JFS, JCC, MJF to partner with national outreach organization
Welcoming the stranger is a central Jewish teaching. It’s so important that it is repeated more than 30 times in the Bible, said Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky, Ph.D., executive director of the New York-based Jewish Outreach Institute.
But we usually think of the principle as applying to total outsiders. What if the stranger is an unaffiliated Jew, or a non-Jew married to a Jew? Is the community welcoming then?
Olitzky and his organization seek to help it become more so. He was in Milwaukee recently for the launching of two new outreach programs to be run by two of this community’s major Jewish organizations: Jewish Family Services and the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. Both programs are being funded by a grant from the Helen Bader Foundation.
JFS will create a “healing center,” which will be not a physical place but rather “an umbrella for services and programs” that “add the spiritual component” to physical and mental health issues, according to JFS executive vice president Elliot Lubar.
The JCC will create a broad outreach effort to unaffiliated and intermarried families, to “find these people, build bridges and … open doors to the Jewish community,” said Jay Roth, JCC executive vice president.
Both of these efforts will be created in consultation with JOI and with help in coordination and disseminating information to the community from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, which encouraged the initiatives.
“The federation’s strategic renewal plan had as one of its priorities outreach to unaffiliated and interfaith families,” said Betty Lieberman, the federation’s director of planning and strategic services. “We’re happy that two agencies are expanding their work in this area because we think it is important to the community. We’re anxious to have people feel at home in federation activities and in the larger Jewish community.”
This past spring, the Helen Bader Foundation’s Jewish Life and Learning program area made a grant of $75,000 for each of three years (total $225,000) for these efforts.
Of this, one-third will go to the JOI for consultation, and one-third each to JFS and the JCC for the specific programs, according to Tobey Libber, program officer for Jewish Life and Learning at the Bader Foundation.
“The reason why [funding these efforts] became an important opportunity for the Helen Bader Foundation is because of the potential for service to two of our largest and most effective Jewish communal agencies in areas that they would not otherwise be able to do,” said Libber.
And the foundation, he added, “is eager to support new projects that will benefit the Jewish community of Milwaukee.”
At both agencies, the specific content of the programs will be designed in consultation with JOI, said Lubar and Roth. Moreover, there will likely be opportunities for collaboration between the programs, they agreed.
JFS has hired Michael Luber to coordinate the healing center, and Marge Eiseman will staff the JCC’s program.
Lubar said that many Jewish family service agencies have begun offering healing centers as part of their pool of services because, he said, “there is a feeling” that “we have not paid enough attention to the integration of spirituality and emotion” in physical health and mental health issues, he said.
A Jewish healing center “makes use of Jewish tradition and the community to achieve spiritual wholeness [or] offer comfort and perspective in the face of illness, pain or loss,” said Lubar.
Exactly how Milwaukee’s JFS will offer this is in the planning stages. Coordinator Luber, who has a doctorate in psychology and himself has muscular dystrophy, said, “Our hope is to start out slowly with a few programs and then build.” Early efforts could include visitation programs for the homebound, support groups for the bereaved and for caregivers, and creation of a Web site, Luber said.
A side benefit from such centers is that unaffiliated and interfaith families often find them a more comfortable Jewish spiritual or communal environment than a synagogue or other institution, Lubar said. Moreover, they can be gateways to other community services, for example to a meditation or yoga class offered by a JCC, or to a healing service offered by a synagogue, he said.
The JCC’s outreach program is also in the planning stages. “How we do it, the tone, all need to be thought through,” said Roth.
He said Eiseman will “be working as part of a team with the [Harold and Terry Nash JCC] Parenting Center staff and our Jewish educator to define the kind of programs and then determine how we’re going to implement them. We’re also in the process of establishing a committee, hopefully with interfaith families who can help us understand the dynamics of outreach to that population.”
Eiseman, who has wide experience as a Jewish educator in the Milwaukee area, started work about three weeks ago. She said her position is “a perfect blend of salesmanship, Jewish education and programming, all things I love to do.”
Moreover, she will be seeking volunteers for such projects as engaging people in conversation about Passover in area grocery stores prior to the JCC’s scheduled Passover event on March 29. “I hope a lot of people feel they can be my partners in doing this outreach work,” she said.
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