Leadership program expands
Wexner Foundation will train new cohorts of Jewish community activists
The Russell Berrie Foundation has always invested in leadership, Idana Goldberg, the foundation’s CEO, said.
The Teaneck-based philanthropy has a number of mission areas. One is helping build a thriving and inclusive Jewish community in Northern New Jersey. “We want to see a community where Jewish families have many opportunities for educational and other kinds of Jewish engagement and belonging,” Dr. Goldberg said. “We want to see that there are opportunities for many different kinds of Jewish communities. We recognize that Northern New Jersey is one of the most densely populated Jewish communities in the country, with a lot of opportunity, and we think that there could be more opportunity, especially for those Jewish families that may be less affiliated in their practice or engagement.
“And when we look out at what we want to see, we understand that investing in leadership is a key component of how we’re going to help ensure that the community remains thriving and diverse.”
For many years, the foundation worked with the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey on its Berrie Fellows Program, which was designed to help build local leadership. The program was modeled after the Wexner Heritage Program, a fellowship for lay leaders that the Wexner Foundation has been running for years throughout North America, including in MetroWest.
Rabbi David Russo directs the Wexner Heritage program, which is two years of intensive Jewish learning and leadership training. The foundation has run the program in 36 communities across North America; ommunities include not only MetroWest but also New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver. About three cohorts start every year with generally six running at any given time.
Cohort members are selected to represent “a real cross section” of the local Jewish community and to reflect its diversity, Rabbi Russo said. The program is for up-and-coming leaders “with a track record of leadership.
“People who have shown that they’ve taken on big challenges, that they’ve made really positive change in various spheres in their lives. We want people who have done that in the Jewish community, and we also want some people who have done it outside the Jewish community. The most important thing is that they have a track record of leadership in some way, that they are intelligent and curious, creative, and good listeners, and that they are people who really want to make positive change and have proven that they’ve done it in one realm or another. It might be at work, or in their already existing volunteer or lay leadership work.”
Participants meet about twice a month. “Two thirds to three quarters of what we do is intensive Jewish learning,” Rabbi Russo said. “Our goal is to learn about Jewish history, and to learn about Jewish tradition, and to learn it in this diverse environment. So whether you’ve had a very intensive Jewish day school education, or you’ve really learned very little about Jewish texts before, you’re going to be studying those texts together with these 19 other driven, brilliant, thoughtful people, and you’re going to be able to share your perspective and to learn from one another.
“We also bring together faculty that is meant to be diverse, whether it’s from different geographic places, denominations, or backgrounds.
“The goal is that by learning about the sacredness of our tradition with the people around the table in your group, and with these brilliant faculty members, you’re going to have both renewed inspiration and new perspective for whatever lies ahead in the future. Our goal, with any of the pieces in Jewish history that we learn, and the Jewish texts that we are reading and studying, is that those pieces don’t just remain as texts in a vacuum, but they’re going to be texts and pieces that are going to in some way resonate as eternal and continuing leadership lessons.”
For example, Rabbi Russo explained, if a group is delving into the history of certain prominent yeshivot, “it would be important for our faculty to teach about the rise of the yeshivot and then also their decline, and for the group to think about what happens when great institutions are at their peak, and also what happens when they decline, and how we envision a renewed future.”
The other quarter to third of the curriculum focuses on leadership. “One of the main ways that we teach leadership is called adaptive leadership,”he continued. “In biology, in order to survive, a species sometimes needs to adapt.
“The idea is for leaders to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. And we often use another system that’s called case consultations, which is taking the adaptive leadership skills that we learn, and consulting with one another, with whatever thorny issues that we are dealing with in our communities, to help us figure out what the path is to move forward.”
The program also includes two domestic retreats and a trip to Israel. “We go to beautiful places, like Colorado or Utah, to foster bonding among participants and to immersively dive into Jewish learning and leadership training,” Rabbi Russo said. “It’s a great way to disconnect. Often when we’re in our local communities, it can be a little hard to think outside the box. So by going to a really beautiful place far away, in the mountains, it gives you a chance to step back and dream a little bit bigger.”
Cohorts running at the same time often attend retreats together. Groups in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver started over the summer, and others are scheduled to begin next summer in Philadelphia and San Francisco, as well as in Northern New Jersey. “So you can already hear some of the cool geographic diversity,” Rabbi Russo said.
David Leit of Maplewood participated in a Greater MetroWest cohort that ran from 2015 to 2017. He thought it was a “terrific program” and described it as “sort of a Jewish studies and Jewish leadership executive MBA program.
“I definitely think it gave me different perspectives on where the community should be going,” Mr. Leit said. “It was certainly useful for me to have the broader perspectives the program brought.” He has remained involved and is now a member of the program’s alumni council. He formed close connections with others in the cohort and “some of them of them have become my closest friends.”
Maxine Schwartz of Westfield also participated in the Greater MetroWest cohort and described her experience as “incredible.
“The studying was rigorous, but the teachers were first class. We delved deep into different topics and had full discussions and debates. It was a great way to explore Judaism, and my connection to Judaism and Israel. People had different perspectives, so that made it particularly interesting.”
Ms. Schwartz had been involved in the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest before she started in the program and found that her involvement grew significantly afterward. “I feel like I became a more knowledgeable lay leader because I gained a better understanding about why I was doing what I was doing,” she said. “I understood our history better, and how the rabbis used to argue and debate with each other, and to really listen to the other.
“The program gave me the confidence and the knowledge that I could take into the Jewish world and make a difference.”
Craig Levine also was in the MetroWest cohort. He compared the program to “a master’s degree in Jewish history, philosophy, theology, politics, and peoplehood” and appreciated the “rich and meaningful dialogue” that resulted from the diversity among the fellows, the high level faculty, and the fact that “every one of the faculty members was a superstar.”
Back in North Jersey, “We retired the Berrie Fellows Program about seven years ago, after running several cohorts, because I think we reached a moment where we felt like we had been investing in leadership and were ready to see how those leaders would work in the community and take that investment into the future,” Dr. Goldberg said. “We’ve been really pleased with the Berrie fellows, and how many of those fellows have become leaders across the local community, and even nationally, and have felt really satisfied with our investment.”
One of the Berrie fellows, David Rosenblatt, was invited to join the board of trustees of the Russell Berrie Foundation. “That’s a testament to how we understood the impact the project can have,” she said. Several of the fellows have taken leadership roles in the JFNNJ, at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey, and at local day schools.
After a number of years, “we started to think about whether it was time to start a new cohort,” Dr. Goldberg continued. The foundation had recently helped the JFNNJ do a community needs assessment, and “we felt coming out of that was a realization that there were new younger families that had moved in.” The idea was to “invest in their leadership, especially after covid, as part of this restarting of Jewish life after covid.
“We reached out to the Wexner Foundation to see whether we could bring its lay leadership program to Northern New Jersey in partnership with us. We were really pleased to find out that we could, so that’s what we decided to do.”
The Wexner Heritage Program for Northern New Jersey is scheduled to start next summer. The program is seeking nominations of Jewish lay leaders, approximately 30 to 45 years old, who live in Bergen, Hudson, or Passaic counties. Nominations will be open through November 1.
The cohort scheduled to start next summer will be the program’s first in Northern New Jersey. Communities generally request participation and provide half the funding, Rabbi Russo said.
“Our partners at Russell Berrie approached us about creating a cohort.
From everything that I’ve heard about Northern New Jersey, it is just an amazing community, with so many people who are deeply involved in their individual Jewish communities, and some who are not especially affiliated but are Jewish and are out there and are searching. And what we look forward to is bringing 20 people together who really represent the diversity of the Northern New Jersey Jewish community to figure out how we can work together to continue to take the community to new heights.”
The Wexner Foundation will run its usual program, “but we’re hoping to work with them to help in targeting some of the learning and the curriculum to specific needs in Northern New Jersey,” Dr. Goldberg said. “Northern New Jersey tends to be pretty siloed, and while we have such a high concentration of Orthodox families and very engaged families, we also have many families from other Jewish denominations who are not affiliated, and we’d love to see ways for the community to bridge between those silos and to bring more unity to the work. We think that there are opportunities in Northern New Jersey that are being left on the table to engage more families and teens in Jewish life, particularly outside of the Orthodox community, where there are not as many resources.”
The Russell Berrie Foundation also works with the Wexner Foundation to help identify candidates. “We’re reaching out to our local grantees, to former Berrie fellows, to professionals we know in the community, to rabbis that we know in the community, to encourage people to nominate candidates for the program,” Dr. Goldberg said. “We really want to see that this is a diverse group coming from all different parts of the Northern New Jersey community, from all different denominations, from all different kinds of demographic groups.
“We’re really hoping to identify up-and-coming leaders who would really benefit from this opportunity to learn from world-class educators to shape their own leadership journey in the context of their local community. We’re hoping to see that this is an inclusive and diverse group with representation from the Israeli community, from the Russian community, from the LGBTQ community, Jews of color, nonaffiliated, and from those communities that are traditionally engaged and affiliated from the Orthodox and Conservative communities, so that the picture of the Wexner class reflects the bigger picture of the Northern New Jersey community, in all of its wonderful diversity.”
For more information about the program, go to www.wexnerfoundation.org/programs/wexner-heritage-program/ or email SSilberstein@wexner.net.
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