Jewish community

Jewish Communities of Meaning: An Emerging Trend

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I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past 20 years in the synagogue transformation space.  I currently direct CLI, a two-year fellowship for rabbis on visionary thinking and change management. On our website, we curate a monthly synagogue innovation blog which includes some truly transformational ideas that are re-imagining synagogues for the better.

But notwithstanding the work that I do to help transform synagogues into vibrant spiritual communities, I am persuaded that, in the future, synagogues will no longer be the only platform where American Jews will experience Jewish life. This is why in 2015, I helped to launch Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network,  whose objective is to identify, convene and build capacity among a growing network of new models of Jewish identity and community.   

 

This article appeared in The Jewish Peoplehood Papers, Vol 26a, published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education in September 2020. It was subsequently distributed by eJewishPhilanthropy on September 29, 2020. 

The premise of Kenissa is that, even as legacy Jewish organizations continue to lose market share, there is a growing ecosystem of new organizations and communities that are capturing the interest of next generation Jews who long for contexts of meaning that can enrich their lives. And while many Jews will find such experiences outside of Jewish contexts, a large percentage of Jews are more than open to having those experiences delivered in a Jewish key. I advanced this idea in an extended fashion in my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future.

The Kenissa initiative, an outgrowth of the book, has allowed us to support the emerging network of Jewish communities of meaning that are attracting Jews within one or more of the following six thematic frameworks:

  • Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
  • Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
  • Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
  • Kehilla – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission;
  • Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture.
  • Shomrei Adama–Pursuing a lifestyle that is ecologically responsible and sustainable, including new communal living arrangements.

These frameworks will be familiar to anyone who is actively engaged in Jewish life. Synagogues, JCC’s and even Federations, could likely categorize many elements of their respective programs into one or more of these themes. These legacy organizations helped to define Jewish life in the 20th century and they were the primary institutions that shaped the Jewish identity of American Jews during that time. Today, however, with some rare exceptions, those same institutions are having a hard time attracting next generation Jews to their programs.  The decline in membership at JCCs and synagogues and the dropoff in the number of donors to Jewish Federations has led to much concern on the part of the stewards of the organized Jewish community.

But one would be misled about the future trajectory of Jewish identity in North America if your only metric happens to be membership in legacy Jewish organizations. The social economy today is such that a person with a good idea can, without too much difficulty, use the organizing power of social media to gather Jews (along with their non-Jewish partners and friends because it is rare for the younger generation to be exclusive in the way previous Jewish generations were) to do, just about anything.

In fact, since 2016 Kenissa has been identifying and convening new models of Jewish identity and community and inviting them to be part of a national network of creatives who can learn from each other, partner with one another, and acquire the tools, skills and strategies to be successful entrepreneurs.

We have found that many of the entrepreneurs themselves tend to be bnai bayit, young people who benefitted from Jewish youth movements, camps, day schools, Hillels and trips to Israel. Yet they did not want to partake of their parents’ version of Judaism. Typical of millennials, passion for their respective projects grows out of their ability to own and re-mix Judaism in their own, unique generational and cultural idioms. Not surprisingly, the projects that they are launching attract next gen Jews in ways that much better funded legacy Jewish organizations cannot hope to do. Each represents a relatively new organization or community that is attracting Jews who might otherwise never affiliate with or even walk into a Jewish legacy institution.

There is certainly a narrative out there, supported by data, that suggests that Jewish life is in decline. Having worked closely with Jewish social entrepreneurs and their organizations for many years now, I see a very different story. Our database now lists close to 400 organizations that have been created since the year 2000. Many of them are attracting Jews who never previously had an association with any Jewish organization. On our website, you can read about how each community of meaning has succeeded in attracting people to their program. Despite the fact that most of the organizations we work with are small and under-resourced, legacy Jewish organizations have much to learn from these start-ups.

In the next phase of our work, we will be exploring how to build partnerships between these emerging communities of meaning and legacy Jewish organizations. Each could benefit from collaboration. Stewards of Federations, synagogues and JCC’s should not try to coopt these entrepreneurs and their organizations. They should provide financial support, organizational expertise, mentorship and then…prepare to do a lot of listening. The Jewish community is being reimagined in exciting ways. Pay attention.

Jewish life is not the only dimension of our culture that has experienced a flip from top down to bottom up. We are living in a “maker” culture—people want to have a hand in shaping the very culture that they consume.  There are many who will bemoan the weakening of Jewish institutions, the decline in affiliation rates with the organized Jewish community and the departure from longstanding norms regarding everything from intermarriage to gender identity to the relationship with the State of Israel. For sure, some of these trends are cause for concern. But this is not the Judaism of the last century; it is the Judaism of the 21st century. We have had numerous leaders of the Jewish community come to our Kenissa national gatherings and walk away deeply impressed with the passion and creativity of this next generation of Jewish leaders. 

I think that it is cause for celebration, witnessing the ways that Jews are engaged in the redefinition of Jewish identity and community.

Covid-19 Update:

What a difference a few months make! Our lives and the way we engage with institutions has been radically altered. And, at least from the vantage point of the U.S., it does not seem likely that we will return to our pre-Covid reality for at least six months, and perhaps, for a year or more.

The Kenissa Network continues to be active with weekly blogs, occasional webinars and periodic collaborations between Kenissa organizations because of the relationships that got built at nine national gatherings we held over the past five years. Yet other parts of our plan are on hold. Specifically, for the last two years, we hosted senior executives from about 20 of the largest Jewish Federations in North America. We wanted them to see, first hand, what we had been seeing: a group of social entrepreneurs, passionate about Jewish life, who were devising new ways of exploring Jewish life and community and attracting a good number of next Gen Jews to their programs. The vast majority of the organizations we invited were not known to the Federation professionals, even though most of them held the “engagement” portfolio for their respective communities.

Since “seeing is believing”, our plan over the next several years was to loop back to the Federations that sent us their senior staffers and to begin exploring with each community what it might look like to pro-actively reach out to these younger, edgier organizations and to explore some combination of collaboration, seed funding, skill training and/or cohort based leadership development. We had clearly succeeded in making the case for this agenda and the next few years were going to be our opportunity to advance this agenda, community by community.

This part of our plan is now on hold. These very same Federations are faced with trying to save their legacy institutions from imploding. Buildings sit vacant, fundraising is way down, valuable professional staff are being let go or drastically cut back. Ironically, many of the organizations in the Kenissa Network may prove to be more nimble than legacy institutions with budgets exponentially larger than their own. It may well be that as the Jewish community is forced to re-assess everything from scratch, they may find in the robust network of Jewish start-up organizations, new ways of manifesting the heritage of a 4000 year old tradition.

Re-Imagining Jewish Communal Life

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I have spent a considerable amount of my professional time over the past twenty years in the field of synagogue transformation. In my book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue, I argued that the American synagogue was stuck in a model that developed in the two decades that followed World War II. That model—the synagogue center—was well suited for Jews who were moving into suburban neighborhoods and who found themselves living among Christians for whom church affiliation was a highly-regarded American cultural norm. Jews, wanting to be good Americans, built and joined synagogues and it fed an explosive growth of Jewish congregational life. 

 

This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 1, 2019.

For a whole host of reasons (detailed elsewhere), that synagogue-center model is at risk today. The aging and shrinking of the memberships of those institutions is taking place across the country. There are synagogues that are thriving today but they have accomplished this by evolving into very different types of institutions. Books, articles and field work by the likes of Larry Hoffman, Ron Wolfson, Amy Asin, Hayim Herring and others have pointed the way for strategies that are far better suited to the 21st century Jewish community. In my own work with rabbis, congregational lay leaders and rabbinical students, I use the term “covenantal community” to describe the next stage of the American synagogue. The Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI) is a two-year fellowship for rabbis who are being trained to bring elements of this new thinking into their communities and CLI’s monthly blog on synagogue innovation (which can be subscribed to at no charge) features some of the best ideas and most successful innovations happening in synagogue spaces across North America.  

Notwithstanding the work that I do to help transform synagogues into vibrant spiritual communities, I am persuaded that, in the future, synagogues will no longer be the only platform where American Jews will experience Jewish life. This is why I helped to launch Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network,  whose objective is to identify, convene and build capacity among a growing network of new models of Jewish identity and community.   

The premise of Kenissa is that, even as legacy Jewish organizations continue to lose market share, there is a growing ecosystem of new organizations and communities that are capturing the interest of next generation Jews who long for contexts of meaning that can enrich their lives. And while many Jews will find such experiences outside of Jewish contexts, a large percentage of Jews are more than open to having those experiences delivered in a Jewish key. I advanced this idea in an extended fashion my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. The Kenissa initiative has allowed us to support the emerging network of Jewish communities of meaning that are attracting Jews within one or more of the following five thematic frameworks:

  • Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
  • Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
  • Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
  • Kehilla – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission;
  • Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture.

These frameworks will be familiar to anyone who is actively engaged in Jewish life. Synagogues, JCC’s and even Federations, could likely categorize many elements of their respective programs into one or more of these themes. These legacy organizations helped to define Jewish life in the 20th century and they were the primary institutions that shaped the Jewish identity of American Jews during that time. Today, however, with some rare exceptions, those same institutions are having a hard time attracting next generation Jews to their programs.  The decline in membership at JCCs and synagogues and the dropoff in the number of donors to Jewish Federations has led to much concern on the part of the stewards of the organized Jewish community.

But one would be misled about the future trajectory of Jewish identity in North America if your only metric happens to be membership in legacy Jewish organizations. The social economy today is such that a person with a good idea can, without too much difficulty, use the organizing power of social media to gather Jews (along with their non-Jewish partners and friends because it is rare for the younger generation to be exclusive in the way previous Jewish generations were) to do, just about anything.

In fact, since 2016 Kenissa has been identifying and convening new models of Jewish identity and community and inviting them to be part of a national network of creatives who can learn from each other, partner with one another, and acquire the tools, skills and strategies to be successful entrepreneurs. We have found that many of the entrepreneurs themselves tend to be bnai bayit, young people who benefitted from Jewish youth movements, camps, day schools, Hillels and trips to Israel. Yet they did not want to partake of their parents’ version of Judaism. Typical of millennials, passion for their respective projects grows out of their ability to own and re-mix Judaism in their own, unique generational and cultural idioms. Not surprisingly, the projects they are launching attract next gen Jews in ways that much better funded legacy Jewish organizations cannot hope to do. Each represents a relatively new organization or community that is attracting Jews who might otherwise never affiliate with or even walk into a Jewish legacy institution.

We like to call the groups that we convene “emerging communities of meaning”. And in that spirit, Kenissa itself is constantly emerging and evolving. We started the project with a certain concept of how the themes cited above related to each other. But then we started to invite the participants themselves to re-imagine the themes and we invited them to create an original graphic. What resulted was a deluge of creativity that got everyone totally buzzing.

We have now posted on our website over 20 of these original graphics, with a brief commentary by the Kenissa Network member who created it. Each is, essentially, a commentary on the nature of contemporary Jewish life in North America and the aspects of the Jewish heritage that animate the Jewish community.

The graphics represent astounding creativity. Even as there continue to be rabbis, scholars and Jewish communal professionals who have the standing to write articles and books on the nature of Jewish life, we are living in an age when, increasingly, Jews with no official “standing” are defining for themselves the meaning of being Jewish.

Jewish life is not the only dimension of our culture that has experienced the flip from top down to bottom up. We are living in a “maker” culture—people want to have a hand in shaping the very culture that they consume.  There are many who will bemoan the weakening of Jewish institutions, the decline in affiliation rates with the organized Jewish community and the departure from longstanding norms regarding everything from marriage to gender and the meaning of family. Yet there is also reason to celebrate the ways that Jews are engaged in the redefinition of Jewish identity and community. These emerging Jewish communities of meaning reflect exciting new energy that should not only be celebrated by those who care about the Jewish future but also financially supported.

So I invite you to visit the gallery of graphics to stimulate your own thinking about the nature of Jewish life. Ponder the graphic and its symbolism. Read the commentary by the creator of the graphic. Imagine how you would portray the relationship between the themes.

This is how we will re-invent Jewish life together.

____________________

Comments appearing on the eJewishPhilanthropy site:

Yashar koach to Rabbi Sid Schwarz. Chai Mitzvah has been part of Kenissa for a number of years and we have had the good fortune to attend a number of gatherings of these emerging communities. Each time, I leave with a renewed faith in the power of Judaism to allow each generation to claim ownership of our long and rich spiritual and cultural legacy. We need to work harder at building bridges between our legacy organizations and these emerging communities to both continue learning from each other and continue the multi-generational dialogue that is so critical for a healthy and robust Jewish community.

                                          Audrey Lichter, Executive Director, Chai Mitzvah

***

Yashar koach Rabbi Sid!  I so appreciate the way you name, make space for and embrace what is current in the Jewish landscape. Through your encouragement and efforts many of us are able to revel in the sense that Judaism is thriving amidst the changes that are taking hold. Thank you for being a champion and for being open and curious about what is possible. I look forward to continue to build, grow and evolved together!

                                           Keshira haLev Fife, Kesher Pittsburgh

***

Totally agree that we have to cultivate “bottom-up” models of Jewish life, both in emerging and longstanding communities/organizations. The more we own our Jewish lives, the more energy we’ll devote to sustaining Jewish traditions and values, passing them along and making them relevant to future generations. Kudos to Rabbi Sid and to all of the CLI and Kenissa participants for your devotion to this work!

                                               Roger Studley, Urban Moshav

Jewish Communities of Meaning: Ideas Matter

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I recently was invited to make a presentation to deans from eight different rabbinical seminaries. The topic was how to better equip their students with some tools so that they can be more successful at driving innovation in the institutions that they will serve in the future. I observed that when I founded a synagogue (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD), and a national educational foundation (PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values) in the late 1980’s, there was neither grant money available for Jewish social entrepreneurs nor customized training programs for the handful of us who were trying to build new organizations. Today, there are several pots of money available to Jewish social entrepreneurs and numerous options for training. These are developments to be celebrated.

Note: This article originally appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 15, 2018.

When we launched Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network in 2015, it was with the express purpose to do more than just replicate other communal efforts to provide training in the hard skills of fundraising, board development, branding/marketing, taking projects to scale, management, etc. As necessary as those skills are, we believe that we, in North America, are witnessing a sea change in the way next generation Jews will access the core values and content of the Jewish tradition. We are not trying to build a better phone, a faster computer, or a more fuel-efficient car. We are exploring new ways to pass down a sacred heritage in a cultural context in which conventional religious institutions are distinctly out of favor, especially among millennials.

We distinguish the way we are building out the national Kenissa Network from most programs designed to support Jewish-content social entrepreneurs in three ways. First, we take as a premise that many Jews today resonate to core values of Judaism if delivered in a culturally relevant manner. Not only do we reject the Jewish-lite approach; we believe that the more authentic the Jewish content is, the more compelling it is to next generation Jews.

Second, we have identified five core themes that we think animate most of the organizations in the Jewish innovation ecosystem. We often call these themes “portals” because they are the passage-ways that Jews will take to encounter Judaism on their own terms. It is this understanding that yielded our initiative’s name, Kenissa, the Hebrew word for “entrance-way”. The themes/portals are:

• Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
• Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
• Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
• Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture;
• Kehillah – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission.

Having identified these themes, we set out to identify discrete sectors in the Jewish community that are using one or more of these themes to create new models of Jewish identity. They include groups focused on Jewish learning, social justice, spiritual practice, eco-sustainability, the arts and new models of spiritual community.

When we invite the “creatives” who are building organizations focused on one or more of these themes to join the Kenissa Network, they often find the initial gathering disorienting. We are bringing together people with very different approaches to Jewish life, Jewish practice and Jewish identity. In fact, most of the leaders we invite tend to know fewer than 10% of the rest of the people in the room. And yet, at the end of our three-day Consultation, they share a powerful commonality of purpose. They recognize that, despite their differences, all take their Judaism very seriously and all understand that their ability to succeed may benefit from the support, wisdom and insights of the other people in the Kenissa Network.

Third, the Kenissa initiative places unique emphasis on covenantal community and what it takes to create such cultures. I wrote about the idea of covenantal community previously in these pages and won’t repeat it here. Because we believe that “the medium is the message,” we design the National Consultations that Kenissa convenes to model covenantal community. Part of the strength of the national network we are creating owes to the fact that, in three days, we can take a “company of strangers” and forge a relational community of leaders who are eager to stay connected to one another and to the mission of Kenissa. Among the array of communities of practice that Kenissa sponsors year-round, one on “covenanting” and one on “communal culture” are extremely popular. Most of the leaders that we invite have not even thought about these issues before they come to our gathering.

Most of the institutions that characterized the Jewish community of the past 50 years are transactional in nature. Nobody saw anything wrong with such institutions as they reflected the cultural patterns of American society of the times. But 21st American culture has moved decidedly away from top-down organizational structures towards networks and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures. Institutions stuck in the 20th century paradigm are destined to lose market share and fade into irrelevance. Yet just because an organization was created in the last ten years does not prevent founders from defaulting into dysfunctional organizational cultures. They are just mimicking the organizational patterns that are most prevalent in our community. Among the most important value propositions that Kenissa brings to this field is our use of the concept of covenantal community to explore how to create healthy and generative organizational cultures.

We can summarize the three features of the Kenissa Network outlined above in two words: Ideas matter. Anyone who visits our website will find a rich set of commentaries on the state of the American Jewish community and the ideas and values that inspire this generation of Jews to connect to a sacred, ancient tradition. Every Monday we post a new commentary that anyone can receive by signing up for the Kenissa blog. Members of our Kenissa Network also are invited to create graphic representations of the five themes at the core of our Kenissa framework. While we started with one Venn diagram as a way to help our leaders enter into conversation with one another, we quickly discovered that our leaders had their own ways to understand their work in the context of the Jewish tradition. We invite you to visit our gallery of new models of Jewish life and to read their creators’ commentaries on those models. We believe that you will find it a most mind-expanding experience.

We are growing the national Kenissa: Communities of Meaning network in a very intentional way. We believe it represents the new face(s) of American Jewish life. If you are a social entrepreneur who is working in one of our five themes/portals, we invite you to register your project here, which will make you eligible to be invited into the Network. We invite 50 founders/leaders into the Network each year. If you are working in the organized Jewish community and you want to explore how your institution can benefit from the Kenissa Network or partner with some of our projects, contact me at RabbiSid@Hazon.org.

Loyalty, Truth and Freedom of Expression

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Given the controversy surrounding Theater J’s production of Motti Lerner’s play, The Admission, at the DCJCC, I expected a full scale indictment of Israel’s conduct during the 1948 War of Independence. Instead I encountered a play that probed the complexity of war, politics, memory, ethnic identity, love and survival with astounding sensitivity and nuance.

Ever since the play was scheduled last summer a small group of Washington area Jews organized themselves into a group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art (COPMA). COPMA exerted enormous pressure on the local Jewish Federation to cut funding to the DCJCC because its Theater J had sponsored plays that ask uncomfortable questions about the state of Israel. The effort is similar to actions taken in New York and San Francisco to shut down Jewish Film Festivals because some of the films are critical of Israel. In a display of Jewish communal courage all too rare these days, the executive director and president of the Washington Jewish Federation issued public letters declaring that the community would not cave to the pressure exerted by COPMA even though that action will likely cost the Federation tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Post on March 30, 2014.

In fact, the DCJCC did make a concession to the protesters. They downgraded The Admission from a full production to a “workshop” and then inserted into the spring schedule an additional production of Golda’s Balcony, a play about former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir.

The incident is but one of dozens of examples of how the Jewish community currently labors under a not so hidden loyalty test as it relates to what one can and cannot say about the state of Israel. National Hillel is under increasing criticism for its attempt to enforce standards that would keep certain kinds of anti-Israel speakers from being sponsored by their campus chapters around the country. Jews who associate with J Street have been accused of disloyalty to the Jewish community despite the fact that J Street’s policy explicitly endorses a safe and secure Israel as well as advocates for a two state solution to the Middle East dispute. A recent study found that one-third of American rabbis are not comfortable speaking the truth as they see it as it relates to Israel out of fear for their jobs. Recently, the rabbis of B’nai Jeshurun, the famously liberal synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, were called to task for signing an ad that was seen as critical of Aipac.

I understand what is behind this atmosphere of fear and retribution. Israel is increasingly treated as a pariah nation in the international community despite being the only democracy in the Middle East and having a far better human rights record than any of its neighboring countries. While powerless to change the antipathy of so much of the world to Israel, some Jews try to demand of their co-religionists a loyalty to the country that allowed the Jewish people to reconstitute itself after the Holocaust. Yet with the passage of time fewer and fewer Jews carry these memories and their ties to Jewish communal solidarity weaken. Attempts to enforce communal discipline and require a non-critical assessment of the state of Israel not only cannot succeed in America, it is likely to alienate the very Jews the community hopes to engage.

Ironically a play like The Admission may do more to engage Jews with the issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict than foolhardy attempts to enforce loyalty. The play portrays an overly self-righteous son trying to come to grips with the fact that his father may have been complicit in the killing of Arab civilians during the 1948 War of Independence. The father, perhaps altruistically and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, has devoted his life to improve the quality of life of Arab Israelis. The Arab/Palestinian Israelis in the play are torn between their desire to stay out of trouble, get an education and improve the quality of life for themselves and their children and their desire to unearth evidence of an injustice done to their parents and grandparents a generation earlier.

Hovering over the play is the recognition that war has no victors. All in its wake are victims, even, to quote the Bible, “unto the tenth generation”. Those in the Jewish community who seek to stifle freedom of expression are no less living out the trauma of the Holocaust than those in the Palestinian community who say that there can be no peace in the region until they can return to the villages of their grandparents which are now inside the borders of the state of Israel.

One of the great gifts that Nelson Mandela gave the world was the understanding that no healthy nation can be built on back of an historical injustice without a process of truth and reconciliation in which all parties come to grips with the transgressions of the past. There is plenty of blame to go around, on all sides. Until the parties to the Middle East conflict are ready for such a process, perhaps art will have to suffice.

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Rabbi Sid Schwarz is a senior fellow at Clal. He is the author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). He also serves as the director of the Rene Cassin Fellowship Program, a fellowship on Judaism and human rights with hubs in New York, London and Jerusalem for Next Gen Jews.

New International Fellowship Program on Judaism and Human Rights

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Last week an application process was launched for a brand new program called the René Cassin Fellowship Program (RCFP). With hubs in New York, London and Jerusalem, the RCFP will select 36 outstanding Jewish young professionals, ages 25-35. The year-long program of study, travel and hands-on impact projects does not take the place of one’s current employment or program of studies. It is rather an enrichment experience that will explore Jewish visions for a just society and will provide young Jewish professionals with the knowledge, skills and contacts needed to enhance their activism in the areas of social justice, international human rights or related fields.

It is sad and a bit ironic that some in the Jewish community have acquired an aversion to the array of organizations that deal with human rights. This stems from the fact that for several decades many human rights groups have put a spotlight on Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinian population living in the territories captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. The U.N. has been a forum particularly hostile to the state of Israel, with many resolutions of condemnation failing only because of a United States veto in the U.N. Security Council. The U.N. sponsored 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban South Africa became a flashpoint for the obscene and disproportionate attention paid to Israel as compared to many other countries with no tradition of democracy or legal due process and with far worse records on human rights.

The RCFP starts with a different premise. We believe that the many international, national and NGO forums in which human rights is the focus can either support or detract from the legitimacy of nations. Israel and the Jewish people have an important stake in the issues addressed by these bodies. While it is unfortunate that Israel must engage in a debate over its legitimacy in the community of nations 65 years after its founding, the choice to be absent is an error. Israel was created by an act of the United Nations. Even in the face of the most outrageous accusations and plentiful evidence of double standards being used by states whose record on human rights are among the worst in human history, Jews must appear at such forums and speak the truth in the noblest tradition of Jewish values. The Fellowship program is designed to equip participants for just such kind of engagement.

The sponsoring organization for the fellowship program is René Cassin, a human rights NGO based in London that uses the experience of the Jewish people and Jewish values to campaign and educate on universal human rights issues such as discrimination, detention and genocide. Founded in 2000, the organization is named in honor of René Cassin, a French Jew and Nobel Laureate who was one of the principal co-drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With special consultative status at the United Nations, René Cassin uses that forum to give voice to Jewish values within the international human rights community.

The RCFP is funded by a lead gift from New York UJA/Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People. A critical dimension of the program is having three cohorts of fellows each from a different center of world Jewry. Between monthly study sessions, there will be regular Skype conversations between Jews in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Each will bring their unique historical and cultural background to bear as they reflect on the very challenging issues presented in the international human rights arena. The group will participate together in a study tour of Israel in June 2013.

Partnering with René Cassin in Israel will be Makom, a division of the Jewish Agency for Israel led by Jonny Ariel. Makom is playing a leading role as a catalyst for effective and compelling Israel engagement and Israel education. The lead educator in Israel will be Rabbi Gideon Sylvester, an Orthodox rabbi from the UK with expertise in human rights who now lives and teaches in Israel. The lead educator in London will be Simone Abel, a human rights attorney who is also the executive director of Rene Cassin.

The deadline for applications is December 1, 2012. Those interested in learning more about the fellowship program or who would like to obtain an application form please email info@renecassin.org with subject line “RCFP”. Applicants should be between the ages of 25 and 35 and live close to one of the three regional hubs – New York City, London or Jerusalem. Selections will be made by February 15, 2013, with the program commencing in May. To learn more about the program, please visit: http://bit.ly/UCaRz3 which is part of the René Cassin website.

Rabbi Sid Schwarz, author of Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World and the forthcoming, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future, is the director of René Cassin Fellowship Program and will also serve as the lead educator in New York.

(Originally posted on http://ejewishphilanthropy.com)