RJ Blog

Confirmation and b’nai mitzvah have been front and center on this blog for the past few weeks, what with Rabbi Carole Balin’s post on the 90th anniversary of the first bat mitzvah, Barry Shainker’s appreciation of the role of confirmation in Reform Judaism, and then the thoughtful comments on Shainker’s post by rabbis Fred Guttman, Andy Koren, and Joel Abraham. As I commented on Rabbi Balin’s post, the early Reformers deserve high marks for the institution of confirmation as a replacement for bar mitzvah, even though over the long haul their innovation did not “take.” Mr. Shainker pointed out confirmation [...]

Next Wednesday, May 23, will be a big day for our family. That night, my wife, Dana Gershon, the outgoing president of The Rashi School’s board of trustees, will be honored at the school’s annual dinner. Dana has been president of the board for two years and, with four daughters, all of whom are Rashi students, we spend a lot of time at 8000 Great Meadow Road in Dedham, where we’re all part of the wonderful kehillah that is Rashi. Needless to say, between meetings, classes, sports, parent-teacher conferences, plays, t’filah, and more, it’s very often where our family hangs [...]

by Ruby Macsai-Goren As a typical teenager, I do a lot of extra-curricular and academic activities, attend high school, and spend lots of time with my family and friends. However, I spend minimal to no time learning about Israel. I know very little about Israel; my knowledge is extended to what I have learned from my years in Hebrew school and what I know from my Middle Eastern History class. While I have had the limited opportunity to learn about Israeli politics, I have no idea what the culture and land itself is like. I am incredibly excited to travel [...]

By Eli Cooper NFTY-Northern is made up of 11 active, very distinct and different, temple youth groups (TYGs). Each and every one has its own quirks and individualities. The TYGs all have their own triumphs and struggles. They all have different events that go on throughout the year, whether it be cooking and distributing Thanksgiving meals for hundreds of less fortunate families in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area or attending a sleep out to promote awareness of teen homelessness. What makes our TYG’s different aren’t the events that we hold or even the people that are in them.  It’s our synagogues [...]

Confirmation is a reaffirmation of all that Congregation Or Ami is about. I wish you could have been there. On Friday night, 7 Or Ami teenagers – Jessa Cameron, Libby Coufal, Nathan Fried, Ben Ginsburg, Dakota Keller, Marissa Meyer, and Peter Young – stood on our bimah to articulate those values and experiences which bind them to our Jewish tradition and community. Listening to them speak, my eyes misted over. I remember watching each one of them grow up, some since they were infants. We rabbis and cantor have the unique privilege of walking the journey with our teens as [...]

by Susan Alexander One of my favorite weekends of the year is when I facilitate OSRUI’s Mother & Daughter Kallah. This is a program designed for mothers, grandmothers, aunts and the girls they love ages 5-12. The Mother & Daughter Kallah is open to mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, and the girls they love ages 5-12. The connection between mothers and daughters is probably the most profound of human connections. With today’s busy lifestyles, sometimes this relationship needs to be charged with something new to keep it alive and growing. This weekend is designed to deepen that bond between these women [...]

We’ve been talking about the Campaign for Youth Engagement since the URJ’s 71st Biennial Convention last December. In the four and a half months since, we’re been working on hammering out the details of this exciting and important campaign, and we want to be sure we’re communicating those details effectively along the way. So what is it? Quite simply, the Campaign for Youth Engagement is a focused, strategic effort to leverage the full strength and talent of every corner of the Reform Movement to engage and retain the majority of our youth by the year 2020. Here are a few [...]

My full name is Sara Kathryn, but it has never meant much to me. I have always known that I am named for my great-grandmothers, those black and white faces whose photos I have seen but whose stories I had never heard. In fact, beyond their names, I knew almost nothing at all about Great-Grandma Sarah and Great-Grandma Katie, not even where they came from. When, as a child, I was assigned class projects that required me to trace my family tree, I always hit a stumbling block. My paternal grandparents were both long dead, and my father had no [...]

by Melissa Stoller I started planting the seeds of an intergenerational visit to Israel several years before my oldest daughter, Zoe, became a bat mitzvah. By the time I finished, my husband and I and our three girls, Zoe (13), Jessie (10), and Madeleine (4), together with my mother and in-laws, all were on board for our first trip to Israel, a special post-bat mitzvah journey to make connections in our family and to connect us, both spiritually and physically, to the land that we had read about and studied for years.

In this week’s Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh, Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the URJ’s Senior Vice President, lays out the ideas behind the Reform Movement’s new Campaign for Youth Engagement, a major effort to bring young Jews (back) into the fold. [Rabbi Pesner] said 80 percent of the Reform Jewish b’nai mitzva fall away from Jewish life by the eighth grade. “The crisis is most of those kids will disappear by 12th grade, and they will bring their families out the exit [of the synagogue],” Pesner told the Chronicle in an exclusive interview. “So somehow the bar and bat mitzva has become [...]