In May 2014, rabbis and professional leaders from our seven organizations — IKAR in Los Angeles, Kavana in Seattle, the Kitchen in San Francisco, Lab/Shul and Romemu in New York, Mishkan in Chicago and Sixth & I in D.C. — came together for the first time at the Leichtag Ranch with support from Natan and the Leichtag Foundation. As leaders, we were building Jewish community in new ways, focusing on an entrepreneurial approach that was purpose-driven, rooted in tradition and radically welcoming. We had a common passion for invigorating Jewish life and were dedicated to collaborating with one another to raise the bar for our own organizations and, hopefully, for the entire field.

As this loose affiliation began to take shape, we partnered with the Jim Joseph Foundation to create the Jewish Emergent Network, with the idea that new and thriving Jewish spaces could grow together in surprising and creative ways. The story of the Jewish Emergent Network echoes the story of Jewish tradition and innovation, in which new forms of community emerge in response to the needs and desires of the people we serve, informed by the past but fundamentally oriented to the present moment. The Network formed a meta-community as the leadership of our seven communities leaned on each other and learned from one another, creating relationships that have now lasted for over a decade.

The leaders of the Jewish Emergent Network in an undated photo. Courtesy

The Network’s first official project was the Rabbinic Fellowship, crafted with the Jim Joseph Foundation, who engaged other funders. Rather than competing for grants or being cut off from national funding opportunities, the Network worked collectively on behalf of the seven communities to secure funding for the fellowship. This was a unique partnership — independent synagogues located in different regions of the country don’t usually collaborate with one another on projects of this scale or duration, and large national funders don’t usually directly fund individual spiritual communities. Along with the Jim Joseph Foundation, over the course of the fellowship we were privileged to receive generous support from an anonymous family foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies, the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, Natan, the Righteous Persons Foundation and the William Davidson Foundation.

This Rabbinic Fellowship placed two cohorts of seven early-career rabbis into each community for a two-year period to help develop a new generation of dynamic rabbinical leaders. The fellowship served multiple purposes. As a collaborative project among all seven communities, it strengthened the network, reinforcing the idea that they were all on the same team. This in turn supported the efforts of each community, with more rabbis on the ground enabling each community to engage more people and create more inventive forms of Jewish prayer, learning and gathering. As for the fellows themselves, they received training as the next generation of enterprising rabbis to take on the challenges and realities of 21st century Jewish life in America in different settings. The Jim Joseph Foundation and the Network understood that we could raise the entire field of Jewish innovation by facilitating and encouraging these young leaders to share experiences with each other and with individuals outside of the communities. 

Over the four-year period, the fellowship proved to be both a steadying force and one that laid the foundation for the Network’s evolution. The 14 fellows, guided by the rabbinical leaders in each community, were steeped in the ethos of Jewish experimentation and enabled each community to grow and mature. Today, these rabbis continue to inject entrepreneurial spirit into Jewish communities across the country. Many of the rabbis who participated in the fellowship have gone on to found their own communities or work at organizations that are reinventing the forms of how Jews gather together in community. 

Beyond the rabbinical leaders and the fellows, the connections between the Network organizations deepened at every level, with micro-communities forming among rabbis, CEOs and executive directors and across staff in collegial working groups organized across development, communications, programming, and education.

In 2020, as the fellowship concluded the pandemic began — and with it an opportunity, even a necessity, for the Network to flex its collaborative muscles. The communities worked together, and often with other organizational partners, on holiday, social justice, and adult learning programming in an unprecedented environment that necessitated quick pivots and virtual experiences. The Network had the unique experience of coming together to support each other — nearly the full 25-person group of Network leaders met weekly via Zoom for the first eight weeks of the pandemic — to dream up programming that brought critical opportunities to engage with one another even as we were all isolated in our homes.

Amid the pandemic and the racial reckoning in the U.S., the Network engaged even more deeply in social justice, an area that each community embraced as a defining element of its work. Many of the rabbis became known on the national stage, preaching Jewish texts and traditions as a method for narrowing the chasm between the world as it is and the world as they wanted it to be.

Which brings us to today. In a period of reflection about the future of the Network, we looked around us to realize, with great joy, that the landscape of innovative and vibrant Jewish organizations has exploded since we began 10 years ago. There are entire organizations, like Beloved Builders and UpStart, dedicated to supporting start-up Jewish spiritual communities and organizations. There are organizations to support Jewish gathering around Shabbat on a large scale (OneTable) and to embed progressive rabbis in young adult communities (BASE). There is a hub for Jewish social change organizations, the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, connecting groups carrying out justice work rooted in core values of Judaism. And there is an organization devoted exclusively to rabbinic leadership and innovation, Atra. 

We celebrate these exciting developments for the field — and it was in this context, after a year-long wind-down as an independent network, that this past summer the Jewish Emergent Network passed on its core initiatives to two thriving organizations best positioned to carry out specific aspects of the Network’s legacy: the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and Atra.

Through the Roundtable, the connections established between the seven communities’ CEOs and executive directors, education leaders, programming leaders, and communications directors continue as we meet in communities of practice and benefit from the Roundtable’s broad expertise in supporting progressive, independent organizations; and Network rabbis will be supported by Atra, which provides myriad professional development and networking opportunities for spiritual leaders. We were also pleased to transfer our library of education, ritual and professional development materials, co-created by Network leaders over the past decade, which Atra will be able to use for research and adapt as expanded resources for our growing field. 

The Network communities continue to serve as laboratories for new approaches to Jewish life and community building. As the Network evolves and blends into these two exceptional organizations, we hope to create a lasting legacy for the field. We are deeply proud of what we have created and modeled, both individually and collectively, and we are profoundly grateful to the funders who were inspired by our bold vision. We also want to thank the fourteen rabbinic fellows; Jessica Emerson, who served as the Network’s inaugural director and steered the fellowship; and Justin Rosen Smolen, our second director, who guided the strategic planning process that ultimately brought us to these new homes for our core initiatives in a way that honors our decade of learning, collaboration and innovation. We offer the work we did together over these transformative years, the community of colleagues and friends we built and the emerging leadership we cultivated as a now-completed chapter in the Jewish people’s long and creative and experiment with our tradition nd we look forward with great optimism to the new chapters future leaders will write to move our people and our world forward.  

Melissa Balaban is the CEO of IKAR.

Rachel Cort is the executive director of Mishkan. 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum is the rabbi and executive director of Kavana.

Justin Rosen Smolen, formerly the director of the Jewish Emergent Network, is the vice president for thriving communities and partnerships at Reconstructing Judaism.