In Pittsburgh, Jewish parents of young children are enrolling in classes with titles like, “How to Raise a Mensch” and “What is my Jewish Journey?” In Austin, Texas, small localized meetups are being organized for small groups of parents in neighborhoods across the city. 

It is all part of a new early childhood Jewish education pilot program based at seven JCC preschools around the country that is focusing its outreach on a previously under-tapped demographic: parents. The three-year, $2 million pilot — the “Early Childhood Parent Engagement Program” — was conceived and is being funded by the Tepper Foundation, a New Jersey-based nonprofit grant-making foundation. 

The program, which officially launched last fall, aims to provide classes, social opportunities and get-togethers centered on Jewish life specifically for parents with children enrolled in JCC preschools. The goal is to strengthen families’ ability to live Jewish lives and be a part of a Jewish community once their child graduates preschool — or even just when they are home on the weekend.  

“There are lots of Jewish parents out there, particularly since Oct. 7, that are looking for this meaningful attachment to Jewish life,” Marian Stern, a portfolio manager at the Tepper Foundation, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “We saw this as a really low-barrier way to do something that would be very engaging, driven by what interests them.”

The idea hatched when the foundation began brainstorming “giving opportunities for young Jewish families to be involved in the community and to feel they have rich Jewish experiences,” Stern said. “Logically, that brought us into the area of early childhood education and other ways that young Jewish families can engage in Jewish life.”

They quickly tapped Rabbi Joy Levitt, an educator and the former executive director of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, as a consultant and expert to spearhead the program.

“The theory here is: find other Jewish parents who like doing what you like doing, and have guides, rabbis, educators, cantors who will be facilitating that journey and helping you go on that journey,” Levitt said.

In June 2023, the foundation partnered with Levitt, who has decades of experience leading a JCC, to conduct a study of what families at Jewish preschools were looking for most. “We were very interested in how to make these schools better platforms for engaged, ongoing, Jewish living for Jewish families,” Levitt said. 

She found that these parents did not only want Jewish life for their kids when they enrolled them in Jewish preschool — they also were looking for it for themselves. 

“While there’s generally a belief that Jewish preschools are fantastic foundations, we also found that if challah stopped [being put] in the [child’s] cubby, that would be kind of the end of Shabbat for a large number of families,” Levitt told eJewishPhilanthropy. “That was disturbing to us because here we have laid this wonderful foundation, but there was no real mechanism for building on that success.”

Levitt said that it made sense that parents themselves weren’t getting what they needed from their child’s Jewish preschool, no matter how good the Jewish education was. 

“By and large, a Jewish preschool’s job is not really to build Jewish life at home. They’re focused on child development — and appropriately so. You can’t expect a nursery school director to become a Jewish educator for parents who are trying to figure out whether they have a belief in God, for example,” she said. “Parents need to find their own Jewish journey that is not about only how to make Hanukkah cookies with your child or go to Shabbat Sing at a JCC on Friday morning with your kids.”

As of 2025, the Tepper Foundation has distributed nearly $2 million to seven JCCs across the country as part of the program. So far, the grant recipients are JCCs in Manhattan, Washington , Baltimore, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Austin and Boulder, Colo.

For now, the program is only being run in JCC preschools. This was in part because Tepper wanted to work with a diverse set of preschools in size, location and demographic, and JCC preschools were a large enough umbrella to find that diversity. 

The other reason, Levitt said, was that JCCs often “didn’t have an ongoing, built-in community,” like synagogue preschools. She found in her study that JCC preschools generally attract less-affiliated families than synagogue preschools, many of which require synagogue membership to enroll. This means that once the JCC families moved onto elementary school, it is less likely for them to actively engage in Jewish life as a family again until the child started studying for their bar or bat mitzvah. 

Jason Kunzman, the president and CEO of the JCC of Greater Pittsburgh, told eJP that participating in the program was a “no-brainer.” 

“JCCs have a long history of great programming in after-school, camp and early childhood programming and in general really being able to bring Jewish engagement towards young children. What a wonderful opportunity to be able to leverage that credit with the parents of them,” he said. 

The JCC of Greater Pittsburgh spent the fall engaging with parents on a one-on-one and small-group basis about what they want and need in their Jewish journey. 

“This is an interesting moment in time — there has been a surge in interest in becoming more Jewishly engaged, even though synagogue membership is declining,” Kunzman said. “People don’t necessarily want to be told what to do in their Jewish journey, and this gives them the opportunity for conversation, to curate their own experiences and share their opinions.” 

Though Levitt serves as a liaison between the foundation and the grantees, helping them make decisions about how and what to implement with the money, especially in the first year of the program, the foundation is largely leaving it up to each individual JCC to decide what exact programs and initiatives they will carry out to engage parents. 

However, there is some overlap. Stern noted that each JCC had so far employed a majority of the funds towards hiring a Jewish educator to work with parents and put together a curriculum. The other two buckets of expenses that each JCC has dedicated funds towards? Food and babysitting.

“When we asked what the obstacles were for parents in getting involved in the Jewish community, a common answer was, ‘well, we would love to go out and meet with other Jewish parents and learn something together, but we can’t afford a babysitter,’” Stern said. “It was such a simple answer to what felt like a complex problem.”

Shalom Austin, the JCC in the Texas city, has hired a parent life educator, Rabbi Dan Ain, to run this program. Similarly to Pittsburgh, much of the fall was focused on engaging with some 50 families for one-on-one conversations about their needs. 

“We want to help build confidence and competence for these parents to host events, Shabbat dinners and have Jewish experiences, especially when their child leaves preschool,” said the JCC’s senior engagement director, Alachua Haskins. She also noted that through these conversations, they found that although families weren’t affiliated with a synagogue, there was still a “need and want” to meet other Jewish parents. 

“Parents wanted to get more involved, but we just couldn’t give that to them. We didn’t have the staff to work with just parents,” Haskins said. 

In addition to planning upcoming social gatherings for parents to meet each other, the JCC in Pittsburgh will begin its first class series in late February, focusing on topics like “How to raise a mensch,” “How to Shabbat” and “How to create inclusive Jewish spaces.” 

“If we do it well, it will create a micro-community of like-minded folks these parents can walk on their Jewish journey with,” Kunzman said. 

Stern said this was one of the goals of the program. “For young parents, to be able to have Jewish friends who are also interested in evolving as a Jewish family was so important to us,” she said. “As young parents, there’s nothing better than to have other people who are going through the same thing to talk with. It is essential to being a good parent.”