Repair the World – To launch a program that will equip Jewish educators across the country with skills and tools to facilitate deep and meaningful Jewish service learning for their constituents.

What have you found is the key to successful Jewish service learning?

The key to successful Jewish service learning is creating experiences that inspire participants to explore their Jewish identity and their relationship to the broader Jewish community. It’s about asking them to grapple with big questions:

• Who am I as a Jew?
• What do I want my Jewish identity to be?
• What is my responsibility to my community and to others?
• Where do I want to find Jewish community?

At Repair the World, we believe that meaningful growth happens when participants wrestle with these complex questions and explore the tensions, such as “to whom am I responsible,” that emerge through a service experience. By engaging in this reflective process, they deepen their connection to Jewish values, community, and peoplehood.

What makes you most excited about this new project?

What excites me most about this project is the potential impact we can have on the field of Jewish service learning, and that through this program, we can begin to build a more widely recognized Jewish service learning landscape. This means we won’t just be equipping a new cadre of Jewish educators with these skills—we’ll also be building a field with trained educators who can take their expertise and bring it to the Jewish community. Ultimately, this will help us enrich service experiences with meaningful Jewish learning, allowing participants to find deeper meaning and connect more profoundly with their Jewish identity.

What’s the most meaningful experience you’ve had as an educator?

The most meaningful experience I’ve had as an educator was staffing a program in Hungary for Jewish teens who were in a camp setting with Jews from around the world. Through their experiences in facilitated spaces with Jews from around the world, they began to understand that they were part of something much bigger than their Jewish lives in North America. Through this experience, they began to explore their own identities and understand their place within global Jewish peoplehood. Supporting them as they expanded their perspective beyond the American Jewish experience was powerful. This experience reinforced my belief that grappling with identity and values deepens commitment and connection to Jewish community and peoplehood.