A Time for Collaboration

by Audrey Lichter

We are all not doing well… Bravado aside, as I travel the country and speak to the “organized” Jewish community – Synagogues, Federations, JCCs, Day Schools – except for a very select few, we are all struggling for members, for the attention of the Jews. Covid fatigue takes many forms. For one thing, we all got used to a slower pace… Most things, from food to Jewish education to fundraising events, were  delivered either at our door, or on our laptops, as we sipped coffee in our casual clothes. It is possible to stream Saturday morning services or to log on to one of the hundreds of Jewish educational classes, lectures, or periodicals. For teens, they established more of their life online. The  aftershocks of Covid lockdown is now being felt in higher social anxiety and depression of young people. We are tired and bombarded with choices that compete with real social interaction and actually getting up and joining something. In times of scarcity, our tendency is to buckle down, trim our sails and work hard to get noticed.

What we need more than anything else though, is to talk to each other
and figure out together what the sustainable new models of Jewish education look like.

Here are a few thoughts: 

• Day schools are increasingly serving as the Jewish community for families, as many of them do not belong to synagogues. As family education organizations, what resources do they need to fulfill this role? Who will provide that? How will they integrate into the communities they live in?
• Programs for young adults… One Table, Moishe House, NextGen programs, all need to join partnerships with the communities they live in to provide a holistic Jewish experience for young adults and to introduce them to the larger community they live in.This means collaborating with the “established” Jewish community to provide resources and opportunities for engagement.
• Antisemitism is on the rise, and everyone is talking about it. Synagogues are looking like closed fortresses, and Federations are sponsoring community wide antisemitism workshops and safety procedures. Unfortunately here is where we can come together and it dovetails with conversations about Israel and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories. We can seize this moment to think about what teens need to prepare for the college campus, and what we  all need to know about Jewish history to put our current reality into perspective. The sad reality is that we have not done a great job educating our teens or ourselves and we should get more serious about that. I just returned from the ClubZ teen conference. There I found serious educated Zionist teens ready to take leadership roles. What can we learn from this model? These are serious times, and we need serious conversations and lots of community dialogue. No one has the answers, but together we can and must meet the challenge and do better.