Shutaf Inclusion Programs – To disseminate online training materials and resources for camp, religious school, and youth program professionals throughout the North American Jewish community to enable them to better serve participants of all abilities.

How will use of the guide enable Jewish institutions to better serve constituents with diverse needs?

The Jewish community of today represents diverse needs and differences. Understanding the power of that diversity as well as learning how to welcome and represent those differences—with knowledge, professionalism, and the reflective conversations needed for community and personal buy-in—is still a work in progress. The Shutaf Inclusion Guide is accessible, with easy-to-use resources that can be adapted to different settings and different needs—great for lay leaders as well as professionals. Workshops and added support from Shutaf will allow Jewish professionals to develop and sharpen their inclusive language and skills, in order to work more flexibly and creatively in informal and formal educational settings.

What are the most pressing issues in the Jewish community and the field of Jewish education, in your opinion?

The Jewish community, along with Jewish educational settings—formal and informal—must reckon with a kind of thinking that has created longtime barriers to those seen as different, especially those Jews who have more significant developmental needs, be they physical, cognitive, mental health, or emotional/behavioral. It’s time to talk deeply about these barriers at all levels of Jewish life—how and why they came about as well as how they can be removed, for good—while investing in the infrastructure that will grow our commitment to inclusive thinking, discarding the physical, cognitive, and emotional obstacles that have limited our true development as a community of tomorrow.

What inspires you to keep doing the work that you do?

Hope for a more accepting tomorrow for Jews of all abilities. Shutaf started small, with a dream of building a better kind of informal education program—inclusive, innovative, professional—where diagnosis wasn’t a barrier to entry. What we found was an opportunity for learning and growth, with the opportunity to share that inclusive Torah to Jewish professionals at all levels, so that children, teens, and young adults of all abilities can experience the power of a Jewish educational experience, formal and informal, with the support they need and deserve. Together, we’re creating inclusive social change, for a Jewish world we’re all striving towards.