Milwaukeean Judy Mann has been an organizer and activist all her life in secular realms — until now.
Even her Jewish communal work — in Milwaukee as executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations (1984-90); in Israel for the Melitz Centers for Jewish-Zionist Education (1990-97) — has focused on secular and political aspects of Jewish life.
But that is about to change. As of July 1 “at the latest,” Mann will become the first executive director of Synagogue 2000, a national project “devoted to the spiritual transformation of synagogue structure, culture and practice,” according to its website.
One of the founders of this group, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, told The Chronicle that after a national search Mann was chosen for the post “for a variety of personal characteristics,” including “her stellar reputation in the Milwaukee community and beyond; her remarkable history of success in everything she has undertaken; her commitment to Jewish values; her demonstrated capacity to work creatively and collaboratively with a national team … and her overwhelming desire to see synagogues renewed and centrally located as spiritual centers for Jewish life.”
Moreover, said Hoffman, who is professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, Mann’s “work for Planned Parenthood [she has been a lobbyist and chief executive officer for Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin] demonstrates her humanitarian commitment; and a large part of the Synagogue 2000 program is the presumption that as moral centers synagogues will allow Jews the vehicle to pursue social justice in their communities. Jewish religious tradition is inconceivable without a very central place given to social concerns.”
Mann, in an interview, said, “I can’t isolate myself as a Jew religiously, separate from myself as part of the Jewish people. Synagogues have the potential for including all these aspects of me.”
According to Mann, Synagogue 2000’s founders believe that synagogues often need to do more than just “piecemeal” adding of programs to change themselves and become more attractive places for Jews.
Synagogue 2000’s staff want synagogues to go through a process of examining themselves in their totality — everything from how new people are greeted when they walk in the door to architecture to rabbi-lay relations to music to staff issues, Mann said.
Some 70 percent of all American Jews “touch base” with a synagogue at some point in their lives, but only about 50 percent of them stay, and often in “a superficial way,” Mann said. Many treat synagogues like a retail store; they come to obtain something they want — like a religious education to bar/bat mitzvah for their children — and then leave.
But the staff of Synagogue 2000 — which has offices in New York and Los Angeles — thinks synagogues can become “vital communities of meaning” where people can “stay for their entire lives,” Mann said.
Since its founding in 1996 by Hoffman and Dr. Ron Wolfson, professor of education at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, Synagogue 2000 has worked with individual synagogues and with groups of synagogues of all denominations in Colorado and in the Washington, D.C., and Detroit areas; and is launching a project in Westchester County, N.Y.
It also offers consulting to individual synagogues (so far, none in Wisconsin, said Hoffman) and has launched “a variety of research and development projects to learn more about synagogue life,” Hoffman said. It also has begun to produce a series of publications on synagogue transformation in cooperation with Jewish Lights Publications.
It has a budget of “close to $2 million a year at the moment,” Hoffman estimated, and is funded by private donations, foundations and some Jewish federations, he said.
But all this “needs organizing [and] solidifying of its base” to create “an institution that has staying power,” said Mann. “That’s my job,” which she will do from the New York office.
Hoffman and his colleagues believe that “her leadership will bring us to the next level of what we can do for synagogue life,” Hoffman said.
MORE STORIES
Loading ...