I just returned from two weeks in Israel focusing on the intersection of Israel and youth engagement… and eating lots of delicious hummus! A dynamic connection to Israel is a critical strategy in all our youth engagement work.

One of the key Israel intersections occurs at the URJ camps. URJ camps host more than 200 Israelis (Shlichim) over the summer creating a unique engagement opportunity for our North American campers to interact with, learn from, and learn about Israel. I was able to spend several days with the URJ Camp Directors and Educators during the training of the Shlichim. The training incorporated innovative experiential and expeditionary techniques that enhance and deepen Israel educational experiences at camp, and another training track provided educators with new approaches and methodologies. A special thank you goes to the Legacy Heritage Foundation for partnering with the URJ for the last five years to ensure Israel is front and center at our camps. (Read more on that from Greene Family Camp director Loui Dobin.)

At HUC-JIR, I hosted a conversation for North American rabbinical, cantorial, and education students who are finishing-up their first year of study in Jerusalem. In addition to an update on the Campaign for Youth Engagement, the students were particularly interested in discussing the importance that professional synagogue leadership plays in youth engagement work and hearing about models of synagogues that place youth at the center. The students offered many suggestions from their own recent experiences as engaged youth including reminding me of the importance of clergy and adult role models for shaping their Jewish journeys.

I was especially pleased to have spent some time with Rabbi Michael Marmur, Vice President of Academic Affairs, HUC-JIR, and Rabbi Rachel Shabat Beit-Halachmi, incoming National Director of Admissions and Recruitment, HUC-JIR, discussing ways in which we can strengthen the partnership between our organizations to benefit youth and the adults who work with youth.

At the end of last week, I gave remarks at HUC-JIR’s graduation ceremony in New York. My message to these graduates was this:

“If we want more engaged youth, one of the most important strategies we have is making sure we have more engaged adults. Our youth are diverse and scattered throughout our communities doing so many different things – we need to surround them with thoughtful, passionate, articulate, committed adults. That is you. You have the power to plant the seeds, to nurture our shared future. We believe that every adult in the movement, professional and volunteer has the potential to change the lives of our youth. We look forward to partnering with you.”

Is your congregation interested in offering classes on “Judaism 101″? The Union for Reform Judaism is offering grants to help congregations offer Taste of Judaism™, a free, three-session class for beginners – Jewish or not – that explores the topics of Jewish spirituality, ethics and community values.

Taste of Judaism™ is a high-visibility, low-threshold program of liberal Jewish content designed to pique the interest of all who are searching for an access point to Jewish life.  The class is designed for those who would like to explore or re-explore the foundations of Jewish tradition and are looking for an entry into Judaism. The class has been remarkably successful with unaffiliated Jews, those who are not Jewish but who are interested in learning about Judaism, interfaith couples and their families and those considering conversion.

Congregations may apply for grant funding if they have not received a URJ Taste of Judaism grant within the past three years. The URJ will fund 75% or more of anticipated advertising costs plus a modest honorarium for the instructor. Congregations with 150 or fewer members may be considered for full grant funding. Grant applications are due by May 31 and notification of awards will be made by June 30.

With or without URJ financial support, all URJ congregations offering A Taste of Judaism™ receive training, camera-ready advertisements, a class listing on the URJ’s new website for people interested in Judaism, access to Taste of Judaism™ administrative documents, and more.

Rabbi Jonah Pesner, senior vice president of the URJ, calls Taste of Judaism™ “one of the URJ’s best tools for expanding our reach beyond the walls of our congregations.”

For more information and to apply for a grant, visit urj.org/cong/outreach/taste.

It’s May. Can you believe it? Every year it seems to sneak up on me. But here it is.

Most synagogues and Jewish professionals are at the point in the year that I typically call the “race to the finish line.” We are busy completing our program years, winding down religious schools and looking toward Shavuot as a point where we might briefly catch our breath; all while planning for next year by finalizing calendars and budgets. We can probably agree that the much anticipated summer months will allow us a chance to regroup, reflect and start it all over again.

I think this is a good time for a check-in.

Do you remember that February was Jewish Disability Awareness Month, or is it just a flash in your rear-view mirror at this point? Did you check JDAM off your program list as you moved on to the next activity, event or holiday? Now is the perfect time, despite the crazy, hectic days of budgets and calendars, to be thinking about JDAM.

Take a moment or two for reflection. Did you experience something meaningful? Did you learn something new? What inspired you? Please share it here. Let’s learn from each other, share our experiences and use this as an opportunity for meaningful reflection. Meaningful reflection can lead to positive action!

Some thoughts for you to consider:

• As you plan next year’s calendar, dedicate specific days for disability awareness/acceptance opportunities.
• Even better, look at your entire calendar with an eye toward ensuring that all your programs will be inclusive.
• Form an inclusion committee or task force now, so that it can guide your conversations in the program year to come.
• As you plan your budget, set aside funds for professional development, teacher training and/or guest speakers.
• Even better, make the commitment to hire a dedicated professional to specifically focus on issues of inclusion.

It’s May. And if you are like me, February seems like a year ago. I hope you don’t let Jewish Disability Awareness Month become just another “program” that you “did” this year.

Inclusion is too important.

Originally published at Jewish Special Needs Education: Removing the Stumbling Block

by Ron Wolfson

It’s that time of year, when Jewish institutions pull out their 2013-14 calendars and fill them with events. Many of the programs are very good, with clever names and slick marketing: Jews and Brews for young Federation leadership; L’mazeltov for expectant parents; Torah and Tacos for synagogue members who favor a certain southwestern cuisine with their Bible study.

And yet, after all this well-meaning effort, membership in synagogues and JCCs is declining, federation campaigns are flat and a generation of young Jewish adults is in no hurry to affiliate. The 20th century model of programmatic engagement is not working.

Recently I received an urgent phone call from what once was one of the largest synagogues in America, some 1,500 households. In 2000, the congregation had a balanced budget and no mortgage on a sprawling building. Ominously, young couples were moving out of the neighborhood and older folks were dropping out. The leaders knew they had to do something.

Here’s what they did: They borrowed $1 million. Nearly half was spent on a slick rabbi who lasted less than two years. The rest was spent on programs: lectures by top speakers, concerts by renowned celebrities and an array of events targeted to specific segments of the community. Lots of people came to the programs and ostensibly enjoyed them. Then they went home.

Nothing was done to address the widely held perception that the congregation was cold and unwelcoming. Nothing was done to create connections between those who showed up and the clergy and staff. By the time the leaders called me, the congregation was $1 million in debt and had shrunk to 350 households.

What’s going on? Synagogues, rabbis and Jewish educators once were the main access points to serious Jewish learning. JCCs were a comfortable place to put your little ones in preschool, join a health club and participate in cultural activities. Federations were the central address for supporting the various arms of the community.

The Internet has changed all that. Hundreds of websites feature rich Jewish content for free. Why pay to join a congregation when I can watch live streaming video of worship services, arrange for a bar or bat mitzvah tutor online and have the ceremony in my backyard with a rent-a-rabbi? Why join a JCC when I can go to a fitness center and easily find a cheaper preschool? Why give to a centralized federation when I can direct my giving to causes that resonate with me?

This begs the ultimate question: What is the value of affiliating with a Jewish institution?

In my new book, “Relational Judaism” (Jewish Lights Publishing), I suggest it is this: a face-to-face community of relationships that offers meaning and purpose, belonging and blessing.

To create such a community, we need to turn our engagement model upside down. Rather than spending all our time planning events and hoping people show up, let’s begin with the people: Welcome them, hear their stories, identify their talents and passions, care about them and for them — and then craft programs that engage them with the Jewish experience.

Thankfully, there are organizations and individuals on the cutting edge of this relational tipping point. Chabad has grown from a small group of disciples to an army of 4,500 rabbis and their families who reject the dues model of affiliation: pay up front, then you are served. Rather, they build a relationship with individuals first and only then ask for financial support.

Congregation-based community organizing begins with one-on-one conversations designed to tease out common interests that can be the basis for communal action. Hillel is sending well-trained college students into the dorms and Greek houses to develop relationships with peers who would never walk into a Hillel House. A number of next generation initiatives like Synagogue 3000’s Next Dor and Moishe House are designed to reach young Jewish professionals by building relationships. Social media are increasingly useful as a way to build virtual communities and encourage face-to-face meetings.

The best fundraisers know that relationships are at the heart of raising money; most charitable giving is to people the donor trusts, not simply to support a particular cause.

From these case studies and more than 150 interviews with those doing relational work, my book throws a spotlight on a number of best principles and practices that any Jewish institutional professional or lay leader can use to do this transformational work, ranging from personal encounters to new relational membership models.

This paradigm shift will not be easy; this is labor-intensive work. It will not require more buildings but a reallocation of the precious time of staff and laity. We will need engagement rabbis, relationship directors, community concierges and sophisticated tracking systems to ensure appropriate follow-up and transitions as individuals traverse the life cycle of community engagement. We will not need new institutions, but to transform the institutions we already have from programmatic to relational communities. People may come for programs, but they will stay for relationships.

So as we fill out those calendars for next year, let’s embrace a new goal: to engage every member of our institutions and every interested unaffiliated person in a deeper relationship with Judaism, with the Jewish experience and with each other. Let’s begin by putting people before programs. Let’s learn who they are before we try to figure out what they want. Let’s inspire them to see Judaism as a worldview that can inform the many different levels of relationship in their lives.

Let’s work toward a rededication of our mishpachah, our people, to a relational Judaism.

Ron Wolfson, a member of the URJ Faculty of Expert Practitioners, is the Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and the co-founder of Synagogue 3000/Next Dor. His new book is “Relational Judaism: Using the Power of Relationships to Transform the Jewish Community” (Jewish Lights Publishing). Learn more about Ron and the URJ Faculty.

by Barb Shimansky, MSW

I knew going into the Youth Engagement Conference that our Sunday morning trip to the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Church would be a highlight of the weekend. Learning how another faith organization engages their youth would surely provide some insight into how we as Jewish professionals can do the same. As we walked into the service, we were struck by church members who warmly greeted us outside on the sidewalk. This seemed like a no-brainer for creating a welcoming atmosphere until I put it into context for my own congregation in Wisconsin; standing outside the building in mid-February is not really an option there. Even so, the notion of how well the FAME members welcome the stranger resonated, particularly since we often do not accomplish this commandment as well as we would like to think we do within our own congregational communities.

The service itself was full of joy and spirit, and every single person in the congregation seemed to be engaged in the moment. The music was plentiful and uplifting. We were even pleasantly surprised when the pastor began his sermon and framed it in the text of Lech L’cha! (In the English, of course; we recognized that we have a distinct advantage as visitors with regard to language over many who visit our Jewish congregations.)

Following the service, we heard from a panel of FAME teens and adults who work with the teens, and they shared with us their thoughts on how they have been successful in the area of youth engagement. One teacher shared with us that his measure of engagement is whether the teens are on their phones or not during class. In fact, he identifies potential participants for his program by looking for those who are texting during a service; he invites them to a religious school class to learn about the prayers so that they can eventually return to services with a greater appreciation and understanding of what is going on – and at that point, they no longer feel a need to be on their phones during a service. Instead of directing our teens to put their phones away as soon as they walk into a class or service, perhaps we should let them monitor this themselves and use it as a measure of whether they are “with us” or not!

I think the biggest take-away from the panel was how FAME frames everything they do within the context of worship. It is not that their activities vary so significantly from ours – the FAME teens also participate in religious school, youth choir, lock-ins, and community service – but everything they do is seen as a form of worship. Learning in the classroom helps enhance the actual prayer experience. The things that we would call “social action” or tikkun olam are framed as direct service to God, and therefore a direct form of worship. Conversely, when we in the Reform Movement attempt to engage teens, we often try to steer it away from worship by saying things such as, “It’s a totally social event, there won’t be any services” or “NFTY services are more fun than the ones in your congregation.” While the adults at FAME try to help their teens connect more deeply to their worship experiences through everything else they do, we frequently try to diminish the presence of worship in the experiences we provide for Reform Jewish teens. While we cannot completely emulate the FAME model due to some obvious liturgical differences, I am excited to start working on how we might take this approach and adapt it to our own framework for worship.

Unexpectedly, this idea converged with another experience of the Conference – the Youth Engagement Labs. Prior to the Conference, I had chosen to participate in the Worship Lab. After an open-space initiation, I chose to take part in a conversation with three others regarding the role of the sh’liach tzibur (prayer leader) in the service. Our conversation evolved over many hours, and it extended into other thoughts about the role of leadership within a prayer service. In the end, we created a prayer experience on Monday morning in which approximately 80 NFTY teens participated, examining several different prayers in the liturgy and effectively creating a service, on the spot, for each other. It was a risk, one that was exciting and scary at the same time – and it worked. We heard great feedback from the teens, and we felt good about the outcome of this experiment.

As a participant in several prior URJ conferences for youth professionals, I noted that this was the very first time we had a direct role in a piece of the concurrent NFTY Convention – and the experience reinforced why we do the work we do each day. And while we can argue that perhaps the majority of teens who attend NFTY Convention are already engaged with Jewish life, I look forward to the challenge of taking what I learned through this process and exploring ways to re-imagine the role of worship in engaging our youth.

Barb Shimansky, MSW is the Director of Youth Education at Congregation Sinai in Milwaukee, WI. She has been in the field of Jewish youth and education for nearly 15 years, and has previously worked with congregations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Barb also serves as a summer faculty member at the URJ Kutz Camp, and is a newly-appointed member of the NATE Operations Team.

Originally published at Eden’s Garden

by Shelly Christensen

In parashat Bo, “Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another. For three days no one could move about; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings.”

God hardened Pharoah’s heart again leading up to the final plague. While the light glowed for the Israelites, the Egyptians were bound by darkness. It must have been terrifying to live in the thick, enveloping darkness.

Imagine living in another kind of darkness; darkness where the light of God never shines. You want to be enveloped, not in darkness anymore, but in the light of Torah, of community and of God. What do you hold dear as a member of your community? Imagine how your life would be different if you were isolated from it.

I visited a synagogue during Jewish Disability Awareness Month where every word uttered on the bimah was displayed on a large screen in the front of the sanctuary. The congregation invited Jewish men and women with disabilities from a nearby residential center to attend. My hosts and I sat in the back, right next to these visitors.

The Inclusion Committee chair spoke, asking committee members to stand – about 25 of them. She cited everything the committee had done to increase welcome and accessibility.

But from my seat, I didn’t observe much hachnassat orchim, that hallmark Jewish value of welcoming the stranger. These visitors were invisible to the congregation. As the chair spoke, many of made noises; people stared.

Then the cantor sang.

A woman sitting nearby was one of the special guests. The agitation of a moment earlier was replaced by a calmness reflected in the serenity of her face. We reached for each other’s hands, and as we linked them, I knew I was experiencing someone’s emergence from that all enveloping darkness of isolation. In this moment, someone was experiencing the warmth of God’s light – and it was awesome.

Still, there is darkness that envelopes many people with disabilities and their families. We must open our arms even wider to embrace and include them.

As Moses said in parashat Bo, “We will all go, regardless of social station; we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds.”

My husband and I have three sons, Aaron, Jacob, and Zac. Jacob was diagnosed with ADHD at 8 and with Asperger syndrome at 15. Raising a kid with a disability was not in myMother’s Manual. I spent hours fielding the “Mrs. Christensen?” calls from assistant principals and teachers, who catalogued everything Jake did wrong – and I learned special education law, thus making me a notoriously informed parent.

Now, Jacob is soon graduating from the University of Minnesota majoring in Sociology. He participated in a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip for young adults with Asperger syndrome. He’s worked part time in high school and college; he speaks at conferences about Asperger syndrome; he has friends. One place where Jacob’s disability didn’t matter was in our synagogue religious school. He was engaged in learning, especially Jewish values around social justice. Jake celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah and was confirmed with the same kids he’d known since kindergarten.

What do we learn from these different experiences – the congregation that extols inclusion but doesn’t welcome everyone sitting in the sanctuary, and the congregation that naturally supported a young man on his Jewish journey?

The hallmarks of a good life – opportunities to work, live, love, learn, play and worship – are growing in many Jewish communities. Including people with disabilities throughout the lifespan is becoming less a dream and more a reality.

There are basic philosophies about inclusion that guide us on the journey.

• We don’t do things for people with disabilities. We do things with them. We must build relationships, respect their humanity and think of them as individuals with hopes and dreams.

• No one does this alone. Pirke Avot teaches, “… it is not up to us to complete the task, but neither are we ever free to desist from trying. People with disabilities and families must participate in all decision making about their lives. “Nothing About Us Without Us.”

• Inclusion is woven into every activity in the Jewish community. People with disabilities must choose how they wish to participate. Just like anyone else.

My Zadie Max said, “To be known, you have to be shown.” We have to raise awareness, believing that people with disabilities belong in the sanctuary, the classroom and the boardroom.

The Chassidic master Yehudi HaKadosh said, “Good intentions alone not accompanied by action are without value. The main thing is the action, as this is what makes the intention so profound.” It is time to act and end the darkness.

Shelly Christensen is one of the leading speakers and advocates for inclusion of people with disabilities in Jewish life. She is the author of the acclaimed “Jewish Community Guide to Inclusion of People with Disabilities” and founder of Inclusion Innovations, where she works with synagogues and Jewish organizations to build inclusive communities. Shelly co-founded Jewish Disability Awareness Month with the Jewish Special Education Consortium and continues to provide leadership and guidance. Shelly is a frequent contributor to Reform movement publications and blogs. She and her husband Rick are the proud parents of three adult sons, one of whom lives with Asperger syndrome.