Clockwise from top left: Parenting expert Wendy Mogel helps launch CYE, URJ President Rick Jacobs, URJ VP Jonah Pesner, Hillel President Wayne Firestone | Photos via URJ and JLTV
Two years after college program ended, replacement announced
We’ve all heard the joke: A synagogue is trying to get rid of a field mouse that won’t leave the building. So they give it a bar mitzvah.
Aiming to put an end to that punchline, the Union for Reform Judaism launched a new initiative called the Campaign for Youth Engagement at the Reform movement’s biennial convention, held near Washington, D.C. on Dec. 14-18.
“I think it’s going to be fantastic,” Ryan Leszner, a senior at York University, told New Voices. “It doesn’t immediately speak for college campus needs … but you have to start somewhere.”
As its name indicates, the new youth campaign is an effort to increase engagement of Jewish youth from when they become bar or bat mitzvah to when they finish college, according to CYE Director Rabbi Bradley Solmsen. Solmsen, who was most recently director of high school programs at Brandeis University, was appointed shortly after the program was announced.
“Of all of the movements, Reform Jews lead the way—this ain’t a happy one—we lead the way in leaving when childhood education is over,” URJ President-elect Rabbi Rick Jacobs said at the closing plenary of the 71st URJ Biennial, the largest American Jewish conference ever at 5,000 attendees.
Donations for the campaign, some in honor of outgoing URJ President Rabbi Eric Yoffie, already total $1 million, URJ Director of Presidential Transition and Senior Vice President Rabbi Jonah Pesner told biennial attendees at the same plenary. Some of those funds will be rewarded in the spring as grants to synagogues that come up with innovative ideas to increase Jewish youth engagement, Solmsen said.
About 80 percent of Reform Jews drop out of Jewish life after their bar or bat mitzvah, according to several studies, including one from Brandeis. Campaign organizers hope to reduce that rate to 50 percent by 2020.
“I think we should be even higher, but I agree with you that it’s an ambitious goal,” Solmsen told New Voices in a phone interview after his appointment. “I think we should be doing even better than that, but I think it’s feasible.”
However, there are no plans in place to achieve this goal. Instead, the URJ has focused on brainstorming through conservations in synagogues across the country and at biennial.
“We are just now building these plans,” Solmsen told New Voices in an email. “We are very clear that this is a long term effort. While we want to show initial result of success right away – we also want to be clear that these initial results will be small pilot projects.”
Students expressed hope for the new effort and think it will help rectify the current dearth of Reform Judaism on campus.
“It’s terrible to hear so many Jews drop out after their bar mitzvah,” said Aaron Klaus, a student at Rowan University who attended the convention. “I see it all the time.”
Few, if any, at the URJ doubt that lack of youth engagement is an issue. But some leaders in the Reform movement, including URJ Youth Specialist Craig Rosen, question the validity of the 80 percent dropout statistic provided by the CYE. There are metrics other than counting students enrolled formal Hebrew education that still indicate Jewish involvement, such as being in a temple youth group or being in a Jewish online community, Rosen said.
“I would hate to think that they just totally drop Judaism and would never think about it again,” he said.
Nevertheless, students who talked to New Voices said the campaign has its purpose. Everybody New Voices talked to, both students and professionals said that youth involvement in Reform Judaism is severely lacking.
“There really isn’t any Reform Jewish voice on college campuses,” Leszner said.
The effort is a successor of sorts to the URJ’s previous attempt to engage college-age Jews through a now-defunct on-campus program called Kesher. Kesher was a budgetary casualty of a URJ restructuring process two years ago.
“I think instead they started looking at the multiple things Reform Jews stand for and what are some of the avenues to begin to entice Jews,” Wayne Firestone, president of Hillel International, told New Voices.
Rather than focusing on one program, like Kesher, leaders recognize that Jewish identity can be accessed through other interests that Jewish teens have. Firestone and others think the URJ and Hillel can help connect Jewish youth with Jewish activities, such as joining a klezmer band, going on service trips, or even — as Solmsen suggested — working at New Voices as a way to maintain involvement in Jewish life.
“Journalism is another area where I think teens are really engaged,” Solmsen told New Voices. “Why can’t they be covering Israel or covering the Jewish community or asking really important questions about their Judaism in serious, journalistic ways, whether they’re electronic or print, and engaging them that way? I just think New Voices is an example of something we could be doing with teens and not just with college students.”
“I talk about the balancing between universally human and distinctively Jewish. I think that balancing during the period of modernity is going to be a constant tension for Jews in an age of choice,” Firestone said.
Subie Banaszynski, the interim director of the North American Federation of Temple Youth — the Reform high school group, and the largest Jewish youth organization in the world — said that some of the more important ways to hold on to Jews is to foster relationships between Jews and increase family commitment to Judaism.
Jacobs confirmed that in his message to the plenary, saying, “we are going to focus on relationships over programs.”
Some of those relationships will also be between the URJ and other organizations. Hillel is set to be a prime candidate to work with the URJ to engage Jewish life on campus. It already has infrastructure on many campuses, such as offices and staff that can be leveraged by the URJ to reach out to Reform Jews, said Lisa Barzilai, the young adult specialist at the URJ. Barzilai holds the only current URJ staff position dedicated to Jewish engagement on college campuses.
Firestone confirmed that future partnership in his address to the attendees, saying, “We cannot do this alone. We must continue to enrich our partnerships with the Reform movement and others in the community.”
There are certainly problems to be addressed, especially on college campuses. A number of students at the URJ Biennial told New Voices that they had difficultly connecting with Jewish life once they got to college. Some of the problems come from a lack of resources or opportunities for Reform Jews, poor marketing, low-quality programming, lack of family support and other factors, Rosen said.
There is also the inevitable problem of alienation because students are used to services in their home congregation that aren’t replicated by Hillel, said Becca Diamond, a biennial attendee and a freshman at Muhlenberg College.
There are some models that are already a source of experimentation. As New Voices reported during biennial, a pilot partnership between URJ and the Hillel Foundation hires three Reform Engagement Interns at a price tag of $3,200 per intern. The interns, currently at Cornell University, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania, are charged with making 60 students more involved in Jewish life. 20 of those students have to be Reform.
Katie Rosson, a Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative intern for Hillel and sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “You’re not reaching to people and saying, ‘Come to this organization; it’s really cool.’ It’s, ‘What are you interested in and how can we connect you to what you’re interested in and keep these connections growing?’”
Zach C. Cohen is a sophomore at American University. He is the student life editor of The Eagle at AU, the new media coordinator of Scholarships for Burma and a member of Dime a Dozen, AU’s premiere co-ed a cappella group. Previously, Zach has contributed writing and reporting to TIME Magazine, AWOL and AmWord. He is a New Voices associate editor and national correspondent.
