We believe that many people – our leaders, members of the media and citizens from all walks of life – truly want what they believe is best for America and the world. Thanks to social media, a 24- hour news cycle and nearly global connectivity, we have the ability (and some have the tendency) to instantly transmit our thoughts far and wide before we have a chance to actually consider whether we truly want to articulate them, and how.

As Jewish educators, we believe, as Rabbi Ben Bag Bag did over 2,000 years ago, that if we look at the Torah, turn it over and over, we can find the answers to nearly every problem. And so, we invite you to join us in considering how we can bring more kind and empathetic discourse-- and possibly more peace-- to our world.

Below, you’ll find the first unit in a 6 unit series on teaching civil discourse. Each lesson, which will be shared free of charge right here on The Covenant Foundation website, will have material appropriate for 6^th/7^th grades, 8-10^th grades and 11^th grade-Adult students.

Explore this lesson and others that will follow, and let us know if they bring a modicum of civility to your classrooms, and your worlds.

By Joel Lurie Grishaver and Ira J. Wise for The Covenant Foundation

 Joel Lurie Grishaver is an author, teacher, spiritual counselor, artist and the Creative Chairman of Torah Aura Productions, a publisher of books that help Jewish teachers create learning experiences in and out of the classroom. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. Ira J. Wise is Director of Education at Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport, CT and also a teacher, author, mentor, educational consultant and Joel’s student.

Download free lesson plan here

We do not always know what we have until it is in jeopardy. This is the case with civil discourse, respectful conversation. To engage in civil discourse is to avoid rage, hostility, and disparagement toward others even amid sharp disagreements. It requires us to listen generously and to act as though—and to really believe—we could be open to persuasion. It is crucial for living and working in close quarters among people with diverse and conflicting assumptions, interests, and aspirations. And civil discourse is essential if democratic government is to function effectively. Only with humility and respectful exchange can a society composed of people from different religious, races, economic statuses, and life experiences, establish and sustain social peace and justice.

The framers of the United States Constitution worried about factions and tried to devise institutions that would prevent permanent social divisions; they did not anticipate political parties. Yet, within a decade of the early Republic, political parties formed and expressed vehement division in a long and bitter campaign for the presidency. Partisan rancor persisted for some time, oft receded only to erupt again into the Civil War, during which time more people died than in all other U.S. wars combined. We are now again living in a time of intense partisan conflict, and recollecting how such conflict can erupt into violence should move people on all sides to take the personal and collective steps necessary to repair civil discourse.

Yet we seem to have lost both the will and the ability to talk about matters of public importance in a manner that has a chance of leading to mutual understanding and persuasion. When argument becomes reduced to insults and slogans, all we can do is to mark friend and foe, destroying any chance of government of, by, and for the people. We each may think: “I did not cause this situation, I am not to blame.” Yet we each have the capacity to help society turn the corner, if we honestly ask what went wrong and what we can do about it.

Others can, and will, debate the role played by social media, Russian hacking, institutionalized forms of inequality, and distrust in provoking partisan division. Too many of us have lost the art of listening. We too easily caricature the positions our opponents take and we do not care to find out how they see issues. Without a desire to listen, we cannot take the perspective of others. And if we cannot control our emotions, we cannot listen with sympathy to what others have to say.

Moreover, few have learned to communicate beliefs, perspectives, understandings, and values in ways that others can understand. Perhaps we have stopped looking for common values that support our positions and even written off the possibility of finding common ground, or presenting our arguments in ways that could be understood and accepted by those we think are “on the other side.”

Perhaps we do not believe we can trust those with whom we disagree. When political opinion is only communicated by attacks, slogans, and insults, we withdraw, assume defensive postures, and stop even pretending to listen. Some of the problem does stem from hateful, threatening, unacceptable acts. Rallies stoking group hatred and violence come to mind. But there is no reason to attribute hateful acts to most people or certainly not to others simply because they align with a different political party or neighborhood.

Knowing what has gone wrong tells us what we need to do. First, we need to rekindle our respect for other people with whom we disagree. We can do that by really listening to them. To do that, we should assume they are arguing in good faith and expressing values, fears, and aspirations that they truly hold. That requires us to try to see the world from their perspective, to imagine how we might have the same fears and goals and values if we looked at the world from their vantage point.

Second, we need to learn to connect both their concerns and ours to common values. If we can do that, we can connect our arguments to values others can understand and possibly accept. We also can come to recognize that they are arguing for values that we also share. If we do this, we can communicate with each other, and communication is the first step to persuasion.

Third, we need to understand the emotions that others feel and the intuitions they have about important issues, while listening to the reasons they give for their beliefs and positions. Emotion is often based on moral intuitions that have some claim to respect. We can test our emotional responses and our strong intuitions by giving reasons why they make sense and are appropriate to the facts of the situation, but that requires us to give equal respect to the feelings of others, as well as the reasons they give for their feelings.

Fourth, we need to practice using reasoned arguments based on common values. We can acknowledge plural values, what they mean in specific cases, and the ways they push us in different directions. We can tell stories that help us understand the meaning of conflicts and identify the moral valence of human relationships at issue in the dispute. We can focus on social context to show why some values prevail in one situation while others prevail in a different setting. We can engage in Golden Rule reasoning that asks whether we could accept a rule, law, proposal, or resolution if we did not know on which side of the dispute we were. We can practice humility by taking the perspective of others and seeing what we can learn from them, noting the values they assert that we agree with and want to pursue and support.
Generous listening and respect across differences matter because they actually produce better, more creative and inclusive results as well as because they reflect the right way to treat others and to want to be treated. Sometimes, we just will not agree, and, then we need modes of living together, accommodating differences, and, doing what it takes to be able to come back another time, for discussion or coexistence.

This volume contains materials that honor and strengthen civil discourse and human relationships. Let’s read and learn from them. Religious traditions offer valuable resources for us to use, now more than ever.

By Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and Joseph William Singer, Bussey Professor of Law, Harvard University

“A visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives…” said Maira Kalman, Israeli-born illustrator, artist, writer and designer.

But can a visit to a museum be an act of civic engagement, as well? To the staff of educators at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the third largest Holocaust museum in the world, it can and it must be so.

“Part of ensuring that [an event like the Holocaust] doesn’t happen again is actively creating the world you want to live in,” said Miriam Haier, Senior Director for External Affairs at the Museum. “It’s an ongoing civil project, to understand in a constant way that you’re responsible for being active in the world.”

As a primary resource in North America for teaching and learning about the Holocaust, educators at the Museum think very carefully about how to engage visitors and student groups and more specifically, how the facts of the Holocaust connect to contemporary issues.

“Rather than drawing comparisons,” Haier explains, “we want people to understand that what they learn here can be relevant to their own lives.”

With that charge, Haier and her colleagues recently hosted “After Charlottesville: With Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn,” a special presentation by two of America’s leading litigators who are currently representing the plaintiffs from Charlottesville, Virginia who were “targeted on the basis of their race, religion, and ethnicity or because they stood up for the safety and civil rights of others.”

“The rally was rife with anti Semitic language and neo Nazi participation at a higher rate than any other event in recent U.S. history,” Haier said. “That’s relevant to our student groups and our visitors because they come to this museum to try and understand the Holocaust—and part of that is acknowledging that some of these very same ideas are still present in communities in this country.

“Our intention isn’t to instill this idea in a fearful way, but rather, to help people confront the issues and access the legal tools and the civil rights tools that we have, to address them here, in a respectful space,” she said.

According to Michael Glickman, President and CEO of the Museum, when the doors to the building opened in 1997, it sent a powerful message that “mere decades after the tragedies of the Holocaust, the Jewish communities of New York claimed the right to speak for themselves.”

“At the museum,” Gilckman said, “our daily work of responsibly documenting history and honoring Holocaust victims and survivors is inspiring us to be honest about our present moment in this country. We have work to do."

The Museum recognizes the work of Kaplan and Dunn as contributing in a major way to that imperative. As literature on their website explains, ‘Kaplan and Dunn’s groundbreaking lawsuit against white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and affiliated hate groups is designed to make it clear that inciting and engaging in violence based on racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism has no place in this country.’

They argue that the rally was not a free speech issue, as many have claimed. Rather, this was a conspiracy to commit violence, and someone died, and many others were injured. Kaplan and Dunn are taking a look at those acts of violence and working with precedents set after the Civil War, including the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which aimed to protect the civil rights of black Americans and fight against the KKK’s “reign of terror” in the South at that time.

Kaplan and Dunn are making headway. Their suit is in progress and they’ve completed the first part of argumentation against a motion to dismiss the case.

During their October 10^th presentation at the Museum, they lawyers told the crowd about the complaint they filed which put their suit into motion. That complaint happens to be the most comprehensive catalogue detailing what happened at that rally in August of 2017 and by circulating it and making it public (anyone can read it, here) people can begin understand what truly happened. There’s also a website hosted by the organization Integrity First for America, which shares all of the details of the case.

The Charlottesville program, which was moderated by Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate magazine who writes primarily about law and politics, gave audience members the chance to ask their own questions and “talk back,” a priority and goal of all the educational programming that happens at the Museum. Audience members who attended live as well as those who were watching the live stream were able to dig deeply into the issues and have their opinions shared and responded to. (Haier shared that within about 24 hours of the event’s live stream, there were more than 15,700 online views of the video.)

Over 60,000 students come through the doors of the Museum each year, from across the socioeconomic, racial and religious spectrum. As Haier explains, the Museum aims to show all visitors that a space devoted to Holocaust education can be the site of “meaningful conversation.”

Programs for students are designed to ask them to reflect on their own place in history; the Museum curriculum focuses on heritage and students are encouraged to consider their own. The lessons are not exclusive to Jewish students, either, but rather, every student who visits is asked to think about what makes them a meaningful member of their own community.

“In our work, we are constantly modeling respectful conversation,” Haier said, “and we do this for all of our visitors.

“If we want them to understand the lessons that can be taken, implicitly or explicitly, from the events of the Holocaust, then we must live our values, in real time.”

Toward the end of the program, an audience member asked Dunn and Kaplan if they feared that by bringing this suit before the courts, they would potentially further anger and incite violence amongst those who rallied in the first place. Would this lawsuit only serve to grow their bigotry?

Kaplan’s response was unequivocal.

“We live in a morally difficult world,” she said. “But what’s the alternative? To not fight back? To not speak up? To not apply the rule of law against what these people did? To me, to me that’s an unacceptable thing to do.”

By Adina Kay-Gross for The Covenant Foundation

More to Consider

• Virtual Reality, Rare Artifacts and More at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (The Forward, September 18, 2018)
• Inside the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ Rally Lawsuit (Newsweek, August 11, 2018)

Is the college student in your life registered to vote? Have they seen this video?

The largest digital campaign ever run by Hillel International, MitzVote is “reclaiming Jewish ritual and lending that to American democracy,” says Sheila Katz, Vice President of Student Engagement and Leadership for Hillel International.

“Jews have something to offer the American Democratic Process that’s deeply rooted in our tradition,” Katz said. “You’re doing a mitzvah by going to the polls. This is living Torah.”

With an unprecedented coalition of groups involved-- 50 campuses have partnered up, along with 25 organizations including BBYO, One Table, Moishe House, and even many campus Greek life organizations—MitzVote is aiming to create a new Jewish ritual out of the voting process and turn students out to the polls in record numbers, for the midterm elections in November.

“The basic premise is that Jews know a thing or two about coming of age,” Katz said. “The Bar Mitzvah ritual has been around longer than American democracy, and so why not create another ritual around the coming of age that happens when you become eligible to vote at 18.”

Katz explained that borrowing from what happens at bnei mitzvot ceremonies all over the world, MitzVoters may study the ballot instead of a Torah portion, but there will be a blessing when they enter the polls, and a party when they leave.

“Adding a celebratory factor to the process is an essential component,” Katz said. To get college students excited about voting, she explained that poll parties will happen at polling sites on all of the participating campuses. The parties will take on all different themes, including interfaith parties, bar mitzvah- themed parties, “soul” parties, and more.

Katz shared that she and her colleagues at Hillel have been astounded by the student interest in the MitzVote campaign. The video, produced by Mik Moore (who also co-created “The Great Shlep” for Obama’s campaign in 2008), had over 200,000 views in the first 48 hours after it was posted to social media, and has long surpassed that number.

Hillel International’s goal is to mobilize 100,000 students on 100 campuses by the time the midterm elections come around.

“We want to link student passions to Judaism,” Katz said, “and to engage them on issues they care about. We are finding that students are coming out of the woodwork to participate, those who weren’t previously engaged with Hillel on their campuses are getting involved now. It's a way to root activism in something that feels Jewish.”

Katz was quick to assert that this is a non-partisan campaign and those who sign on to work on the MitzVote campaign must adhere to that principle.

“We’re inclusive of a diverse set organizations,” Katz explained, “everyone needs to be invited to the table.”

So college students? No more excuses. Even if you don’t have a printer in your dorm room, MitzVote will print out your voter registration forms and mail them on your behalf or send you a pre-stamped envelope to send on your own (because really, who doesn’t have time for that?)

And MitzVote doesn’t just provide information for college students, either. Via the MitzVote website, anyone can find out their polling place, register, obtain an absentee ballot, and much more.

Fulfilling your civic duty was never easier!

By Adina Kay-Gross for The Covenant Foundation

More to Consider:

• Joshua Malina and Lisa Edelstein star in Hillel’s get-out-the-vote campaign video (JTA, September 6, 2018)
• Hillel International to Mobilize 100k Students to the Voting Booth and Celebrate their MitzVote (Hillel.org, September 6, 2018)

Spring has arrived, and the Jewish community is busy planting with purpose.

In Vaughan, Ontario, the yellow coltsfoot and purple-blue scilla are just starting to flower at the Kavanah Garden, a half acre community garden that’s part of Shoresh, the Canadian-based Jewish environmental organization that includes the Kavanah Garden and Bela Farm. On “Yom Manual Labor” just a few weeks ago, volunteers gathered to turn the soil, plant seeds, paint outdoor tables and participate in construction projects with the Shoresh team, preparing the garden for growing season.

At Abundance Farm in the Northampton, Massachusetts, where garlic, elderberries, crocuses and daffodils are currently in bloom, all ages gathered on May 6th to participate in spring growing projects and share soup, salad and bread. With their wheelbarrows, trowels and shovels, children and adults alike will have a chance to dig in the dirt, and beautify the land, while enjoying fresh air, sun, and community.

And just recently, down in Reistertown, Maryland, volunteers gathered on 180 acres of rolling hills at The Pearlstone Center, to tend to blooming strawberry plants, as they readied for the spring harvest.

But while the flowers and fruit trees are just now abloom in the northeast, educators and volunteers on these farms and at many other Jewish land-based and environmentally focused organizations are living and working in intentionally Jewish ways that are not limited to the growing season.

In fact, a burgeoning movement of dedicated Jewish professionals and lay people are finding their way to the farm, so to speak, year round.

“Ninety-five percent of the people who come to Bela Farm are coming because they care deeply about the natural world,” shared Risa Alyson Cooper, a 2013 Pomegranate Prize recipient and the Executive Director of Shoresh, which runs programs with schools, synagogues, camps and community organizations in the Greater Toronto area.

“In the beginning, I thought the ratio would be 50-50—half the people joining us on the farm because they were interested in the environment, and half because they were intrigued by the Jewish aspect. Now I understand that people are coming to us first because they care deeply about the earth; a huge percentage of our volunteers are not otherwise engaged in Jewish living and learning. But we provide a point of entry.”

This is a familiar refrain across the JOFFEE movement (Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education). In fact, many of the leaders of JOFFEE organizations themselves were drawn to the work because of their own search for Jewish meaning.

Shoresh is the brainchild of Cooper and her old day school friend Sabrina Malach, currently the Director of Engagement for the organization. A model of sustainable land-based Judaism, Shoresh is a 20-acre reforestation project with 11,000 native trees, each sponsored in honor or in memory of someone. By connecting families to these trees, Shoresh has physically tied the community to this piece of land. Bela Farm is collaborative project, with an organic vegetable CSA, and 20 acres of organic hemp. Shoresh also stewards a 20-acre bee sanctuary and harvests honey for Rosh Hashanah from their apiary, a premier event at Shoresh and a perfect example of the way in which they build community while helping to protect the environment.

“All of our honey is harvested by hand,” Cooper explains. “Every year people gather before Rosh Hashanah to work in the honey house, unpacking the honey, putting it into an extractor and spinning it.”

“And then there’s the moment where someone opens up the extractor valve and the liquid honey pours out,” she adds. “There’s a collective breath taken in because it's so amazing to participate start-to-finish in this natural process.”

In fact, getting people to say “wow,” like they do when they see that honey poured, is one of Cooper’s metrics of success. As she explains it, community members are far more likely to take responsibility for the earth and its bounty, if they feel deeply connected to its natural process.

“We want to offer experiences where people can feel radical awe and wonder of and for the world around them,” Cooper said. “And to give people these experiences through a Jewish lens is the most powerful teaching we can offer.”

This idea—that one can engage Jewishly by connecting with the earth, is a guiding principal for many of today’s leaders in the JOFFEE movement.

At Abundance Farm, in Northampton, MA, Director and Covenant Foundation grantee Jacob Fine shared that this understanding helps direct some of the strategic planning in his community’s local synagogue.

“We have a couple thousand people who participate in [Abundance] Farm life each year,” he explains, “but only a portion of those people are also synagogue members or send their kids to day school,” he said.

Fine explained that by looking closely at the demographics of who is coming to Jewish themed events on the Farm and where they are accessing Jewish experiences (if not within the walls of the synagogue building), clergy and leadership at Congregation Bnai Israel, the synagogue that shares a campus with the Farm, have engaged in very intentional thinking on topics like identity, how to manage a membership drive, and what all of this means in the larger context of Jewish community in the 21st century.

For Fine and his colleagues at Abundance Farm, a Jewish food justice farm that also functions as an outdoor classroom, connecting to Judaism through the twin notions of social equity and radical sharing are ways in which they emulate Jewish living.

“Basic biblical theology explains that human beings don’t own the earth—only the holy one is the ultimate owner,” he says. “Humans are stewards of the earth, and that understanding is expressed through agricultural laws and systems that require we share resources in pretty radical ways.”

This theology is practiced in real time on the Farm, which is unique in that it shares a campus with not just a Jewish Day School and a synagogue but also with the Northampton Survival Center, a secular organization which runs two food pantries that serve low-income individuals and families in the area and works to improve their quality of life.

Thanks to the growing integration amongst the three organizations at Abundance, radical sharing is a mitzvah that anyone who comes to the Farm can participate in.

Fine explains this in terms of the biblical teaching from Leviticus 19:9-11, pe’ah, which instructs that when we harvests our fields, we should not reap all the way to the edges of the field, but rather, we are instructed to leave some of the harvest for the poor and the stranger.

By hosting Pick Your Own events, clients from the Survival Center can come and participate in the life of the farm in a dignified way, harvesting produce alongside anyone else from the community, Jewish or not, food insecure or not.

“Everything the earth gives us belongs to God,” Fine emphasizes. “It was never ours. Everyone deserves their share.”

This is our way of honoring the halachic concept of kavod habriyot (honoring the individual with dignity),” Fine adds, “and it’s built into the design of how we run things at Abundance Farm.”

At The Pearlstone Center, about 350 miles south, Executive Director Jakir Manela runs a 180-acre campus that’s growing rapidly but very much focused on the same values that Fine and Cooper talk about.

“Our core brand identity,” Manela says, is ‘living Judaism.’ Not just Judaism that we learn off a page we read, or by listening to someone talk about it, but rather, by making havdalah outside at a campfire, harvesting food for Shabbat dinner, living our values and offering Jewish experiences that are infused with meaning because they involve intentional actions. This really resonates with people.”

The Pearlstone site includes an active retreat center, a farm that grows organic and kosher food to service those retreats, a meditation garden and hiking trails that cater to the greater Baltimore area and beyond.

(Pearlstone used to manage about 11 acres of their larger campus owned by The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore. In 2015, they were given the opportunity to create a master plan and capital campaign to maximize the potential of the entire property. Recently, blessings increased, when Pearlstone was just gifted an additional 150 acres from the Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore (which owns the Pearlstone site and recently closed an adjacent campsite that will now be added to the Pearlstone property). This most recent development will allow them to expand in massive ways.

Part of the plan for the extra space involves establishing a Jewish Eco village, the first of its kind in the country.

“We envision staff members living together in an inclusive, pluralistic, vibrant Jewish community, functioning as an anchor of talent and passion and, much like the intentional community of a moshav or a kibbutz in Israel. There will be practiced interdependence and shared living. We want to do this in an ecological way that reflects our values and serves as a model for the Jewish community.”

But while Manela speaks of scaling up, and reaching upwards of 40,000 people within the first year of expansion, practicing gratitude and awareness and living Jewish values each day are still the central tenets in Pearlstone life.

During the months of May and June, when blueberry picking events really get underway, those who visit Pearlstone will pick fruit alongside a Jewish farmer and educator who will teach brachot of gratitude and share teachings about ethics. There will also be a ma’aser bin (for tithing) that U-pick participants can add to, as they go.

“When we celebrate Sukkot, or Lag Ba’Omer, or Tu B’Av on the Farm, we are doing it in a beautiful environment and infusing the experience with Jewish ritual, and this combination really speaks to the next generation of Jewish families and young adults that are seeking an inclusive and immersive experience,” Manela says.

He adds that for many people who are seeking Jewish connection but haven’t found it, the immersive experience with the land really resonates.

“So many people who have come to the Farm for a few hours or for a weekend, tell us: ‘I’ve finally found my Jewish home.’”

By Adina Kay-Gross, for The Covenant Foundation

Advocates of inclusion practices often speak of the need for holistic inclusion—looking at not just one aspect of a child’s disability, but rather, at the entire scope of factors affecting that child and his or her family.

For Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, a holistic approach isn’t just pedagogy, it’s intrinsic to her life.

Gabby’s son George was diagnosed with Autism when he was three years old. At the time, Gabby was working part-time in Jewish education but it wasn’t until George began expressing a love for Judaism, that Gabby started considering how to integrate George’s needs with a Jewish education.

“When George was younger, he had really limited communication,” Gabby shared. “But I could feel how important Jewish connection was to him. He would light up when I played Jewish music in the car, and when we recited Shabbat blessings, it was clear how excited George was at hearing them.”

At the time, George was enrolled in an in-home daycare that wasn’t quite equipped to handle his needs, which included sensory processing therapy, play skills and language acquisition. Ultimately, Gabby and her family found a therapeutic program for George that was housed in a synagogue, Bright Horizons at Temple Beth-Hillel in Wynnewood. When her family moved one year later, they found another great classroom in a synagogue preschool Sinai at Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park.

“When we found Bright Horizons and then the Sinai class, we exhaled,” she said. “We thought, ‘These are communities that care about us,’” Gabby said. “We connected to the parents at both schools, and being in a Jewish environment that also provided a structured and supported classroom made a huge difference in George’s life and in ours.”

Through the preschool program, Gabby started attending Shabbat morning programming with George.

“Every Friday there was a Shabbat activity at the synagogue,” she shared. “I had the chance to see the class in action when George was the ‘Shabbat star,’ and I realized how important it was for us to have that experience together. One of George’s amazing teachers, Barbara Greenberg (z’l), created a structured Shabbat program that the kids looked forward to, with just the right amount of songs and ritual for kids with short attention spans. She found a way for everyone to have a role in the Shabbat circle, whether it was passing out kippot or holding up the kiddush cup.”

Gabby realized then that she could put her Jewish education experience in conversation with her experience as the parent of a child with a disability. George would be graduating from preschool and attending public school—but she imagined that within her synagogue, Mishkan Shalom, there was a place to create a monthly Shabbat experience for families like hers.

Together with Rabbi Michelle Greenfield and with help from Rabbi Margot Stein, she developed a monthly Shabbat experience that was designed to be sensory-friendly. Not too many loud noises, lots of space to move around, a place where children who were nonverbal could smell and taste and experience Shabbat, where those with intellectual and cognitive challenges could access Jewish experience by doing, where it was okay to leave and take a walk and come back because everyone in that space would understand.

That is how the Celebrations! Program at Mishkan Shalom was born. Established in 2010 as a family education program for children with special needs, their parents and their siblings, the program is designed for students who have cognitive, learning or developmental disorders, including but not limited to Autism spectrum disorders, cerebral palsy and Down Syndrome.

In 2011, Gabby applied and received a grant from The Covenant Foundation to expand the program.

“It was very affirming that someone outside our community recognized the worth and the potential of the program and that inspired me to think bigger,” she said, reflecting on that initial grant.

The Celebrations! program, where Gabby is the Project Coordinator, is still thriving at Mishkan Shalom and now, several other Philadelphia area synagogues offer the program as well. Mishkan Shalom also runs a program called Mitzvah Menshes, which is geared toward young adults, in the 18-30 age bracket, who have significant disabilities and a high level of support needs.

“It’s been so neat to see those same young adults who began in our Celebrations! programs back in 2010, still with us now, at our dinners, havdalah programs and participating in social action projects,” Gabby said.

For someone who doesn’t have a degree in Special Education, Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer’s training has truly been defined “on the job.” In 2011, while working part time for the Jewish Learning Venture in Philly on family engagement work, Rabbi Phil Warmflash approached Gabby and asked if she might be interested in working as an Inclusion Specialist for the Whole Community Inclusion program at the agency.

An initiative of JLV, Whole Community Inclusion serves all of greater Philadelphia, a five-county area, which includes over 50 synagogues. As Gabby explains, there are three distinct branches through which the staff aims to make change as it relates to disability inclusion: supporting professionals, direct service and support to parents and families and advocacy and awareness.

Along with a team of consultants and other professionals who provide trainings for staff, Gabby’s work is to integrate those three different columns.

“We’re focused on how to bring the task of inclusion onto the radar of clergy and educators in the Jewish community,” she said. “This might happen through a monthly gathering of agency professionals across the field where we get together and create community-based programming, or it could be via different trainings that we conduct for clergy, educators, and teachers, or via a webinar and seminar series for parents, and of course, by hosting sensory friendly events.”

Gabby emphasized the inclusion work JLV is doing is unique, because it synthesizes family engagement and congregational support with content in a truly specific way.

For example, on President’s Day, Gabby and her team will partner with jkidphilly to host a “Sensory-Friendly Access Day” tour of the National Museum of American Jewish History that’s completely geared toward kids who are have special sensory and cognitive needs. The tour will be short, and will take the group to specific spots in the museum where they can learn quietly, in a tactile and experiential way—a covered wagon they can sit in, quiet places where parents and kids can learn together, at their own pace.

“Our goal is to give families an experience that they might otherwise never have considered, given the particular needs of their child.”

A Bar Mitzvah is a particular Jewish experience that families of children with special needs might also consider impossible. But two years ago, Gabby’s son George celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, in a carefully curated and meaningful way. With the encouragement and support of their clergy and George’s teachers, Gabby and her family created a unique service that celebrated this rite of passage with music and visuals, in way that spoke to George.

Gabby and Rabbi Greenfield have since created a training for tutors and clergy about creating accommodations and modifications for B’nai Mitzvah services for young people of all abilities.

“Family is at the center of all of these experiences,” she said, reflecting on both George’s Bar Mitzvah but also on her inclusion work throughout greater Philadelphia. “We want families to feel connected to Judaism and supported by the community. We want them to feel like they can access Jewish education, and we work hard to make sure that happens.”

More to Consider

• Whole Community Inclusion Fundraiser, for #JDAIM18
• Faith, Companionship and Vulnerability: Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer’s ELI Talk
• Empowering Institutions, a Consortium through the Jewish Learning Venture
• How Musical Visual Bar Mitzvah Rituals Communicated My Son’s Essence (Ritual Well)
• Preparing for Our Son’s Bar Mitzvah Is a Coming of Age Moment for Us Too (WHYY-Philly Parenting)
• The New Normal (Blog about Disability, hosted by The Jewish Week)
• What If Esther Had a Child with Special Needs? (By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Covenant Foundation)

For those of us in the field of Jewish Inclusion, this is our hectic time of year – like tax season for accountants. Jewish Disabilities Awareness and Inclusion month (#JDAIM18) has just ended and we’ve been busier than usual raising awareness, promoting programs, celebrating inclusive Jewish organizations, and, overall, helping the entire Jewish community understand how (and why) to implement successful and meaningful inclusion.

We know that 1 in 5 people have some form of disability. 1 in 68 individuals is diagnosed with Autism and 1 million children in the US are Jewish; minimally, 200,000 school-aged Jewish children grapple with disabilities. We also know that an individual with special needs has a profound effect on how the entire family is (or is not) included in Jewish life.

Imagine the drastic repercussions when Jewish parents are told – again and again – that their child cannot be served in Jewish preschool or religious school, or that there is not a place for their child (and therefore their family) in the Shabbat service, or the teen youth group, or any number of opportunities that are afforded to families with more “typically-developing” children.

Many years ago, a Matan board member explained how having a Jewish child with Autism felt to her family. “It’s like having our noses pressed up against the window of a beautiful restaurant, but never being able to walk through the door.”

I never forgot that, and all these years later this notion of creating opportunities for meaningful inclusion guides my work daily.

Photo courtesy of Ilana Trachtman

For families, the path to finding the right Jewish education and involvement for your child and your family is not always easy. You might meet people along the way who don’t yet understand how your family’s participation will make their community stronger, and how your child’s individual gifts will create a more vibrant Jewish education for everyone. But you will also meet people who renew your faith, strengthen your resolve, and accompany you on your journey. Forging partnerships with the latter will have ripple effects that not only benefit your family, but the entire Jewish community.

Jewish institutions - schools, synagogues and even larger “umbrella” organizations - often tell me that inclusion feels overwhelming; that there are so many different aspects to consider, such a wide range of possibilities, so many variations on where to begin. They feel they can’t do everything, so they sometimes become stuck and don’t do anything.

I understand that feeling.

Certainly, though, as a Jewish community, we cannot afford to exclude 1 in 5 families from the fabric of Jewish life.

So what do we do?

We take the first step. Ask yourself what feels like a manageable place to begin. Maybe it’s having signage around your building that makes navigating the space easier; or a clergy member talking about inclusion from the pulpit. Perhaps it’s inviting an outside speaker to help open the conversation at your synagogue, religious school, youth group or day school; or perhaps you create an inclusion committee. Sometimes that first step is as simple as asking questions, encouraging open, honest communication - and actively listening to the answers. Remember that parents are the experts on their child. Don’t make assumptions: families with children with special needs are told “no” so often in their lives, they truly don’t know that you want to be inclusive unless you show them and tell them.

Say yes. Parents don’t expect you to have all the answers right from the start. Say yes instead of being yet another no in their lives. And then show families that you mean it. Communication is as much about the words you say as the environment you foster. Consider having a clearly marked and easy to find “quiet room” in your building where people can go when they feel overstimulated and need a break. Create a basket of fidget tools for your sanctuary or your classrooms, with an explanation of why it’s there and how to use it. Be sure your libraries include books that have characters with varying abilities (Matan is giving away a set of our favorites this month!), and that toys/materials in your classrooms or Shabbat babysitting rooms represent the wide gamut of people created in God’s image.

Examine your own marketing materials and literature about your Jewish organization. Do you have an inclusion statement? Is it easy to find? Do your programming fliers, bulletins, announcements and other means of outreach display verbiage related to inclusion? All of these things will “pop out” to families with a child with special needs; they are not used to experiencing these efforts towards inclusion, and you may be the difference for them between connecting to Jewish life and turning away from it.

We can easily be deceived into thinking that inclusion creates a better Jewish experience for individuals with special needs. Look again, though, and we begin to understand that inclusion benefits everyone. Indeed, our Jewish community is only as strong as its ability to include all members in the fabric of Jewish life. Doing so helps each of us recognize the unique strengths we all bring to the Jewish community, and that community cannot possibly be complete until we actively and intentionally welcome each other.

--Meredith Polsky 2017 Covenant Award Recipient

National Director of Institutes and Training, Matan

Developmental Support Coordinator, Temple Beth Ami Nursery School

More to Consider

• Jewish Schools: You Have A Moral Responsibility to Kids With Disabilities (The Jewish Week)
• A Disabilities Act for the Jewish Community (The Jewish Week)
• 8 Tips for Choosing a Hebrew School for Children With Special Needs (Matan Kids)

Book Recommendations

• Hope Will Find You – Naomi Levy
• The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
• The Out-of-Sync Child – Carol Stock Kranowitz
• The Blessing of a Skinned Knee – Wendy Mogel
• Kids Who Think Outside of the Box – Stephanie Lerner
• The Best Kind of Different – Shonda Schilling
• Expecting Adam – Martha Beck
• Now I See the Moon – Elaine Hall
• Switch – Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Artists have the capacity to be change agents in the work of Jewish education and organizational life; they help us shift perspective and engage in our work more creatively, more passionately, and with intention. Their presence is wasted if it is simply a side-show, or a gimmick to make boring content light and fun. Artists help us access our deepest potential.

Dr. Elliot Eisner, one of the most prolific advocates of arts education of our day, wrote in Arts and the Creation of Mind, “Education … is the process of learning to create ourselves, and it is what the arts, both as a process and as the fruits of that process, promote. Work in the arts is not only a way of creating performances and products; it is a way of creating our lives by expanding our consciousness, shaping our dispositions, satisfying our quest for meaning, establishing contact with others, and sharing a culture.”

If we enlist teaching artists in the project of creating our lives, as Eisner suggests, we will no doubt unlock richness, mystery and meaning that we would not otherwise access.

-Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, National Director, School of Education, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

Zoe Penina Baker

Zoe Penina Baker is a Jewish-American artist exploring themes of female identity through interactive installation and storytelling. Using interviews and social spaces like Shabbat dinners to collect stories from her peers, Zoe seeks to paint portraits of millennial Jewish life that explore their diverse, intersectional identities. Interested in exploring ideas about consumerism and personal identity through objects, Zoe collects materials from her own life, peers, and surroundings to develop archives of personal stories and ephemera on Jewish themes.

Her current project, “Miss Mitzvah,” will be on view at the Museum of Jewish Montreal in November 2017. Drawing from her own experience as a young woman growing up in Queens and the Five Towns on Long Island, Zoe’s own memories of over-the-top affairs and keeping up with the Joneses at Jewish day-school inspired a deep dive into her own past, often fraught with the search for meaning and value in Jewish life within a materialistic mall-driven secular culture.

From first aliyot to first kisses, the objects in the collection reflect the stories of interviewees from across North America, women on the precipice of adulthood post-college who have been invited to reflect on their first responsibilities and interests as budding adults on the eve of their Bat Mitzvahs. Their stories paint portraits of friendship, family values, insecurity, peer pressure, and immense beauty and value in the face of a truly confusing time of life.

Zoe also teaches high school students in Brandeis University’s BIMA program.

Zoe Penina Baker, from Dining Dreams, a storytelling project exploring intergeneration Jewish female identity

Sam Ball, of Citizen Film

Sam Ball is a documentary filmmaker and cofounder of Citizen Film, a not-for-profit production company dedicated to crafting documentaries with care and dignity. Citizen Film collaborates with cultural institutions, community organizations and independent producers to create films and online media that foster active engagement in cultural and civic life. Through its Digital Storytelling in Jewish Studies initiative, Citizen Film inspires exploration of Jewish subjects in the public sphere. For example, documentary artist Sam Ball and professor Francesco Spagnolo, curator of UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, are bringing young refugees and students together for an ongoing series of workshops, public exhibitions and events. October 23-25, they’ll communicate with hundreds of thousands of people in a large scale media installation on Times Square featuring a collection of objects and multimedia art that offers a striking glimpse of what it means to leave home, when home, in the words of refugee poet Warsan Shire, “is the mouth of a shark.”

Check out this trailer for one of the videos produced for the initiative: https://vimeo.com/220677251/3e6077063a

Sam Ball (From Shared Studios and Times Square Arts present Citizen Film's What We Carry With Us @ TimesSquare_Portal Oct. 23-25)

Tirtzah Bassel

Tirtzah Bassel is an Israeli artist based in New York. Her drawings, paintings and site-responsive installations explore the relationships between power and space, and the permeable borders between public and private domains. She also is the founder of PopUp for Change, a program of the 14th Street Y that brings teens together to transform urban spaces into vibrant PopUp food trucks, supper clubs and fashion boutiques that tackle issues of social justice. Tirtzah is assistant director of the Brandeis Institute of Music and Art at Brandeis University and a resident artist in the Chashama Workspace Program in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Pilgrimage (diptych), 84"x120", acrylic and oil on canvas, 2017

Ezra Benus

Ezra Benus is a visual artist based in New York. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, the University of Amsterdam, and completed his undergraduate degree in Studio Art and Jewish Studies at CUNY Hunter College. He recently completed the Jewish Studies Fellowship at Paideia Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. During the summer Ezra teaches art to high school students in Brandeis University's BIMA arts program. From paintings, sculptures, to performance art, Ezra's work engages with social and cultural assumptions revolving around the topics of disease/disability, and religion.

Ezra Benus, "Disease, Health, Remission

Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik

Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik is an artist living in Southern California. Isaac “cuts up paper and reassembles it into work made of clean lines and patterns, sinuous shapes and sharp edges, large fields of color and small intimate spaces.” Isaac also teaches a two-week mosaic and papercutting midrash immersion at URJ Camp Newman every summer.

In the summer of 2017, Isaac used tools and tile purchased with leftover dollars from a micro grant he received from The Covenant Foundation to make a four-foot wide and six-foot tall mosaic with his campers, that reflected the theme of “community.”

Together with his wife, Rabbi Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik, Isaac also leads workshops that integrate contemporary art, pop culture, and scholarship, which may be customized for your community. Learn more here.

And check out KIDS' work on Isaac’s blog: http://isaacb2.blogspot.com/

Courtesy of Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik, from URJ Camp Newman Summer 2017 

Ariel Burger

Ariel Burger is the creator of Illuminated Jewish Stories, which began as an illustration project, and has expanded to include adult learning, professional development workshops, and storytelling seminars. This past year, the themes of otherness, the search for home, and hospitality emerged as central and relevant. Together, groups of adult learners share stories of their ancestors' migration to this country, as well as their own experiences of feeling marginalized or welcomed. We all have messy and multivalent identities, and by putting these stories in dialogue with Jewish Aggadic (narrative) texts, we can shed new light on our own stories and reveal hidden diversities and hidden commonalities between us. The combination of storytelling, text study, and art making leads to powerful insight and new, transformative perspectives.

Ariel Burger (Sara Chana at the Tip of the Church Tower, pen and ink over gouache)

Hanan Harchol

Hanan Harchol is a New York-city based artist, animator, filmmaker, classical guitarist and educator. Hanan is currently producing a feature-length narrative film, based on his experiences as a public high school teacher in New York City. Written and directed by Harchol, the film takes an honest look at the challenges that new inner-city public school teachers face, why so many leave the profession, and what leads some to stay. The film features Harchol's former students as actors, and is currently scheduled for a December, 2018 release.  Check out this link for more: www.hananharchol.com/film.

Hanan also recently taught a course in filmmaker to Education students in the HUC-JIR Masters in Education program. Read about it, here.

Hanan Harchol (from About a Teacher, feature film)

Aaron Henne

Aaron Henne is the Artistic Director of theatre dybbuk, which creates “provocative theatrical presentations and innovative educational opportunities based on Jewish folklore, rituals and history.” Henne was also the Dianne Luboff Scholar at the Cutter Colloqium at HUC-JIR this past August. Working in close collaboration with Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, National Director of the School of Education, Aaron facilitated a series of creative, collaborative exercises for upcoming leaders in the field.

Currently, theatre dybbuk is in development on lost tribes, a new touring multidisciplinary performance piece which utilizes stories connected to the lost tribes of Israel to investigate questions of artistic expression, belonging, equal treatment, integration, appropriation, and assimilation in our world today. It will premiere in February 2018, with an accompanying educational program exploring questions related to identity, and continue touring throughout the year.

Read more, here:http://www.theatredybbuk.org/lost-tribes

Aaron Henne (From theatre dybbuk's exagoge. Photo by Taso Papadakis)

Alicia Jo Rabins

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer and Torah teacher in Portland, OR, and the creator of Girls in Trouble.

Most recently, Alicia worked on a project with Lisa Schonberg, a rock drummer in Portland who is Jewish but never had a bat mitzvah. Alicia taught Lisa to chant Torah (they started with the alphabet!) and about Judaism, and prepared her for a bat mitzvah (in Alicia’s backyard!) In return, Lisa taught Alicia ato play the drums and compose for percussion. Together, in chavruta, they researched the ancient Near Eastern roots of women's drumming as well as women's spiritual leadership. Having both recently turned 40, they see the project as one that’s also about lifelong learning, and what it means to learn new skills beyond the early years.

Here’s a trailer for the forthcoming film about their project, a Drummer’s Bat Mitzvah:

http://www.lisaschonberg.com/drummers-bat-mitzvah/

More projects Alicia is working on right now:

The Matriarchs: A Love Story (working title) - a spiritual memoir written around and through the stories of women in Torah. About growing up as an artist and a secular Jew; going deep into Jewish texts for two years in Jerusalem, where I fell in love with the stories of women in Torah; and finally, coming home and finding a path to integrate all that wisdom with daily life in America.

 A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff: The Film - a featurette-length film (30-40 minutes) adapted from my one-woman chamber-rock opera about the intersection of finance and spirituality, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Told from the perspective of an artist working in an empty Wall Street office during the Great Recession, this film explores the boundaries of community, and the very human desire to believe that one messianic figure can finally escape the laws of nature - and finance.

Alicia Jo Rabins'- A Drummer's Bat Mitzvah (Photo Credit, Peter Rabins)

Jon Adam Ross

Jon Adam Ross is an actor, playwright and Jewish educator based in New York. Ross is also the creator of The In[heir]itance Project, which has created five plays made with five communities over three years. Each play is inspired by the narrative of a matriarch or patriarch from the book of Genesis and devised from interactions with communities, opening up the creative process so the audience can participate and ultimately have a deeper connection to the performance and the biblical narratives that inspire the project. Currently, Ross is exploring the biblical narratives of Sarah and Hagar with interfaith community members in Kansas City.

“What we've learned since holding open rehearsals in Kansas City at a church, a mosque, and a synagogue, is that there is no universal true version of this biblical narrative. There is only his truth and her truth and their truth and our truth. We're making theater between a rock and a hard place. And though it's hard work, it feels like sacred work. Putting communities in conversation with each other and their own shared narratives. If not now, when?”

Jon Adam Ross (from The Sarah Play Open Rehersals, Kansas City, September 2017)

Ilana Trachtman

Ilana Trachtman, a filmmaker living in Philadelphia, is currently at work on Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, a documentary feature film telling an unknown story of the civil rights movement. In 1960, three miles from the US Capitol, Maryland’s Glen Echo Amusement Park was tenaciously holding onto Jim Crow. Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, a small group of Howard University students started their own Non-Violent Action Group (NAG) and targeted the Park’s whites-only carousel.  Across the street lay the community of Bannockburn, settled in the 40's by leftist Jews prohibited from buying homes inside the District. In an unprecedented alliance, Bannockburn residents joined the Howard students in sit-ins and pickets at the amusement park. The army of white foot soldiers were largely "housewives" who came out with their strollers, sandwiches, and homemade signs. After ten sweltering weeks and 24 arrests, this interracial partnership confronted the park owners, Maryland’s Jim Crow laws, the American Nazi Party, and the Supreme Court. The picket line trained several of the 1961 Freedom Riders, including Stokeley Carmichael. Eight surviving protesters tell their stories, exploring how following this first impulse to activism transformed their lives.

See a 6 minute sample reel, here:

https://Vimeo.com/123725549

Case-sensitive password: GlenEcho30

Ilana Trachtman (From Ain't No Back to a Merry Go Round)

The Jewish Film Institute

In partnership with ITVS (Independent Television Service), JFI continues its young adult Jewish engagement using film and media to promote dialogue across geographies as a shared community building experience. JFI on Demand for the Next Wave and Talk Amongst Yourselves are hybrid online/live platforms that take the film viewing experience outside of the theatres for smaller, peer-based opportunities for education, dialogue and opportunities for community building.

With support from the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund and the Covenant Foundation, JFI combines its own on demand titles and live screenings with new platforms for a multi-purposed experience of film, community and dialogue. Using OVEE (Online Video Engagement Experience), JFI can enable an an online screening room experience that augments film viewing by encouraging engagement through the use of a chat bar, polls, Q&As, and emoticons in real time while watching video content.

Learn more at https://jfi.org/year-round/talk-amongst-yourselves.

JFI (From San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Summer 2017)

Robert M. Beren Academy, Houston, Texas

10th Grade, Colleen Bryant, Art and Photography Teacher

Robert M. Beren Academy is a Modern Orthodox day school that adheres to standards of academic excellence and exemplary moral conduct as it prepares its students to become self-confident, compassionate, practicing Jews as well as committed citizens and life-long learners.

Congregation Beth Israel, Scottsdale, Arizona

8th Grade, Jessielyn Kreitzer, Teacher

Congregation Beth Israel is a Reform Jewish Congregation in Scottsdale, Arizona, serving over 800 families and the larger community.  Ma’ayan (well-spring) is Congregation Beth Israel’s young adult education program for 8th-12th graders where students continue their life-long Jewish learning as they develop their Jewish identities through a variety of innovative programs, lessons, and experiences.

Sager Solomon Schechter, Northbrook, Illinois

7th Grade, Irit Alkalay, Hebrew Teacher

Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago is an independent Jewish day school where a unique combination of General and Judaic Studies imparts a deeply-rooted values system enabling critical thinkers to thrive.

Park Avenue Synagogue, New York, New York

7th Grade, Jennifer Weisbord, Photography Instructor, Ellen Alt, Artist in Residence

Park Avenue Synagogue’s Congregational school engages 7th graders to study their Jewish Identity through photography. The class meets once a week and culminates in a photo exhibition with a theme the students help create.

As the school year winds down and educators look toward the less-hectic pace of summer, here’s a slate of professional development opportunities for you to consider. Click through to learn more and let us know in the comments below what you plan to do to enrich your professional life this summer!