Mark Your Calendars for Jewish Disability Awareness & Inclusion Month – February 2016
By Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, Director, Whole Community Inclusion As part of my work directing Jewish Learning Venture’s Whole Community Inclusion initiative, I have the honor of working with leaders from schools, synagogues, and organizations across the area that are doing the import work of making their communities more accessible and welcoming for people with disabilities and their families. While we are barely half-way through January, I am looking towards February, Jewish Disability Awareness & Inclusion Month (JDAIM). Though we know that inclusion is a 365-day-year effort, JDAIM is a unified national initiative to raise disability awareness and support efforts to foster inclusion [...]
Ninth Annual One Book, One Jewish Community Kickoff
By Kareen Hartwig As chair of the 2015-2016 One Book, One Jewish Community Implementation Team I was asked to share about why I continue to help make this program happen year after year. The answer is simple, I like being a part of a team of wonderful, talented individuals that truly has a worthwhile purpose and a specific mission. A mission which I have found compelling and relevant for the nine years of the program. While it is not always easy to find that “One Book”, year after year the team perseveres until "the" book is discovered and chosen. OBOJC fulfills a great [...]
The Generosity of Grandparents
by Robin Minkoff, Director, Finance and Development When I was very young, my family made annual pilgrimages to Brooklyn to visit my maternal grandparents for the long Thanksgiving weekends. My sister and I would sing show tunes the whole way up I-95 from Baltimore, and on arrival, we'd race up the back steps of their duplex, past the empty glass seltzer bottles, to smell her amazing cooking and his fragrant pipe, and to give/get the hugs that we so longed for. When they relocated a few years later to an apartment complex only 1 mile from our house, the universe [...]