The Jewish world has dramatically improved its inclusion of children and young adults with disabilities in its formal and informal education systems in recent years, creating a generation of Jews with disabilities who care deeply about their communities and know how to advocate for themselves. But once they graduate from school and camp ends, they still want to stay involved, but the communal infrastructure isn’t built to support them.

The community is “bordering crisis” because of “the lack of opportunities for young adults [with disabilities] to participate meaningfully in Jewish life,” Dori Frumin Kirshner, the executive director of Matan, a national disability inclusion nonprofit, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

To address this dearth of opportunities for people with disabilities in Jewish communal life, Matan is teaming up with the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington to offer the Lieberman Fellowship, funded by Jerry and Eileen Lieberman, which will support Jewish professionals in creating communities that are inclusive to young adults with disabilities. The inaugural cohort will include 6-10 teams made up of a handful of people from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, with future yearly cohorts in other locations across the United States.

“Jewish continuity, education and disability inclusion have always been at the forefront of our philanthropic giving,” Eileen Lieberman, who served on Matan’s board and who has a 45-year-old son diagnosed with cerebral palsy, told eJP about why she and her husband partnered with Matan to create this fellowship. “There are organizations today such as Moishe House and One Table that provide meaningful connections for young Jewish adults, but they need the training on how to include the population of people with disabilities into their framework.”

In recent years, the Jewish community has made strides into being more inclusive, especially when it comes to Jews of color, LGBTQIA+ members, and those in interfaith relationships, but “the one piece of forgotten marginalized opportunities” is in disability inclusion, Frumin Kirshner said.

Particularly after Oct. 7, many Jews with disabilities have felt deserted by the wider disability community, which was largely silent after the Hamas massacres, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a disability advocate, told eJP.

“This is a particularly difficult time to be Jewish anywhere in the world,” Laszlo Mizrahi said. “The antisemitism everywhere in the world is highly problematic, and our community is not feeling safe in many non-Jewish spaces… That’s just more pressure on the Jewish community to get inclusion right because at the end of the day, what do we have? We have our families. We have our community.”

In 2019, over a quarter of families — 25.7% — included at least one person with a disability, according to the United States Census Bureau. Not prioritizing diversity inclusion alienates entire families who won’t attend if their loved one can’t, Laszlo Mizrahi said.

Running from Sept. 5 through mid-June 2025, the fellowship includes monthly virtual learning sessions and eight hours of one-on-one mentoring provided by disability advocates and focused on each organization’s specific needs. The program is bookended by in-person training days and completed with each team presenting an Inclusion Impact (Capstone) Project, showcasing how they’ve implemented their knowledge to improve their organization’s inclusion efforts.

“This is the natural next step,” Maura Linzer, associate rabbi-educator of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester, told eJP. She participated in a 2015 Matan fellowships for educational directors that “fundamentally changed the way that [Temple Beth El] think[s] about inclusion, education, everything from structure of classes, hiring, firing, priorities, everything you could possibly imagine. It was a total game changer for our program.”

Since being a part of the fellowship, Temple Beth El hired a full-time assistant principal with a background in special education. They sought special education certified teachers and began asking to see students’ individualized education programs. Their efforts attracted families who had never seen supplemental Jewish education as an option.

You don’t need a masters in special education to make your programs accessible, Frumin Kirshner said; instead, it’s a “journey” based on each individual community’s needs.

“We don’t need to do every single accommodation all the time because we don’t always know who’s going to come, who’s not going to come,” she said. What’s important is getting leaders thinking about inclusion, planning, and reaching out to ask what the community needs.

Targeting young adults with disabilities is essential, because once they turn 21, they often lose government services that support them, Laszlo Mizrahi said. “Then there’s no school to go to. There’s no job to go to. They’re pretty much sitting in a room, playing games on an iPhone or being on a computer, watching fantasy fiction or playing games. They’re just kind of lost, and it’s a huge problem. A lot of these people are really smart, really delightful. [It] completely would enhance the Jewish community to have them engaged, but people don’t know how to do it, and they don’t have the capacity to do it.”

Making programming more inclusive often costs nothing, Laszlo Mizrahi said. It’s free to turn on captions during Zoom presentations making it so attendees with hearing impairments can follow along. It’s free to turn down music at events so neurodivergent attendees can attend. Free to add a line to invites asking for attendees to state their needs.

“It’s not a matter of limitations,” Elisa Deener-Agus, chief of staff at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, told eJP. “It’s a matter of having the community have the confidence to give [Jews with disabilities] what they need in order to engage… I have deep confidence that the more our organizations do this, the more passionate they’ll become about doing more and more and more.”

Many members of the Jewish community who have disabilities are “rockstars,” Frumin Kirshner said, using the example of Tamir Goodman, a basketball player known as the “Jewish Jordan,” who has spoken openly about his having dyslexia. They just need accommodations to help them reach their potential.

“It would be a shame if our Jewish community continued to function the way that it does, and we don’t see the Tamirs rise to the top,” she said. “We need to start to function as a community, assuming that everyone has some sort of either preferred way of learning, preferred way of participating. As the Jewish community, we need to live our values of making sure that it’s not one size fits all, that there’s meaning made and comfort for every single member, and that belonging is the goal. Community is the goal.”