Good Friday morning!

Arts-and-culture programming can be instrumental in shaping Jewish identity but is treated by funders as more of a luxury than a necessity, said panelists at “Taking Note: Building a Movement of Jewish Arts & Culture,” a virtual event that took place on Thursday afternoon.

“Art is not just art. Art is a portal for the entry into Jewish peoplehood,” said Matthew Lazar, founder and director of the Zamir Choral Foundation, which convened the event. He emphasized the importance of finding “a community of partners, people who are willing to work with you.”

In terms of securing funding, Lazar said, “The challenge with the donors is to find a donor, a supporter who believes in your mission, who believes in your passion, who believes that your goal is correct, and understands the incredible power of art and culture.”

Many artists struggle financially, said Joni Blinderman, executive director of The Covenant Foundation. “We have no lack of extraordinarily talented, talented human beings, devoting their life to Jewish education in the Jewish community,” she said, mentioning one artist she had spoken with that day. “My heart was breaking,” she said, noting that although the artist does work that Blinderman called “important and beautiful…they can’t find money.”

Lou Cove, the founder of Canvas, a collaborative fund for Jewish culture, said that finding the Yiddish Book Center’s literature, music, poetry, theater and film was core to connecting with his Jewish identity. “If someone had shared this with me when I was young, I might have felt a stronger sense of connection to my identity [and] to what I was inheriting,” he said. Arts and culture also has potential to enable cross-cultural connection, he added. “We need people to get together around a single table and start to really do things together, because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to lift up the field,” he said.

Cove stressed the importance of networks, such as the 14 groups funded by Canvas that represent 3,000 Jewish creatives. “Find one another and begin to cross-pollinate ideas, collaborate on projects together,” he said, “so when you find yourself in the company of many others who are also pursuing the same thing, the viability of that notion gets stronger.”

UKRAINE CRISIS

Jewish aid groups on the Ukraine border are preparing for the long haul

UJA-Federation of New York

Eight years ago, Eric Goldstein traveled to Ukraine during what felt, at the time, like a shocking geopolitical crisis, and encountered a Holocaust survivor who had to flee from Russian-backed separatists, seven decades after having fled the Nazis. Now, on his way back from a visit with refugee aid groups near the Ukrainian border, Goldstein is watching similar scenes play out once more, he told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales.

A tragic history: “There are people who are fleeing for their lives for a third time,” Goldstein, the CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told eJP. “The fact that this is happening in Ukraine to people who have known suffering many times before is so sad.” Ukraine’s Jewish history has come to the fore in the war’s first days. Jewish communal and historical sites were bombed, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on global Jewry to “not remain silent right now. Nazism is born in silence. So shout about the killing of civilians.”

Stepping up aid: Jewish groups are providing aid to refugees, helping evacuate them out of Ukraine, giving them lodging and processing some for immigration to Israel. They’re also helping non-Jews. A delegation of medical professionals from Natan, an Israeli disaster relief group, plans to help provide aid to 500,000 refugees.

Staying engaged: Goldstein hopes, as the war continues, that Jewish organizations will avoid overlapping with each other and that Jews will remain engaged with the crisis, especially because so many have roots in Ukraine. “Do people sometimes tire of crises and don’t sustain the effort? We’ve seen that too, but it’s too early to predict what is going to happen here,” he said. “The potential scale of the devastation is so great and so personal.”

Read the full story here.

LIVING WITH A DISABILITY

Breaking (sound) barriers in the Jewish community

Shutterstock

“Like all of us, I hold many identities. I am a Jew, a father, a Grateful Dead fan, a photographer, an educator. I am also Deaf,” writes Gary Alpert, director of admissions and community outreach at MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham, Mass., in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

Most at home: “The Jewish community is where I am most at home. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of going to temple on Shabbat mornings with my family (and sneaking cookies from the kiddush). In elementary school, I found comfort and community with Our Way, an organization serving Deaf Jewish children and adults. In middle and high school, United Synagogue Youth (USY) was the center of my social world. I have been a proud, dedicated Jewish communal professional for two decades.” 

Feelings of isolation: “I have also experienced deep isolation from my beloved Jewish community due to my disability. As a child, I was denied access to Jewish day school because I was Deaf. I struggled through Hebrew school because of my well-meaning teachers’ lack of experience educating children with hearing loss, and the school’s unwillingness to provide an aide. In countless Jewish settings, I have been denied full access to information and content, and the reasons given are always the same: interpreters are costly, captioning feels inconvenient and nobody else would benefit from accommodation.”

Pandemic times: “For those of us who are Deaf and hard of hearing, the pandemic has been devastating. All Deaf individuals are unique. I personally wear two hearing aids to amplify sound, and I rely heavily on lip reading to fully communicate with others. With ubiquitous mask wearing, lip reading is impossible, voices are muffled, and it is incredibly difficult for me to understand what others are saying – particularly children, who surround me in my daily work.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Good Giving: In The Atlantic, James Parker looks at the internal decision-making behind giving to the less fortunate. “But if you are inclined to give, then give wholeheartedly. Not for charity, not for empathy, not for any groaning abstraction, but that the divine economy of giving might circulate through you unobstructed. Through your glands and through your veins. The person before you needs money, and you need to give it. Unplug the wellspring of life, and hand it over.” [TheAtlantic]

Meet Me in St. Louis: Congregation Shaare Emeth, Parkway United Church of Christ, and Turkish American Society of Missouri joined together to form the Intertwine Interfaith Welcome Circle and sponsor an Afghan family of six — with four kids ages 3-11 — in their move to St. Louis, Jordan Palmer writes in the St. Louis Jewish Light. “The core team will have direct contact with the [Afghan] family, enrolling the kids in school, helping the parents learn the fundamentals of food shopping, transportation, language skills, banking and more, while also introducing the family to the many cultural and entertainment options in St Louis. Resource identification, career assistance, and assimilation to the St. Louis community will be ongoing efforts to help the family become self-sufficient.” [JewishLight]

Orgs Get Digital: Digital-first peer-to-peer fundraising is making a bigger and bigger contribution to the coffers of American nonprofit organizations, David Hessekiel writes in Forbes in an article about a new study of 44 nonprofits. According to the study, more than $154 million was generated for charity in 2021 by “digitalcentric” peer-to-peer fundraising, a 30% increase over 2020: “‘Social giving is the highest and best use of social media,’ said Nick Black, co-founder and CEO of GoodUnited. ‘The six billion dollars raised on Facebook signals supporters’ desire to converse and convene in the channels where they spend time. Increasingly, that’s online. It’s not an overstatement to say the economics and virality of digitally-native fundraising has the power to save the world.’” [Forbes]

Pic of the Day

JDC

In Siret, Romania, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and FEDROM, the Jewish community Federation of Romania, are providing humanitarian aid, including hot soup and bottled water, to refugees from Ukraine, many of whom are Jews. The round-the-clock operation is being run by a team of 30 volunteers and staff working in shifts, including Silviu Vexler (right), the president of FEDROM, and Israel Sabag, JDC country director for Romania. This is one of numerous relief efforts that JDC is providing in Romania, Poland, Hungary and Moldova, including special services for Jewish refugees.