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| | Email this article • Print this article | Moishe House goes local
Address for ‘nonaligned’ young Jews
by Sue Fishkoff and Paula Amann
Take one night of Israeli films, a few games of sheshbesh (backgammon) and a weekly Shabbat potluck, and what do you get? Four guys in a three-story house in the District's multiethnic Adams Morgan neighborhood whipping up a new ethnic recipe for Jews in their 20s.
The quartet - Leo Beckerman, Adam Cramer, Chris Silver and David Weinberg - settled into their rented digs little more than a month ago, as part of an international experiment underwritten by the Forest Foundation and the Center for Leadership Initiatives.
Dubbed Moishe House, like similar efforts in seven other cities from Abuja, Nigeria, to Montevideo, Uruguay, to Boston and San Francisco, the District brownstone doubles as a gathering place for young Jews. In return for subsidized rent, the residents commit to organizing 8-12 Jewish activities a month.
"We're just getting started, and we've had well over 100 people pass through our doors in the first month," said Silver, 23, a Hebrew teacher and tutor.
All natives of Los Angeles, the four Houseniks know each other from their activity at the Hillel center of the University of California at Berkeley.
Yet their religious leanings vary somewhat, from Conservative-raised Cramer and Weinberg, to Beckerman's self-described "educated Reform" stance, to the Hebrew-speaking Silver, who calls himself a "cultural Jew."
The target audience of their programs comprises what Cramer, a writer and the lead Shabbat chef for the District Moishe House, calls "nonaligned Jews."
The project was launched close to a year ago by The Forest Foundation, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based philanthropy. David Cygielman, 25, the foundation's executive director, says the goal was to give young activist Jews the financial freedom to focus on creative programming designed to reach other young, unaffiliated Jews - an age group they feel gets lost in the communal shuffle.
"After college, there's no more Hillel, and they don't join the Jewish community until they have families," Cygielman notes.
The Vancouver-based Center for Leadership Initiatives, an independent foundation launched with seed money from philanthropist Lynn Schusterman, joined as a funder this month.
CLI director of programs Yonatan Gordis touts the training component of Moishe House, which entails one annual three-day conference and weekly conference calls.
The first Moishe House opened last December in San Francisco. Seattle was next in February, joined quickly by houses in Boston and Los Angeles. New ones opened in October in Nigeria, Uruguay and the District, and the plan is to have 12 houses up and running by next year.
Except for the Nigerian house, which is a one-man outreach operation, they all follow the same formula: Three or four Jews in their 20s receive a rent subsidy of up to $2,500 a month, along with $500 for programming. In return, they are expected to become a communal hub for young Jews by hosting Shabbat meals, card games, Yiddish lessons, film nights, book discussions, neighborhood clean-ups and other social, intellectual and civic-minded activities.
"The impact is phenomenal," said Gordis, citing an average monthly attendance per house of 100. "In each city that it's happening, we are seeing a tremendous flow of people who are eager to attend events in these houses."
Residents say the formula works because it lets young people organize events they themselves would want to attend, rather than having something imposed from above by a synagogue or Jewish community center.
In many ways, it's the bayit of the 21st century. But unlike those communal Jewish homes of the 1970s and '80s, which usually were sponsored by Zionist youth groups, Moishe Houses residents don't subscribe to a particular ideology.
The focus varies according to residents' interests: The houses in Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco host a lot of poker parties and film nights, while the Boston house is more involved in social action.
Houses have great freedom, Cygielman says, so long as they meet the minimum requirements: hosting eight to 12 events a month, making weekly reports, maintaining a Web site (www.theforestfoundation.net/moishe_display.asp.) and reaching out to young people. Funding can be withdrawn if a house doesn't perform.
"I won't tell them what's a wrong program or a right program," Cygielman says. "I don't care, so long as they're building community and lots of people are coming."
It works out well for the entire Jewish community, Cygielman says: For the same money it would take to hire one full-time Jewish professional, a Moishe House funds four people doing nonstop youth programming, and provides a space to hold the events.
A former District resident, Margie Klein helped launch Boston's Kavod Jewish Social Justice House, part of the Moishe House network.
Klein - a rabbinical student at Boston's transdenominational Hebrew College, co-founder of the activist youth community Jews in the Woods and former head of Project Democracy, a nonprofit that mobilized college students to vote in the 2004 election - set the tone at Kavod House, where residents combine social action with an understanding of the Jewish roots of their political commitments.
Klein was inspired by Chabad's successful outreach to young, unaffiliated Jews.
"As a grassroots organizer, I traveled around the world. Everywhere I went, Chabad provided an address for my Jewish life, a warm family opening its doors, with good Jewish food on the table," she says.
But as an "egalitarian Jew," she says, she couldn't make her home in the Lubavitch community. So she took their model and combined it with her own progressive politics and egalitarian practice, experimenting first with a now-defunct house in the District, then founding the Kavod House in Boston.
The impetus came right after the 2004 presidential election, when she sat up all night with some other friends equally despondent over the Democratic Party's defeat.
"How could we revitalize the Jewish community for our generation? How could we make our generation understand it's our responsibility to create a politics we can believe in?" she asks. "We thought, let's use the model of Chabad, not to get people to a certain observance level, but to create a Judaism that is fully engaged in repairing the world."
Early funding for the Boston house came from the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel alumni fund and the Jewish Life Network. Joining the Moishe House network in June strengthened programming, as has the house's close relationship with Hebrew College.
Rabbinical students came over at Tu B'Shevat to teach young Jews how to do text study on environmental topics. The house also sponsored a blind tasting of tap and bottled water in Harvard Square to encourage people to drink free, local water. That stunt landed them on NBC's "Today Show," where Klein says "we emphasized we were a religious group doing this out of moral conviction."
Kavod House has about 100 regulars and more than 250 frequent visitors. As more people began coming to activities, Klein has broadened her view of what the house can provide.
"People come for all reasons," she admits. "Some just want a Jewish home. Some want to explore their spiritual practice."
They now offer cooking classes and "poetry as spiritual practice," taught by a national poetry slam champion who happens to be Jewish.
Meanwhile, in the second month at the District's Moishe House, Weinberg, 23, is organizing arts activities, like a field trip to hear Israeli jazz artist Idan Raichl and a discussion of the movie Paradise Now, about two boyhood friends turned suicide bombers.
In some ways, living at Moishe House harks back to summers spent as a camp counselor at Camp Alonim, northwest of Los Angeles, concedes Weinberg, whose day job involves government advocacy on religious freedom.
"It's alike because both jobs involve a significant amount of creative thinking to find ways to access their Jewish identity," said Weinberg, but his current post in Adams Morgan, he stresses, "can be a great deal more rewarding because the objects of programming are capable and eager to be active and involved subjects as well."
Beckerman, also 23 and an alumnus of Young Judea who works for a medical association, touts the laid-back atmosphere of Moishe House as one draw for its offerings.
"In the informality of the program, the flexible structure of it, people are more willing to try, because it's not signing on for the long-term," Beckerman said. "To close off community to people who are not ready to commit 100 percent is closing off a lot of people."
Sue Fishkoff writes for JTA News and Features; Paula Amann is WJW news editor.
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