Doing Jewish, Together
MAYA BERNSTEIN
SHMA.COM
Maya Bernstein is the director
of education at UpStart Bay
Area, which helps innovative
Jewish organizations get
started toward success, and
works with existing Jewish
organizations to help them reposition themselves for
success in the future.
See:
http://www.sfjcf.org/aboutjcf/
localcommunity/study/
When Bay Area Jews seek to design a bar or bat mitzvah ritual for a child, it is 80 percent more likely that they
will create the ritual themselves than join a synagogue. A substantial majority of Jewish respondents in the San Francisco federation’s
most recent demographic study* have made it
clear that existing institutions are not meeting
their needs and yet they would still like to engage in meaningful Jewish opportunities. So
what are their choices? They can not do the ceremony, or they can do it themselves, or they can
tap into one of a rapidly growing number of
projects and organizations that design innovative Jewish programs to meaningfully engage
Jews in Jewish life in the Bay Area. For example,
Jewish Milestones helps create unique Jewish
lifecycle opportunities like a bat mitzvah at
Yosemite; Wilderness Torah takes hard-core
backpackers into the Mojave Desert to re-expe-rience Passover; and G-dcast.com broadcasts
the weekly Torah portion, creatively condensed
into a short animated film, on the Web. These
are only a few examples of a broader array of
new pathways to Jewish living.
The Bay Area is decades ahead of the rest of
the country in terms of its communal patterns,
according to editors Ava F. Kahn and Marc
Dollinger in their 2003 book, California Jews.
When Jews moved to the West, they write,
“they experienced little anti-Semitism, and
gained almost immediate access to power.”
Therefore, they helped establish communal —
Jewish and civic — institutions with other new-
comers like themselves. They assimilated
quickly and then dispersed, geographically, re-
ligiously, and culturally.
Parallel Track or Continuous Loop:
A Round Table on Do-It-Yourself Innovation
Nina Bruder is the executive
director of Bikkurim: An
Incubator for New Jewish
Ideas, which helps Jewish
organizational nonprofit start-ups grow through their start-up
phases to reach sustainability.
Lisa Farber Miller is senior
program officer at Rose
Community Foundation in
Denver, where she directs the
foundation’s Jewish life
program.
Susan Berrin: Let’s begin our conversation by
looking at what defines do-it-yourself (DIY)
Judaism today. What's the relationship between
the draw of DIY and a contemporary yearning
for community?
Lisa Farber Miller: One example of DIY
Judaism in Denver is a porous, independent
minyan that draws people to work on a project
without imposing a sense of obligation or duty.
They’re a totally volunteer community with no
professional leadership and no dues. Recently,
they’ve been creating a community-supported
agriculture group.
