for a musical havdalah parade and the first ever FENTSTER film production (run time: 11:04 minutes).

With music and dance, spices and fire, an all ages community parades through the backstreets of Toronto with a monumental spice box on wheels. They make the blessings to conclude Shabbat and collect memories to transmit to our children's children's children living in a radically transformed, climate ravaged distant future where society as we know it has collapsed - a world where havdole / havdalah* may never come again.

Presented together with KlezKanada

Thank you to the cast of Havdalah for the End of the World - in order of appearance:

Lishai Peel, Kasper Drewczynski, Kinneret Sagee, Lorie Wolf, Howard Buckstein, Maxine Lee Ewaschuk, Schreiber Sasaki Family, Alisha Kaplan, Rochelle Rubinstein, Friedman Family, Koffman Family, Aviva Chernick and Marcia Beck.

The crew:

• Producer / Director: Evelyn Tauben

• Assistant Director / Sound: Hartley Wynberg

• Videography / Editor: Jean-Christophe Foolchand

• Videography: Aaron Rotenberg

• Photography: David Waldman

• Crew: Defne Inceoglu, Ezgi Dincer

Havdole for the End of the World premiered on August 28, 2021 in time for the close of Shabbat (Toronto time) followed by a raucous klezmer jam streamed from both Toronto and New York featuring the Toronto Klezmer Society and the Klezmer Picnic Band. Watch that full livestream event here. Click here for additional details

* havdalah or havdole in Yiddish is a ritual to conclude Shabbat and mark the transition into the week. Learn more here