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In a typical month in the Houston area, members of the Jewish community study aspects of Jewish law and philosophy with kollel rabbis, Jewish residents of a nearby suburb attend Shabbaton programs and lectures led by the rabbis of Houston\u2019s largest Orthodox synagogue and Jewish students at the city\u2019s public high schools spend their free time discussing basic Jewish concepts with Orthodox youth leaders.<\/p>\n
Few of the participants in these activities are Orthodox.<\/p>\n
Houston, which has grown into the nation\u2019s fourth-largest city but is better known for Stetsons than for Borsalinos, is the new face of Jewish outreach in the United States. Its kiruv, outreach, programs represent the current trend of outreach efforts that bring traditional Judaism to the largely non-Orthodox American Jewish population.<\/p>\n
There are 5.2 million Jews in America today, but only 3.3 to 3.4 million adhere to any type of Judaism. Roughly one quarter of those who identify as Jewish consider themselves Orthodox. (2009 American Religious Identification Study by Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Out-of-Town Outreach<\/strong><\/p>\n Three decades after the early kiruv movement\u2019s yeshivot and classes on Torah began fostering the thousands of ba\u2019alei teshuvah who revitalized Orthodox Judaism, today\u2019s successful outreach programs look different. For one thing, while kiruv organizations in New York City still offer a variety of innovative outreach activities, a growing number of start-up outreach programs are coming from other Jewish communities across the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n \u201cKiruv is much more sophisticated these days,\u201d says Rabbi Steven Burg, international director of NCSY, the international teen organization sponsored by the Orthodox Union (OU) dedicated to connecting Jewish teens to Torah.<\/p>\n In the early years of the teshuvah movement, most of the successful programs originated in New York. But thanks to the ease of communications fostered by the Internet and a flowering of Orthodoxy in smaller communities across the United States and Canada, many kiruv programs today originate in a larger number of cities like Los Angeles and Toronto, according to outreach authorities.<\/p>\n \u201cCultural Jews are harder to reach; they only vaguely identify with the Jewish community. It\u2019s more difficult to find them.\u201d(Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum of the National Jewish Outreach Program)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Outside of New York, there tends to be a more open approach to Judaism, encouraging programs that transcend Jewish labels, says Rabbi Gavriel Jacknin, educational director of TORCH, the Torah Outreach Research Center of Houston. \u201cAway from New York, the slower pace of life allows people to listen in the first place,\u201d he says. \u201cIn New York, everyone is busy.\u201d<\/p>\n (Although nowadays, with the economic downturn, even unaffiliated New Yorkers are finding the time to learn. More people have more time on their hands, says Rebbetzin Leah Kohn, director of the Jewish Renaissance Center, a Manhattan-based outreach center for women, and are using that free time to learn about Judaism.)<\/p>\n Rabbis without Borders<\/strong> \u201cYou are no longer going to find unaffiliated Jews in the JCCs or the synagogues,\u201d says Rabbi Burg. \u201cYou\u2019re going to find them in other venues. We have to engage them in their own territory, in their comfort zone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a new dynamic,\u201d says Rabbi Kenneth Brander, dean of Yeshiva University\u2019s (YU) Center for the Jewish Future. In other words, the onus is on the kiruv community to find and reach out to future members of the Torah-observant community.<\/p>\n \u201cYou are no longer going to find unaffiliated Jews in the JCCs or the synagogues. . . . You\u2019re going to find them in other venues. We have to engage them in their own territory, in their comfort zone.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum, associate director of the National Jewish Outreach Program (NJOP), a pioneering kiruv group, agrees. The Jewish community is more spread out nowadays, with more and more Jews settling in areas with no identifiable Jewish neighborhood, he says. NJOP is based in New York City but coordinates non-denominational activities, like crash courses in Hebrew and Shabbat Across America, which brings tens of thousands of Jews together for an annual Friday night event occurring simultaneously at hundreds of locations in cities across North America.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to work harder\u201d than in the past to find unaffiliated Jews, Rabbi Rosenbaum says. \u201c[Jews] are more scattered. They\u2019re not looking for [Jewish enrichment].\u201d<\/p>\n The new trend in kiruv has both rabbis and lay leaders seeking out Jews in high schools and college campuses, cafes, restaurants and office buildings. Think rabbis without borders.<\/p>\n The number of American Jews who identify as religious has dropped by more than 20 percent over the past two decades, while the cultural Jewish population (Jews who identify by ethnicity alone) has nearly doubled. (2009 American Religious Identification Study by Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many of these programs serve as a magnet for Jews because they don\u2019t take place in an obviously Jewish site. Thus, programs loosely wear an \u201cOrthodox\u201d or \u201coutreach\u201d label to avoid scaring away Jews who have little connection with traditional Judaism.<\/p>\n \u201cThe average kid who is not Orthodox is terrified by an Orthodox shul,\u201d says Rabbi Burg. \u201cIt\u2019s strange. It\u2019s not what he\u2019s used to.\u201d That, he says, is why NCSY has located some of its most successful outreach programs in places like public schools and cafes. \u201cKids\u2014even youngsters in families that belong to Orthodox congregations\u2014are not in the shul anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Take Latte and Learning, an NCSY program founded in 1996 in Detroit, which attracts middle and high school students to coffeehouses with an offer of free coffee and a Torah discussion. The program has spread across the country, from Seattle to Miami. Philosophically, NCSY is making essentially the same pitch it did years ago, when kids were still in the synagogues, Rabbi Burg says. \u201cTorah hasn\u2019t changed; what\u2019s different is the packaging,\u201d he says. \u201cThe kiruv movement is all about marketing Orthodoxy.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone in the Orthodox community understands this out-of the-synagogue approach, Rabbi Burg says. One disapproving rabbi commented that \u201cNCSY is not the National Conference of Starbucks Youth.\u201d Interestingly enough, the NCSY chapter located in that rabbi\u2019s community created a Latte and Learning program that now draws sixty to seventy teens each meeting.<\/p>\n Whereas two-thirds of adult Canadian Jews and nearly 75 percent of French and Australian Jews have been to Israel, only 35 percent of American Jews have visited there even once. (\u201cThe Truth About American Jews and Israel,\u201d by Jack Wertheimer, Commentary, June 2009)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But Rabbi Barry Gelman of Houston\u2019s United Orthodox Synagogues (UOS) understands that a shul can be alienating. So three years ago he started UOS\u2019 outreach to Sugar Land, a bedroom community thirty minutes from Houston with a growing Jewish community but no Orthodox residents. The UOS initiative may be the first such Orthodox synagogue program in the United States that specifically aims to influence a community without Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Gelman says. He continues to lead a monthly Sugar Land study group and last year hired Yeshiva University musmach Rabbi Moshe Davis, who coordinates the outreach and leads regular classes in people\u2019s homes as well as a monthly Shabbaton in the social hall of an assisted living facility.<\/p>\n Interest in Sugar Land is still growing, Rabbi Gelman says. \u201cPeople are more comfortable in their own homes or in the homes of someone they know.\u201d Some participants in the Sugar Land program have joined UOS, some have become shomer Shabbat, some have moved within walking distance of an Orthodox synagogue, he says, but that isn\u2019t the point.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important goal is to inspire people by exposing them to Torah,\u201d Rabbi Gelman says. \u201cI\u2019m interested in building a community that has lots of different types of Jews. We have a responsibility to teach Torah to whoever wants to have it.\u201d<\/p>\n Niche Kiruv<\/strong> But today\u2019s kiruv programs range across the Orthodox spectrum, from Modern Orthodox to Chareidi auspices. The road of twenty-first-century outreach was paved, in part, kiruv experts say, by Chabad, whose shaliach couples have for decades served as the lone outposts of Torah Judaism in isolated communities, and by Birthright Israel, whose young participants, after visiting Israel for the first time on the program, tend to return with a sudden openness to strengthening their Jewish identity.<\/p>\n \u201cFor every ba\u2019al teshuvah we make, we probably lose between four or five other Jews.\u201d (Rabbi Rosenbaum of the NJOP)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Moreover, with a growing number of trained leaders involved in kiruv activities\u2014some of them raised and educated as Torah-observant Jews, some of them young and culturally savvy\u2014many outreach programs are now geared to specific, easy-to-identify niche communities. One-program-serves-all is yesterday. Today, it\u2019s earmarked activities for teens and college students and women and Jews from Soviet or Iranian families.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause there are more and more people involved, there is more room for people to specialize,\u201d says Rabbi Rosenbaum.<\/p>\n This is especially true in the \u00e9migr\u00e9 community of Jews whose families came from the former Soviet Union. In the early years of the kiruv movement, many of the programs geared for newcomers who arrived with little or no Jewish background were led by American-born rabbis.<\/p>\n Now, says Rabbi Eli Blokh, the Moscow-born founder of the Jewish Russian Community Center in Queens, New York, which concentrates its religious and educational efforts on people from the former Soviet Union, there are \u201cmany [Soviet-born] Russian-speaking people working in the field.\u201d<\/p>\n Another example: Rabbi Mordechai Tokarsky, a native of St. Petersburg who heads RAJE (Russian American Jewish Experience) in New York, a specialized division of Gateways, an international kiruv organization. Rabbi Tokarsky\u2019s colleagues, who are fellow \u00e9migr\u00e9s or members of \u00e9migr\u00e9 families, have a better understanding of the immigrant mentality and are better equipped to tailor their programs to the participants\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n \u201cIn order to be effective in kiruv, you have to share common ground culturally with the group you are reaching out to,\u201d says Rabbi Burg. \u201cYou have to have grown up with the same Sunday morning cartoons.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to outreach, specializing, experts say, makes sense. NCSY often gets referrals from kiruv organizations that have made parents frum but are unable to reach the teenagers in the family. \u201cTeenagers\u2019 brains are in a different place. They are not adults and they are not kids,\u201d says Rabbi Burg. \u201cAdult kiruv tends to be intellectual; teen kiruv is social. It\u2019s all about hanging out.\u201d<\/p>\n Thirsting to Learn<\/strong> Established ten years ago, Birthright Israel has taken more than 200,000 young Jewish adults on a free ten-day educational trip to Israel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the same time, however, there are not as many willing to leave everything behind to go study Torah. Several decades ago, Rebbetzin Kohn says, people were anti-establishment and were quick to leave everything behind to join a yeshivah. Today, by contrast, they want to learn in addition to everything else they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s not that learning is less important, she says, but that in some ways \u201cit\u2019s a different reality. . . . [People] are more realistic and more grounded.\u201d<\/p>\n Kollel Kiruv<\/strong> According to the Association for Jewish Outreach Professionals (AJOP), the major kiruv umbrella organization, nearly three dozen community-supported kollel programs\u2014some are affiliated with the Mizrachi-oriented Torah MiTzion movement, others take a more Chareidi, Lakewood-inspired approach\u2014are in operation in the United States, some in such unlikely Jewish settings as Savannah, Georgia; Des Moines, Iowa; and Norfolk, Virginia.<\/p>\n Local synagogues help establish the kollelim, NJOP\u2019s Rabbi Rosenbaum says, as an investment in the future of their communities and the viability of their congregations. In addition, YU rabbis, sponsored by YU\u2019s Center for the Jewish Future, take part in temporary kollel programs across the country during their vacation time.<\/p>\n The rabbis in ten-year-old TORCH are \u201cYeshivish\u2014but not all the guys wear black hats,\u201d Rabbi Jacknin says. They teach approximately one thousand people a month, including participants in well-attended women\u2019s conferences and medical ethics conferences, he says. Many of the kollel classes are held in Reform and Conservative synagogues. \u201cThe shuls are happy to have us teach classes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Chabad\u2019s more than 3,000 \u201cshluchim,\u201d emissaries who serve the Jewish public, are found in more than 70 countries around the world. Chabad also reaches more than 50,000 students on 238 campuses in North and South America, Europe, Australia, the former Soviet Union and Israel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Upstate, in Dallas, the community kollel is developing a hands-on, user-friendly brand of Torah Judaism. Based on the campus of the Akiba Academy and Yavneh Academy, the kollel aims its activities at the parents of the schools\u2019 students.<\/p>\n It offers an ongoing Shabbat Family Minyan, a \u201chalachic prayer service\u201d that features explanations of the tefillah and a Shabbox, a bi-weekly container that offers educational materials and family activities on a Shabbat theme, says Rabbi Joe Hirsch, program coordinator.<\/p>\n Facebook Outreach<\/strong> It\u2019s a revolution in tactics, or rather an evolution that has adapted over the years to new realities in the Jewish community, Rabbi Rosenbaum says. He calls today\u2019s successful programs a Generation Y throwback to the popular mixed dances that Orthodox organizations sponsored as early as the 1920s to attract unaffiliated and marginally affiliated Jews. Then, they met at dances; today, on Facebook. Indeed, many of the Jewish community\u2019s new kiruv programs use high-tech Internet initiatives and online social networking to spread their spiritual message. These programs include projectsinai.org, which concentrates on \u201cpersonal growth\u201d; theshmuz.com, which offers interactive forty-five-minute Torah lectures; jewishpathways.com, an Aish HaTorah-developed Web site and globalyeshiva.com, a source of videos, blogs and more. One can also study Torah via video podcast and mp3 audio.<\/p>\n \u201cKiruv has changed,\u201d Rabbi Adlerstein wrote in Cross-Currents. \u201cKiruv has become familiar and comfortable with technology and sophisticated graphic presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n People in all the new outreach activities \u201care thinking out of the box,\u201d developing new techniques and new venues for reaching Jews unfamiliar with traditional Judaism, Rabbi Rosenbaum says. NJOP, he says, has turned to such innovations as Twitter, YouTube videos and e-mail updates to reach its hip target audience. \u201cSociety is changing. People\u201d\u2014especially young people\u2014\u201cdon\u2019t read newspapers. They read e-mails.\u201d<\/p>\n Aish HaTorah International consists of more than 100 branches and projects and has 750 full-time employees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMany outreach professionals are using Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, for recruiting and communication,\u201d says Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld, executive director of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, a Baltimore-based educational organization that seeks to revitalize Jewish spiritual education. \u201cBut I\u2019m not sure this counts as a trend, because regardless of the trend, kiruv still boils down to relationships. These new tools are just that\u2014tools.\u201d<\/p>\n Rabbi Burg agrees. The NCSY web site features videos about its upcoming and past activities, and the youth organization is active in the world of Twitter.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we do is on Facebook, since that\u2019s where the kids operate,\u201d he says. \u201cOf course, the most important thing is the one-on-one relationship; you can\u2019t replace the human dimension.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a typical month in the Houston area, members of the Jewish community study aspects of Jewish law and philosophy with kollel rabbis, Jewish residents of a nearby suburb attend Shabbaton programs and lectures led by the rabbis of Houston\u2019s largest Orthodox synagogue and Jewish students at the city\u2019s public high schools spend their free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[138],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outreach","tag-30th-archive","issues-winter-20095770"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nOnce kiruv activities were based in sites like synagogues and Jewish schools, and participants traveled to the programs. Today, the programs go to where there are potential participants\u2014to coffee houses and college campuses and public high schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIn recent years, outreach was, or seemed to be, largely in Chareidi hands.<\/p>\n\n\nNJOP programs have been offered at almost 3,700 locations across North America and in 37 countries worldwide. Through these programs and its Jewish consciousness-raising advertising campaigns, NJOP reaches 60-70,000 Jews across North America each year and, to date, has engaged more than 1 million Jews in Jewish life.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u201cSage academic types were convinced that the teshuva revolution [of the 1970s] was running out of steam. It was part of a general American return to religion, or left-over idealism from the \u201860s, or a reaction to the devaluing of the individual, which eventually people would come to grips with,\u201d Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, author and educator, wrote two years ago on his Cross-Currents blog. \u201cThey were all wrong. All those cultural trends have come and gone, and there is no end in sight. More and more people emerge each day who wish to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\nTORCH in Houston represents another kiruv trend: ubiquitous kollelim that bring young scholars and their families to cities unfamiliar with advanced Jewish learning. The rabbis, and often their wives, dedicate significant time to teaching classes and participating in chavruta learning.<\/p>\n\n
\nThe new blood in outreach has helped to generate new ideas.<\/p>\n\n