As the head of a summer camp unit, Meredith Polsky bonded with a camper, “Josh,” who had difficulty making friends and fitting in with his peers.
Polsky spent time with Josh, helping him navigate social situations. Six days after his arrival, the camp administration sent Josh home — the camp wasn’t equipped to meet his needs.
Polsky checked on Josh’s status during the school year, but her friend who worked at the Jewish day school he attended replied, “I don’t know. He got kicked out of school.”
“It was this light bulb moment for me,” the Gaithersburg resident said. “I was — maybe naively — shocked that this was happening in the Jewish community, that here was this family that was clearly trying to give their kid the best of what the Jewish community had to offer, and they just kept being turned away.”
Polsky thought that perhaps Josh’s story was an outlier. But conversations with rabbis and Jewish educators revealed that this was a pattern for children with disabilities.
Wanting to come up with a solution, Polsky said she immediately applied to graduate school to pursue clinical work and special education, a mere three months after the phone call with her friend.
Then, in 2000, Polsky helped found Matan, a national nonprofit organization that aims to reshape Jewish communities through disability inclusion. The organization originally served her home state of New York’s tri-state area, focusing on direct service.
“We were basically knocking on doors of synagogues and [Jewish community centers] saying, ‘You have this really big problem that you don’t really know about, and you need to hire us to help you solve it,’” Polsky recalled.
She also worked on creating classes and programs within synagogues and JCCs for children who hadn’t yet had the opportunity to participate in Jewish education. “It was great,” Polsky said. “We impacted a lot of families, parents who told us that their kid had never had a friend before the Matan class, that they never even considered [their child] could have a bar or bat mitzvah before Matan.”
That was the organization’s first decade. A strategic evaluation then revealed that Matan had a “really significant impact” on a relatively small number of people. The team also found that Jewish organizations were “essentially outsourcing inclusion” to Matan.
“They would say, ‘We’re inclusive; we have Matan,’ but [disability inclusion] wasn’t really becoming part of the fabric of the organization at those institutions,” Polsky said. “So what we had to set out to do was to change the fabric of Jewish education for kids with diverse needs and disabilities.”
The team shifted its focus to consulting and training.
“We figured if we could equip people on the front lines of Jewish education — the people who are actually doing the work — with the tools and resources and knowledge that they needed to become more inclusive, then we would have a much greater ripple effect, and that’s essentially what happened,” Polsky said.
In July, Polsky took the helm as executive director. She now focuses on the organization’s strategic vision and fundraising and meeting with stakeholders.
Matan’s biggest change was expanding from Jewish education and children to working toward an inclusive Jewish community for folks “across the lifespan,” according to Polsky.
The organization has also grown to the DMV.
Matan and Polsky work with the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington to grasp the current needs regarding communitywide disability inclusion. A few years ago, Matan held a year-long training program, known as Matan Institute, for about 35 to 40 area Jewish education directors.
Polsky also supports her synagogue, Shaare Torah, in its inclusion efforts.
“I feel really proud of what we’ve created,” Polsky said. “I always say I founded Matan, but I did not create Matan as what it is now. We’ve grown and we’ve evolved, and it has involved a lot of people, a lot of leadership and a lot of support, so I feel really proud of having made it come to fruition.”
Polsky never thought she would work in the Jewish community. Studying psychology at the University of Michigan, she was interested in children and child development. Her summer camp experience right after college brought her down this slightly different path, where her studies come into play.
“Being able to understand the way that people may be experiencing their communities and the ways in which exclusion really impacts a person’s psyche and mental health and sense of belonging and sense of self, and how all of those things really overlap, I think studying psychology gave me good insight into that,” Polsky said. “And I think social work really helped me understand the ways in which systems work and that intersection between people’s individual experiences and how those systems and structures are set up.”
Though she is pleased with the scope of Matan’s reach over the last 25 years, Polsky knows there’s more to be done.
One of her goals involves “helping the Jewish community … understand how far-reaching disability actually is, how many people it really affects in our community.” An estimated one in four adults in the United States have some type of disability, she said, citing a finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I want to create ways for the Jewish community to access inclusion support and training in ways where there aren’t barriers to being able to access those things,” Polsky said. “I want to make it easier for Jewish organizations to offer training to their staffs and teams and lay leaders. I want everybody to have a stake in this.”
She said inclusion shouldn’t fall onto solely one “inclusion specialist.”
“I think it really has to be a collective effort,” Polsky said.
