Common Ground: An Evening of Pride and Connection at the Skirball

Common Ground: An Evening of Pride and Connection at the Skirball

A Dinner We Were Proud to Sponsor

On Tuesday, June 2, Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary sponsored the Skirball Cultural Center's Common Ground Dinner: Pride, and our team was honored to be in the room for it. The evening brought together a shared meal, a candid conversation, and a set of jokes that needed telling, all built around the kind of table where strangers end up talking like old friends.

The Story Behind the Table

The dinner takes its name, and its tableware, from Common Ground, an installation by Los Angeles artist Adam Silverman. Silverman gathered clay, water, and wood ash from all fifty states, Washington DC, and the five inhabited US territories, then combined them into 224 ceramic objects: plates, bowls, cups, and ceremonial pots. The piece was built to celebrate American pluralism and bring people into closer contact with each other through shared meals. Eating off that tableware gave the evening a literal foundation, soil from across the country, set at every place, under every plate of food.

A Partnership with JQ International

This year's dinner was presented in partnership with JQ International, the Los Angeles organization that has supported LGBTQ+ Jews and their families since 2004. That partnership shaped the two voices at the center of the night.

Rebeka Small: A Conversation That Mattered

Rebeka Small, a synagogue professional and mother in Los Angeles, hosted a conversation that was vital in this moment. Small has worked in the Jewish community since 2011, focused on creating safe spaces for people exploring Sinai Temple, and she spoke about parenting a transgender child in plain, specific terms: what it actually looks like, day to day, to support your kid exactly as they are. That honesty gave the conversation its weight.

Raye Schiller: The Comedy the Room Needed

Raye Schiller closed out the night, and the room needed the release. Schiller is a queer comedian who grew up Orthodox, has been featured in The New York Times, headlined the NY Comedy Festival, and hosts the comedy podcast Yenta! The set was irreverent, illuminating, and totally necessary, the kind of material that gets a room full of strangers laughing at the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

The Meal

Between the conversation and the comedy, the food kept coming: phyllo triangles and mini potato latkes to start, matzo ball soup with greens and sweet potatoes, then a buffet of spiced lentils and rice, roasted seasonal vegetables, baharat marinated chicken thighs, and pomegranate honey roasted salmon. Olive oil cake closed out the meal. It was the kind of spread that asks you to slow down and talk to the person next to you, which is exactly the point of a dinner like this.

Why We Sponsor Evenings Like This

Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary sponsors evenings like this because community gets built at shared tables, the same way it gets built through ritual and ceremony. This dinner gave us the chance to support a Pride celebration rooted in Jewish tradition and to stand alongside families like Rebeka Small's, doing the quiet, daily work of loving their kids exactly as they are. We left the Skirball with empty plates and full hearts, grateful for a room that showed up for itself so completely.