Nourishing the Jewish Spirituality, Education, and Social Justice

During 1996, seeds planted in prior years flowered and bore fruit. It was a year in which the Nathan Cummings Foundation supported existing organizations, helped to create brand new organizations, and catalyzed innovations in others. We enabled mainstream educational institutions to adopt innovative models. We made grants to organizations from all streams of Judaism, as well as to a range of secular institutions. And an innovative partnership with the Dorot Foundation made its Wrst grants supporting Jewish pluralism and environmental protection in Israel.

Spirituality: Synagogues, Healing, Intermarriage

Over the past seven years, we have been deepening our understanding of how to make effective grants to nourish the souls of American Jews. We have sought to develop the capacity of the Jewish community to articulate, teach, and practice traditional and contemporary forms of Jewish spiritual wisdom.

To strengthen the capacity of rabbis to provide spiritual leadership, we made a grant to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and continued support for Hebrew Union College and the Univer-sity of Judaism. We also made a grant to the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education to promote women scholars as resources for orthodox institutions, modeling a new role for women, and to place their graduates in community institutions of learning.

As part of our work to help revitalize the American synagogue, we made a grant to the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for three synagogue-based artist-in-residence programs. We hope they will create models for introducing the arts into synagogue life as a vehicle for the expression of Jewish spirituality. Synagogue 2000, a joint effort of the Reform and Conservative movements, brought together teams from 16 synagogues for Wve days of intensive study and liturgical celebration at Camp Ramah in Ojai, California. The teams went back to their respective congregations with a curriculum for change-some of them specializing in worship, others in healing.

Another grantee, the National Center for Jewish Healing, brought together 130 rabbis for a three-day conference on healing and Judaism, giving them ideas for services of healing and support groups for Jews who are ill, strengthening their counseling skills, and reinforcing their spirits. The Jewish healing movement grew in the past year to include centers in at least ten cities and services of healing in hundreds of congregations and communities. With our support, CLAL (the National Center for Learning and Leadership) developed a curriculum on Jewish insights into healing which will be taught across the country.

We support efforts to make the Jewish community more inclusive of those Jews who have married non-Jews, their spouses, and their children. We do so not only because we want the Jewish partners to remain connected to Jewish life, but also because we feel that Judaism is enriched by the spiritual enthusiasm of people from other backgrounds who explore and make commitments to Judaism. We awarded support to the Council of Jewish Federations for a joint Foundation/Federation initiative to evaluate existing oureach programs to the intermarried and replicate best practices.

Jewish Education

The Foundation is interested in the improvement of teaching and the transformation of the synagogue from a place where the religious school is a separate entity to one where learning is seen as the central task of the whole congregation.

Our renewal grant to the Rhea Hirsch School of the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion for its Experiment in Congregational Education (ECE) continues to support its pioneering work of synagogue transformation. The grant will support eight congregations in a three-year process of integrating learning into every synagogue activity in order to inspire children and adults to become lifetime learners, rather than consumers of limited educational activities. We also made a grant to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations for a plan to replicate the ECE model in a much larger number of congregations.

Grants to the Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education supported both the Teacher Educator Institute, which is training master teachers to work with supplementary school teachers in their localities, and a planning process for the creation of a school for educational leadership. Because congregations also need new educational ideas, we provided continued support to the Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values for the replication of its innovative Jewish Civics Initiative, a two-year curriculum for high school students that teaches Jewish values and civic responsibility through community service projects.

Social Justice

We believe that a deep and serious commitment to social justice should lie at the core of Jewish life. We support programs that both advocate for the needs of the underserved and affirm the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam-repair of the world. In 1996, we funded an American Jewish World Service program that took college students to Israel to learn about its overseas development programs and to Honduras to work on a development project and to meet the local Jewish community. We also continued our grant to Hillel for community service programs on six campuses.

To build effective working relationships between Jews and other ethnic groups in urban areas, we supported the Jewish Metropolitan Organizing Project in Minneapolis, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, and, through the Jewish Fund for Justice, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York, the Poverty Action Alliance in San Francisco, and the Chicago-based Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. We also renewed support to the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council to extend its New Leaders Project to three new cities.

To enable the field of social justice to acquire more prominence within the Jewish community, we made a planning grant to Project AMOS to become a network of social justice organizations, a catalyst for new projects, and an advocate for the Jewish imperative for tikkun olam.

Overseas Funding

ISRAEL. In 1996, we made great progress in developing the Israel Cooperative Program, a partnership of the Dorot Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The two organizations, discovering overlapping areas of interest, decided to pool major portions of their grant resources to fund two initiatives in Israel, the Initiative in Jewish Pluralism and the Initiative in Environmental Protection.

The Jewish Pluralism Initiative promotes the development of a Jewish culture in Israel that is multi-textured, respectful of different approaches to Judaism and Jewish identity, and fully responsive to the major social, political, and spiritual issues of the day. Some grants made during our initial year were to the Shalom Hartman Institute for creating curricula for state schools that integrate art and ethics with Jewish tradition; to the TALI Education Fund for teacher training and family education in the state non-Orthodox schools that provide a liberal Jewish education for their students; to the New Israel Fund for work encouraging religious freedom and pluralism in Israel; to Melitz for creating a Jewish learning environment for secular young adults modeled after the Brandeis-Bardin Collegiate Institute.

The Environmental Protection Initiative promotes study, education, and action on issues of environmental sustainability and the development of effective programs and policies, on both the national and regional level, to support an environmentally sound society. Some grants made in the first year were to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School for Nature Studies to develop educational materials on Judaism and the environment, and to do a survey of environmental education in Israel; to the Israel Union for Environmental Defense for work on transportation; to the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel for work on educating the public about the environmental costs of building the new cross-Israel highway; to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a post-college environmental education program on Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava, bringing Jordanians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans together to study the environmental issues that challenge the future of the region.

THE FORMER SOVIET UNION. To help renew Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine, we supported the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Jewish University of Moscow to foster the development of an educated young leadership for the future. In 1996, the Jewish Community Development Fund, created by a number of foundations, including Cummings, Moriah, Blaustein, Grinspoon, Meyerhoff, Levinson, and Auerbach, moved out of the Foundation's offices and found a new home as a project of the American Jewish World Service. A grant to the fund supports the development of grassroots Jewish community organizations and independent human rights organizations in the former Soviet Union. munity Development Fund, created by a number of foundations, including Cummings, Moriah, Blaustein, Grinspoon, Meyerhoff, Levinson, and Auerbach, moved out of the Foundation's offices and found a new home as a project of the American Jewish World Service. A grant to the fund supports the development of grassroots Jewish community organizations and independent human rights organizations in the former Soviet Union.