April Aggravation? The Spring Situation?

Sue Fishkoff calls it "April aggravation." We call it the "spring situation." Whatever you call it, there's something to it. It's the annual conflict between Easter and Passover in interfaith families, and the JTA's Fishkoff has written a story about our survey of interfaith families juggling the two holidays.

The survey specifically looked at interfaith families raising their children exclusively in Judaism, and we found results both familiar and surprising. Generally, they negotiated the holidays in the same way they negotiated the December holidays: they celebrated more Jewish rituals, kept the holidays separate and saw the Jewish holiday as more religious than the Christian one. But once we started slicing up the population, we found some interesting results. There was no difference in Passover behaviors between families where the woman is Jewish vs. families where the woman isn't Jewish, but there were significant differences in the Easter behaviors, especially "secular" rituals like decorating Easter eggs and participating in an Easter egg hunt. There were also significant differences between Jewish and Christian respondents on their level of comfort with, and anticipation of, Easter.

Love in the Time of War

Joshua Gross, a public affairs consultant in Washington, D.C., wrote a poignant story in last week's Forward about how his relationship with a Lebanese woman was threatened by last summer's war between Israel and Lebanon.

As is the case with many Arab-Jewish or Muslim-Jewish relationships, politics was a topic typically avoided in their relationship:

Together, Helen and I had tried to create a tidy little universe with a population of two. In this universe, it didn’t matter that I was a Jew and Helen was an Arab. We were beyond the politics.

As the war progressed, there was incredible strain on their relationship--although Joshua never says that the two of them discussed the war in-depth. He seemed to subscribe to a strategy of avoidance.

I was afraid that if we talked, we would discover that we just could not be together. I was afraid of discovering that love had failed to elevate us to a place beyond politics. “Please,” I begged, “give me some time.”

Interestingly, their relationship became a source of inspiration for some of their friends, who framed their relationship as a "microcosm of the peace process itself." "You can't give up! You owe it to humanity to make it work!" said one friend.

Joshua has a healthy skepticism toward such attitudes, although the piece suggests he also saw the allure of such idealism. I won't reveal the ending, but I bet you will be touched--and maybe a bit frustrated--by his tale.

Remaking the Reform Movement

Rabbi David Forman, the founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, wrote a provocative op-ed in the Jerusalem Post arguing that the Reform movement needs to change if it hopes to engage Jews in Israel, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany. While Chabad has emerged as a dominant Jewish force in many of these places, and other more far-flung communities, the Reform movement "has barely made a dent in the consciousness of Jews in these places."

He doesn't blame the the leadership of the international Reform movement (the World Union for Progressive Judaism) or the leadership of the North American Reform movement (the Union for Reform Judaism), but rather the constitutents of the North American Reform movement.

...while ... the Union of Reform Judaism ... has adopted WUPJ's religious ideology, whereby both Jewish peoplehood and the centrality of Israel to Jewish theology should be primary forces in the life of a Jew, the URJ's constituents have not. Preaching by North American Reform leaders about commitment to the Jewish people does not resonate with most US Jews.

He blames the lack of focus on international Jewish peoplehood on three causes:

1. intermarriage


2. a focus on spirituality over intellectualism


3. a negative attitude towards Israel because it has not recognized Reform as a legitimate religious movement

Intermarriage and the focus on spirituality are intertwined in his mind. Because claims of peoplehood may ring hollow, or even offensive, to people in interfaith relationships, he says that the Reform movement in North America has become primarily a "faith-based religion." Further, in an apparent attempt to duplicate the success of American evangelical Christianity, Reform synagogues have focused on personal spirituality over intellectualism and communal prayer.

If Reform members in the U.S. change their priorities to show greater attachment to international Jewish peoplehood, he says, more money will be spent on sending Reform emissaries to all those communities that Chabad now dominates.

His conclusion is not wrong, but it seems to me he's willing to gamble with the Reform movement's greatest strength--its growing membership and presence in the U.S.--for an uncertain outcome. If the members of Reform synagogues don't quite see eye-to-eye with their leaders or the leaders of the international Reform movement, it's for a good reason. Jews in the U.S. are attracted to Reform synagogues because of the movement's open attitude towards intermarried couples and because of synagogues' attention to spiritual needs. In an assimilated, atomized society, these are more pressing needs for most Jews than a notion of attachment to international Jewish peoplehood.

I also think he casts the Reform movement in the U.S. in an overly uncharitable light. Yes, Reform synagogues may de-emphasize peoplehood somewhat and may focus on spiritualism over intellectualism, but their focus on social action is at least as strong as their focus on spirituality. And the focus on spirituality can be considered a form of marketing, much the same way it is in evangelical Christian movements and even in Chabad. You grab people with a promise to fulfill their spiritual needs and as they get further engaged, they will want to do more sophisticated study--and probably feel a greater attachment to the Jewish people. And it's not like Reform synagogues don't push trips to Israel as much as the other progressive movements. I would guess that most Reform Jews in the U.S. are totally ignorant Israel's position on Reform Jewry.

I wonder if Reform's lack of success in the rest of the world is more due to a lack of international understanding than due to a lack of American support. In Israel, for example, there are only three stops on the religious spectrum: secular, religious or haredi. Either you're secular or you're religious. If you're secular, you attend synagogue for holidays and life cycle events and keep up the illusion that you're as observant as religious Jews--and on the following day you return to your regular life.

In post-communist Russia, too, I'm not sure if people's notions of religion are sophisticated enough yet to understand the idea of a progressive Judaism. In communist Russia, you were persecuted for religious practice so only the most devout people ended up practicing their religion. I imagine that has created a gap between secular life and religion in many people's minds that can't be reconciled. Chabad, on the other hand, offers a wholly transformative brand of traditional Judaism, that probably fits in with people's faint memories of what shtetl Jews looked and acted like. And it's hardly fair to compare the success of any movement with Chabad--Chabad was an outreach organization before it was a religious movement, whereas the other movements were around for decades, if not centuries, before outreach became a central concern.

All Julie Wiener, All the Time

Julie Wiener, our prolific friend at The (New York) Jewish Week, has a new column in today's paper that marks her 10-year anniversary in the Jewish media.

One of the interesting points she tackles is whether or not her column promotes intermarriage? We receive that question--and that criticism--regularly as well, and the answer is complex. Wiener answers it ably:

Does my column, as some have complained, promote intermarriage? That is not my intention. I have no regrets about my own choice of husband (other than wishing he worked fewer hours and was a little handier around the house), but I am hardly out to get new recruits for some interfaith families’ lobby. All other things being equal, I have no doubt that it is easier to live a Jewish life and raise Jewish children if one has a Jewish partner. But I don’t think that means intermarriage is a disaster or, as one sociologist recently claimed, “the single greatest threat to Jewish continuity.”

She goes on to say that she's surprised she hasn't received more hate mail than she has. She credits that to a community where intermarriage has become a fact of life, and not a time of mourning. "Even the staunchest opponents of intermarriage," she says, "now acknowledge that most Jews who marry out are not doing so to rebel against Judaism, but are instead simply choosing to share their lives with a loved one."

What I like most about her piece reflecting on her experience in the Jewish media and her shorter experience as a columnist on intermarriage is that it doesn't play the role of the righteous victim. She points out ways in which the Jewish community could be more welcoming to interfaith families, but also acknowledges when it's doing a good job. That seems like a pretty fair approach to me.

Not the Sunday School You Remember

The Washington Jewish Week had a very interesting article yesterday about a new, non-traditional Sunday school starting at a synagogue in Maryland.

It's interesting for a number of reasons: first off, the impetus for the new school came from a woman whose daughter is married to a Catholic man and has two children. The fact that a grandmother was looking for ways to communicate Jewish heritage to her interfaith grandchildren highlights a phenomenon that we expect to see more of in the coming years. We expect to see grandparents take an increasing role in the Jewish education of their grandchildren as the grandparents are often the population most concerned about passing on Jewish heritage.

Second, the Sunday school, called The Country Cheder, truly is off the beaten path. It's located at a synagogue, the Am Kolel Sanctuary and Renewal Center in Beallsville, that's out in the country and doubles as a spiritual retreat. The program of the Sunday school will be radically different than most: parents will go to school at the same time as the kids, at times learning together with their children. The rabbi, David Shneyer, hopes to use the synagogue's natural setting as an educational tool.

This approach could be very appealing to intermarried parents, many of whom are wary of traditional Hebrew school. By combining education of the parents with education of the kids, the school is providing an opportunity for non-Jewish parents to learn about Judaism in a structured setting. The Country Cheder has something to offer to both the Jewish partner and non-Jewish partner in an interfaith marriage.

The Link Sink

Julie Wiener, author of the column "In the Mix" for The (New York) Jewish Week, is probably the most widely read regular writer on intermarriage. It doesn't hurt that she's also a terrific writer with an eye for interesting takes on the subject (and she's intermarried to boot). She just started a website to catalogue her columns.

The cover story of the new issue of the j., the Jewish news weekly of northern California, is about interfaith burials. It combines the JTA article from January with original reporting, including the encouraging news that a new cemetery has opened in San Francisco's East Bay that will primarily cater to intermarried couples.

A couple weeks ago, The (Pittsburgh) Jewish Chronicle ran a good-sized story on Scott Shay's flawed book How To Get Our Groove Back, which is based on flawed assumptions about Jewish demographic strength and includes useless policy recommendations like suggesting the Reform movement dump patrilineal descent. The Pittsburgh article covers a number of criticisms of the book.

The j. also has an intriguing article about "identity envy" as well as a cover story from a couple weeks ago about converts who choose Judaism for themselves, not for a Jewish partner.

The Threat of Messianic Judaism

Our new issue on The Threat of Messianic Judaism came out today. We decided to do a story on Messianic Judaism because on the surface, it appears to offer a harmonization of Christian belief and Jewish ritual practice--"the best of both worlds," so to speak. But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that it's not, that few Jews consider Messianic Jews to be Jewish, that some Messianic organizations are merely fronts for evangelical Christian missionaries.

In the issue, we look at how Messianic missionaries use a variety of approaches to proselytize to Jews: in Phoenix, Messianic Jews run a Judaica store; on the campus of Colorado State University, they hand out pamphlets with fabricated rabbinical quotes; in New York last summer, Jews for Jesus set up kiosks at a shopping mall; and in Germany, they target Russian Jewish immigrants for conversion.

Something similar to what is happening to Russians in Germany is happening to recent Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Falash Mura, Ethiopians of Jewish origin who converted to Christianity generations ago under social pressure, have been immigrating to Israel for the last 15 years. Because their Jewish education was so minimal (read: non-existent) in Ethiopia, they are easy prey for the claims of Messianic missionaries who argue that there's no tension between being Jewish and Christian at the same time. Moreover, missionaries in Israel have provided friendship, money and housing to people who typically come to Israel with almost nothing.

A recent JTA article elaborates on the missionary efforts and the controversy over exactly who is doing the proselytizing. Some Ethiopian Israelis claim it is fellow Ethiopians who are taking advantage of Israel's open immigration policy towards Ethiopians, while others say the missionizing is primarily being done by non-Ethiopian Christians. One Ethiopian leader even levels the charge that non-Jewish Ethiopians are paying to marry Falash Mura, moving to Israel, divorcing their Jewish partner and then bringing their families to Israel under the humanitarian Law of Entry, which allows relatives of Israelis to immigrate to Israel.

In any case, all the stories point to what the simplest solution is to missionary tactics, be they from Messianic Jews or traditional evangelical Christians: Jewish education and support. Except in rare cases, missionaries are not forcing anyone to convert. If Jews, in interfaith couples or not, have knowledge and a positive attitude towards Judaism, they are unlikely to be susceptible to a missionary's efforts. Which is just another good reason why Jewish institutions should make every reasonable effort to welcome interfaith families.

Balancing the Spring Holidays

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel has a well-thought-out piece on the potential pitfalls of planning a Passover or Easter dinner for interfaith guests. The kosher dietary laws, and the even stricter kosher-for-Passover laws, are of course one constraint, but so is the Catholic prohibition on eating meat on Fridays during Lent. The article includes some helpful suggestions on how to make a meal that will please--or more importantly, won't offend--everybody.

The article reminds me of a great story from our Archives about a Puerto Rican woman's menu for a Latino-tinted kosher dinner for Easter.

The Adult Children of the Intermarried: The "Forgotten"?

JTA just released a package of stories on the adult children of the intermarried, by Sue Fishkoff. It's an important and interesting series, although not without its flaws.

The centerpiece of the package is an article that looks at how little Jewish programming there is tailored to the needs of adult children of intermarried. Fishkoff calls this population "the forgotten piece of the outreach puzzle." It's true; Fishkoff doesn't say it, but there seems to be an attitude among Jewish policy-makers that this population is already "lost" and it's better to focus on young intermarried couples who haven't had children yet or whose children are young. There's no doubt that programming geared to young intermarried parents has the potential for greater impact, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore the 360,000 young adults with one Jewish parent. We know of, and Fishkoff shares, stories of a number of adults who chose Judaism as young adults.

As Fishkoff documents, however, there seems to be a growing awareness of this forgotten population. So far the major movement to engage this population is happening on the periphery of the Jewish world, with things like Robin Margolis' Half-Jewish Network and Laurel Snyder's collection of essays Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes. But things are brewing in the mainstream Jewish community: the Jewish Outreach Institute is working with Hillel to create outreach programs on four pilot campuses, JConnect and Jewish Family Services in Seattle held a discussion class on the issue and three years ago, Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, D.C. launched "Open Door," a workshop for adults with "mixed or non-Jewish ancestry."

There are numerous challenges to reaching this population: their affiliation to Judaism is much more cultural than religious, meaning they tend not to belong to Jewish organizations; they can be wary of the organized Jewish community, which often isn't welcoming to the children of non-Jewish mothers; and they don't like being singled out. Reaching them is less a matter of creating programming focused around the issue of coming from an interfaith home than it is a matter of creating programming that speaks to their sense of Jewish identity and avoids potentially sensitive issues, like matrilineal descent.

The other major piece in the package is a little more problematic. Titled "For kids of intermarriage, choices are complex," it discusses the variety of religious choices that children from interfaith homes might make. Fishkoff admits that "experts stress the importance of giving such children a good Jewish education, as research shows that this makes them much likelier to become committed Jewish adults," but spends most of the article making the case that anything can happen. She doesn't rely on research for this notion, but anecdotes. And each of these anecdotes has a serious flaw.

Take Robin Margolis and her family. She is now a committed Jewish adult and her brothers are all Christians--one is even a minister. But they were raised as Christians and didn't even know their mother was Jewish until Robin was in her 30s.

Or the children of Jill and Tom Docking. They were raised Jewish. Today, one child identifies as Jewish while the other is more equivocal. "If people ask, I say I was raised Jewish and I leave it at that," he says. But there's no indication either child has adopted another religion. And it's not like it's uncommon for an unmarried 27-year-old child of two Jewish parents to be equivocal about his religious background as well.

Another example is the children of Marty Wasserman and her former husband. One child chose the Judaism of her mother, the other child chose the Catholicism of his father. But Marty converted to Judaism after the divorce, after the children were already born. Further, both children went to Catholic high school. Their experience is hardly typical.

The final example is of a couple where the mother raised one child Jewish while the father raised the other child Catholic.

In the podcast associated with the package, Fishkoff says, "Although giving them a Jewish upbringing reduces the chance that they will look elsewhere, it's not a guarantee at all." This suggests that Fishkoff believes that personal choice has as much an impact on how adults identify as does upbringing. But in each example she points to, it's clear that upbringing was a more powerful factor in the interfaith child's identity as an adult than personal choice. Yes, there are no guarantees, but if you raise your child exclusively in one religion, it is much more likely they will end up identifying with--or practicing--that religion as an adult than not.

I liked the individual stories quite a bit more because they make no claim to offer a holistic portrait of children from intermarried homes. They're just interesting stories: Jeff Fry, who was raised a Unitarian by his Jewish mother and Congregationalist father but became engaged with Judaism in college; Rachel Crossley, who grew up in a dual-faith home but got into Judaism in Hebrew school and is now a rabbinical student; and Ephraim Rosenbaum, who, despite his very Jewish-sounding name, doesn't favor either his father's Judaism or his mother's Catholicism.

A Politician Who Chose Judaism; A Seattle Outreach Program Shutters

Some links of note:

• The Arizona Daily Star has a story about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D), a Jewish woman who was born to an interfaith home. What makes it particularly interesting is that her parents--her dad is Jewish and her mother is Christian Scientist--didn't push her to adopt any particular religion.

  
  

  "We were kind of neutral," Spencer Gifford said. "We let them decide for themselves. That's what Gabby did."

  
  But as a state senator in 2001, she went on a trip to Israel with the American Jewish Committee that the article says was "life-changing."

  
  

  "It just cemented the fact that I wanted to spend more time with my own personal, spiritual growth. I felt very committed to Judaism," she said. "Religion means different things to different people. It provides me with grounding, a better understanding of who I came from."

  
  The article also includes information on each of the other Arizona congressperson's faiths and it's a pretty diverse list. There's one Jew, two Episcopalians, four Catholics, one Presbyterian, one Baptist and one Mormon.

• If you can believe it, JTA has another op-ed on Steven Cohen's study of intermarriage, A Tale of Two Jewries. It's by Cole Krawitz, editor of JVoices.com. For those counting at home, this is the fourth op-ed on the topic.

  
  This one, like our op-ed and Gary Tobin's, argues that the notion of two Jewries is a harmful one: "The language of who is worth engaging should raise serious warning flags, for as Jews we all have known what it means to be on the outside."

  
  But it also connects Cohen's study to the recent Brandeis study that shows the American Jewish population is increasing.

• Seattle is losing a small but valuable outreach program that made a point of doing programming outside of traditional Jewish institutions. Called Panim Hadashot--"New Faces" in Hebrew--the organization is shuttering because of a nearly $100,000 deficit in fundraising for 2007.

  
  I hadn't heard of this group before, but its programs all focus on the notion of meeting unaffiliated Jews "where they are." Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, the founder and prime organizer, led Shabbat gatherings in private homes, hosted seders for different holidays and had a booth at a Whole Foods supermarket where he would talk to anyone interested in Judaism. While many of these are outreach techniques pioneered by Chabad, the JTnews article says the organization promoted a pluralistic vision of Judaism.

The Debate is Over

Shaul Kelner, a Jewish studies professor at Vanderbilt University, takes Steven Cohen--and outreach advocates like ourselves, as well--down a notch with his wonderfully sensible op-ed for The Forward.

Essentially, he argues that debating over the value of outreach to the intermarried is misguided because in a pluralist Jewish world, there are spaces where outreach is promoted and there are spaces where it is shunned:

...one would and should expect that the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements will each adopt policies tailored to their particular constituencies and ideologies. The same goes for the federations, Jewish community centers and other agencies.

One size does not fit all. In practice, this is precisely what has been happening. Why, then, isn’t it reflected in the debates that play out in the press?

Ever since the so-called “continuity crisis” was declared in the early 1990s, intermarriage has been treated rhetorically as the hot-button boundary issue portending the demographic decline of American Jewry. Intermarriage has since become a normal part of most American Jews’ friendship and family networks, but the conceptual frameworks that policymakers and expert observers offer seem strangely frozen in time, as if the experience of the past 17 years has meant nothing.

It's a valid point, one made by author Anita Diamant in an interview we did with her for the 200th issue of our Web Magazine. She said opposition to intermarriage is a rearguard action. In Reform synagogues and even many, if not most, Conservative synagogues, intermarriage is an accepted part of life, and non-Jewish partners are an accepted part of the community.

Kelner also makes the good point that prophets of doom and gloom have been predicting the decline of the American Jewish community for years and it still hasn't happened:

In 1990, many read the famous, but exaggerated, 52% intermarriage rate as evidence that the community was collapsing. Instead of decline, the 1990s brought massive institutional growth: day schools, university Jewish studies programs, and even many of the family foundations whose investments of billions into Jewish life are helping set the communal agenda today. The Reform movement, the denomination where intermarriage is most common, did not face institutional decline but rather saw a 13% growth to 896 synagogues in 2007 from 790 in 1985.

And, he could also note, that the Reform movement grew in numbers from 1990 to 2000, as demographer Len Saxe argues in his latest study.

The (New York) Jewish Week Editor Gary Rosenblatt plants another flag for pluralism in his latest column on people who ask to cancel their subscription. One of the most common reasons people cancel is Julie Wiener's monthly column on intermarriage. "Just about every time 'In the Mix,' Julie's column, appears, a few subscribers cancel," he says.

But that doesn't change his resolve to keep publishing the column, he says, because "the way we see it, we simply are recognizing that intermarriage is here to stay--affecting the majority of Jewish families indirectly if not directly--and that our job is to report on the community as it is, not just as we would like it to be."

Bears in Space

To pay tribute to his late father's Jewish heritage, an astronaut from an interfaith home brought a teddy bear into space. The bear was a replica of Refugee, a teddy bear donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Holocaust survivor Sophie Turner-Zaretsky.

Astronaut Mark Polansky, whose mother is a native Hawaiian, asked the museum for some mementoes that would simultaneously pay tribute to his father Irving, who died in 2001, and bring awareness to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The museum also gave him a photo of a child refugee from Darfur. The bear made its 5.3-million-mile journey on the Discovery mission in December, and Turner-Zaretsky, now 80 and living in New York, followed the shuttle's progress every step of the way.

Encouraging Jewel-ish Choices?

Purim, often called the "Jewish Halloween," is on Sunday. But it's more than that--it's also the Jewish April Fools' Day. It's become a bit of a tradition for some papers to publish fake news for Purim.

The intermarriage debate comes in for some parody by our friend Julie Wiener at The (New York) Jewish Week, as excerpted on the Jewish Outreach Institute's blog, in a post by Kerry Olitzky. For the 25 of us who know all the players parodied in the article, it's pretty amusing.

The S-Word: A Response to More Than a Succubus

A response to More Than a Succubus: Confessions of a Shiksa, published in our Web Magazine on Feb. 13, by Ellen Jaffe-Gill:

I had taken a stand on the Yiddish word shiksa long before the afternoon I visited my husband’s Hebrew class. Having learned, while researching a book on intermarriage, that it (and its male form, shaygetz, and the plural shkotzim) derived from a Hebrew word meaning “abomination,” I was already gently correcting people who used it, asking them questions like “An abomination — is that really how you think of your daughter-in-law?”

Then one day I celebrated the meeting of a major deadline with a day off, a nice lunch, and a little text study at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, where my husband had been enriching his life studying classical Hebrew on Wednesday afternoons. The class was looking at I Kings, chapter 11, in which Solomon wrong-headedly builds altars to pagan gods for his foreign wives.

Most Hebrew vocabulary is organized into families of three-letter roots, and I recognized the Hebrew root shin-kof-tzadi spelling the word shikutz before I looked at the translation.

“Hey, there’s the root for shiksa,” I said. “Is ‘abomination’ an accurate translation of shikutz?” I asked the teacher, a native Israeli.

“Yes,” she said. “Literally, it means a slimy, crawly thing.” In modern Hebrew, I found out later, depending on the dictionary you look in, shin-kof-tzadi is still the root for words whose meanings range from “loathe, abominate” to “unclean insects.”

That’s when a program of gentle reminders became a crusade. I began e-mailing copy editors whenever I saw the s-word used outside of direct quotation. My response to anyone who tells me, “Oh, I don’t mean it in a nasty way,” is “Would it be okay for her to call you a kike if she didn’t mean it in a nasty way?”

Yiddish and Hebrew are wonderful languages, full of metaphor and color, but they aren’t particularly polite. The Hebrew word for “female,” after all, is the same as the word for “hole,” and the literal meaning of the Yiddish word “bupkes,” generally used as a synonym for “nothing,” is actually “goat dung.”

Accordingly, sometimes we Americans need to depend on the richness of English to label and describe without insult, unwitting or not. I will prevail on anyone who will listen to consider the s-words to be as inappropriate as any other ethnic or racial pejorative, especially when they’re referring to people who are, after all, members of their families.

Around our house, we don’t consider that political correctness. We believe that not referring to people with pejorative labels comes under the heading of something our parents taught us: good manners.

Cantor Ellen Jaffe-Gill is author of Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (BasicBooks) and editor of The Jewish Woman’s Book of Wisdom (Citadel Press).

A Powerful Partnership

Two innovative national Jewish organizations are teaming up to create a program that will help 18 synagogues become more welcoming towards interfaith families. The program, "Call Synagogue Home," is the product of a partnership between the Jewish Outreach Institute and STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal), a group that helps synagogue improve and strengthen their services.

The program will take place at synagogues in three different communities. According to the release:

Call Synagogue Home's pilot program will provide participating synagogues with tools and communications to reach out to interfaith families during key life-cycle events and ritual celebrations, including beginning a Jewish pre-school or religious school, brit milah and baby namings, divorce and death.

I can't say enough about how promising this program sounds. Even though many synagogues have become quite adept at welcoming and involving interfaith families, numerous synagogues could use the help. Further, by focusing on life-cycle events, this will help the participating synagogues recruit interfaith families who might not otherwise consider joining a synagogue.

Kudos to all involved.