How does your work as a Jewish educator nourish you on a daily basis?
Being a Jewish educator is, for me, all about building community — positively meeting people where they are, journeying with them, growing and deepening connections every day. I discovered that designing programming was something I very much enjoyed and was good at. So that’s my prism. I see quality programming as a boomerang that flies out and comes back as impact. That fuels me.
How do you measure success at the end of the day?
While I’m sleeping! No, honestly, it’s hard for me to measure success on a daily basis. But I’m very intent on collecting weekly observations and measuring post-program outcomes. I want to know that teens are using our Jewish values curriculum, framing and discussing concepts and ideas through the language and lens of Jewish meaning making. We want to understand the change in perspectives youth and older adults go through.
There’s a striking picture on the DOROT website of a boy and an older adult playing chess together. What does that photograph represent to you?
The picture is a great example of the organic quality I seek to achieve as a Jewish experiential educator. Zackary loves chess. It was obvious we needed to connect him with an older adult around the game. He ended up having a relationship with Mr. Bomze for the last seven years of Mr. Bomze’s life. Zackary is now in college and has a deep understanding of being part of the broader Jewish story, and, I hope, of his own personal Jewish journey.
What’s the next “big thing” you’re thinking about?
The past couple of years have changed how I look at what we do and why it matters. For the first time, our youth are having similar issues as our older adults when it comes to isolation and loneliness. There is a much deeper shared understanding. So we have a valuable and unique opportunity now to evolve, to push forward, and to scale programming in order to further grow, strengthen and enhance Jewish aspiration and intergenerational connections.
What does that look like, especially during this pandemic?
I am thinking of our Summer Teen Internship Program, which builds leadership development among participants as they engage in intergenerational connections like discussion groups and home and Zoom visits with older adults. Both groups benefitted from being together to support and learn from one another during the first year of the pandemic. They were more deeply able to understand their own isolation by appreciating and understanding the isolation and situation of the other.
Why are intergenerational connections so critical?
We have a lot to learn from those who are older and those who lived before us. Jewish wisdom is an intergenerational conversation about important questions, ideas and stories. Intergenerational connections provide us with experiences that motivate Jewish meaning making and the construction of one’s own sense of Jewish self.
Where do you see intergenerational education on the Jewish communal spectrum?
We talk about education in segregated terms. There is adult education. There is family education. There is childhood education. As a community, we must view learning spaces in relationship to each other. The very idea of the Jewish People is an intergenerational proposition.
Describe a personal item in your office and why it’s there.
When I started at DOROT twenty years ago, my mother visited me and brought an essay that I’d written in middle school about my grandmother, Nanna, who lived with us for a few years before moving to a nursing home as she was losing her memory. I didn’t remember the essay, but now I have it here in a frame.
It’s a reminder to me and to visitors that we do the work we do for personal reasons, and that we grow in insight and the meaning of life by remembering the wisdom and stories from our pasts. It is the Jewish way to keep telling those stories. It helps us understand the world and informs our experiences. We exist on the shoulders of others, always.
What is your hope for this moment of attention?
I want to help grow the community of those concerned about older adults and help others think deeply about how to find meaning through intergenerational connections. I was nominated for the Covenant Award at the right time. We are having a national reawakening about social isolation and the needs of marginalized people. So I feel fortunate to be the person in this seat right now.
Interview conducted and written by H. Glenn Rosenkrantz for The Covenant Foundation