Expanding the Yachad pipeline

Yachad means togetherness. It’s about many together as one — not all boiled into some bland soup, but together in community.

As its name implies, Yachad is about inclusion — but that English word sounds too clinical. It’s about helping people with developmental disabilities gain educational opportunities, life and job skills, friendship, and joy; it’s also about neurotypical people — generally starting when they’re in high school — coming to understand that people who seem different from them aren’t so different. It provides those neurotypical people with the chance to open themselves to friendship, and the surprises that friendship brings.

It also provides neurotypical teenagers with leadership skills that they will be able to use throughout their lives, as they see specific needs for advocacy and organization, and then come to see that it can be far more effective to do it themselves than to wait for someone else to bigfoot in and do it for them.

Yachad is a national organization run by the Orthodox Union. It includes local branches; Yachad New Jersey is based in Teaneck. Raquel Selevan — in real life, she goes by Rocky — is its executive director. Right now, she’s engrossed in overseeing its annual gala, set for Saturday night (see box), but she was able to find enough time to talk about Yachad as a provider of leadership training and role models for students, now starting as early as middle school. It’s a pipeline, she said.

Ms. Selevan embodies that pipeline. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, going to school at Manhattan Day School and then crossing the Hudson to go to high school at Frisch, in Paramus, she learned about Yachad early. “I started to volunteer in eighth grade, but my exposure to Yachad began even earlier, because there were Yachad siblings and participants in my community,” she said. She began as a Yachad volunteer at Frisch, went to a Yachad Shabbaton, and that did it, she said. At that Shabbaton, she forged the connection that’s guided her life ever since. Now, as the suburban mother of five young sons, ranging from 10 years old to newly 1 — she, her husband, and their kids live in Bergenfield — she is a role model not only for living the values of inclusion, but for showing how leadership logically, maybe even inevitably, grows from living those values.

So how does the pipeline work?

Yachad New Jersey’s Mendel Balk Center, at its Teaneck office, offers Yachad participants and peer volunteers, as Yachad calls them, a place to go, meet friends, join in the scheduled activities or just socialize every evening from Monday through Thursday. They draw Yachad participants and peer volunteers from around North Jersey.

Until this year, those volunteers have come from yeshiva high schools in northern New Jersey and MetroWest — to be specific, from Bruriah in Elizabeth; Frisch in Paramus; Kushner in Livingston; Ma’ayanot and TABC, both in Teaneck; and Naaleh in Fair Lawn. But now that list has expanded. “We always offered volunteer opportunities in high school, but this year we added the middle school program,” Ms. Selevan said.

“We have middle school students who feel inspired and motivated by older siblings and community members who would glow when they talked about Yachad. So this year, in addition to the high school leadership program, which meets monthly, we started our Yachad Junior program.” It meets two evenings each month; the Yachad participants range from 7 to 15 years old, and the peer volunteers are seventh- and eighth-graders.

“The middle school program now has 35 students who come for every meeting,” Ms. Selevan said. So far, they’ve come from Moriah in Englewood; the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey in River Edge; Yavneh and Yeshivat Noam, both in Paramus; and Yeshivat He’Atid in Teaneck. Students from other day schools are welcome as well. “So far, we have about 20 participants; many of them come from the Sinai School,” the organization that provides personally tailored educations inside local day schools to neurodivergent students. Some of the younger participants come from public schools.

Once a month, the middle-school volunteers stay at the Balk center after the participants go home, and “they learn about topics around leadership and sensitivity.”

Once they enter high school, the students’ opportunity to volunteer at Yachad grows.

It’s hard to explain exactly how it works, but Yachad does more than reduce and often remove the stigma that can hover over people with development disabilities. It allows everyone, the neurotypical and the neurodivergent alike, to see each other as people. It gives them the chance to enjoy each other’s company. When Yachad volunteers advocate for Yachad participants, it is not out of a sense of noblesse oblige but from a need for fairness. They protect each other the way friends protect friends.

The leadership lessons that volunteers learn at Yachad, and the leadership experience they gain there, can help them if they choose to return to Yachad as professional leaders, as Ms. Selevan has done. It also can help them in just about any other field they enter, because leadership skills are transferable.

Some volunteers are drawn to Yachad because “they have older siblings who have had magnificent Yachad experiences and want to replicate it for themselves,” Ms. Selevan said. “Others have a Yachad experience in school or in camp or in their community and want to be involved in it.”

Others have friends who are involved, and if their friends are doing it, they want to do it too.

These are all good ways to get involved, Ms. Selevan said.

So, the pipeline.

Not all Yachad volunteers are leaders. Not all are interested in leadership. But leadership seems to grow logically from advocacy, so long ago Yachad’s leaders deliberately began offering leadership training to those of the organization’s volunteers who chose it.

“Yachad is an opportunity to have a meaningful volunteer experiencewwhile simultaneously beiwng part of a leadership program,” Ms. Selevan said.

For example, there’s Micah Pickett of Fair Lawn, a Yeshiva University student who’s one of the 30-person first cohort of YU’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship. “Micah is a prime example of someone who grew up in this pipeline,” Ms. Selevan said.

Mr. Pickett now is a junior at YU’s Sy Sims School of Business. He’s also Yachad New Jersey’s high school engagement coordinator and superviwswes Yachad chapters in North Jersey and MetroWest   He coordinates high school engagement for Yachad New Jersey and supervises clubs at six Jewish high schools in North Jersey and MetroWest — Frisch in Paramus, TABC in  Bruriah, Naaleh, Kushner, and Ma’ayanot — geared to recruiting, developing, and supporting a local volunteer base for Yachad.

“He got involved with Yachad in high school, and he stayed involwved.” He spent many summers in Yachad programs; last summer, he was the boys’ head counselor at the Yavneh program at Camp Morasha. “When he speaks to the students, he really understands what it’s like,” Ms. Selevan said.

This year, Yachad will honor 30 high-school volunteers at its gala. They’re all seniors; they were selected because they head school Yachad clubs, are in a leadership position in one of those clubs, are in national Yachad leadership, or if they are unusually consistent and persistent volunteers, particularly at the Balk center, Ms. Selevan said.

On the evening of December 24, Yachad had what Ms. Selevan called a “parent experience night” for the 30 student honorees and their parents. Some of the parents have never seen what it is that so engrosses their children, Ms. Selevan said. Others were Yachad volunteers themselves. So the evening introduced some parents to new experiences and provided others with chance to meet old friends and renew their ties to the organization.

Yachad participants were there as they always are. The evening’s program was music, with Dov Katz — better known as Digital Don.

“The parents of one of the high-school honorees are being honored,” Ms. Selevan said. That’s Atara Bieler; her parents are Nina and Dani Bieler, who are being given the Keter Shem Tov award. High school award winner Abigail Braunstein’s parents, Yvette and Ari, met in Yachad, when they were both on staff. “And another winner, Sophia Jacob, is the granddaughter of one of our beloved staff members, Batya Jacob.

There are two honorees — twin sisters Esther and Yakira Greenwald — who have a sibling who is a Yachad participant. The twins have learned a great deal from their sibling, and they were pleased to be able to share some of that knowledge as panelists in a group moderated by a Yachad participant’s parents. A student in the audience reported that the panel “was one of the most impactful, because it helped her to understand what it’s like to have a sibling with special needs,” Ms. Selevan said.

After the music program and a Q &A session, the group had dinner. And remember — it was Christmas Eve, and Ms. Seleven had a Jewish tradition to uphold. So the dinner that evening was Chinese food.

These are the winners of the High School Senior Leadership award:
Nava Barenholtz, Talia Braun, Atara Bieler, Abigail Braunstein, Orly Epstein, Liana Kahan. Yakira Greenwald, Esther Greenwald, Miri Kilimnick, Yael Motechin, Maytal Rifkind, Leora Rubenstein, Suri Seplowitz, Eliana Mogul, Tova Rotblat, Leba Staum, Pe’er Peker, Julia Brenenson, Daphna Burack, Hailey Frolich, Sophia Jacob, Aaron Lichtenstein, Talen London, Abby Lowe, Danielle Marks, Ilan Mendelson, Jaclyn Mero, Eytan Rosilio, Jonathan Kaplan, Hannah Rosenfeld.

Nina and Dani Bieler are receiving the Keter Shem Tov award

The Lippe family is receiving the Yachad family award

The Jewish Link is receiving the Lev business award

Who: Yachad NJ

What: Has its annual gala evening

When: On Saturday, January 3, at 8 p.m.

Where: At the Teaneck Marriott at Glenpointe

To learn more: Go to yachad.org/njgala

To learn more about Yachad NJ: Go to Yachad.org/newjersey