Lauren Wistreich began teaching just five months after her bat mitzvah. Now, the Rockville resident creates and facilitates educational programming for a nonprofit that supports Jewish survivors of domestic abuse.
She is the director of education and outreach at the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse, which serves the greater Washington area.
Wistreich’s role is multifold — she creates curricula for educational programs, conducts outreach, builds relationships within the Jewish community, spreads the word about JCADA’s offerings, manages communications, maintains JCADA’s website and social media, designs graphics and flyers and supervises a small team.
“Every program, every curriculum, is up to me,” she said.
She and her colleagues present at Jewish day schools, camps and religious schools, ensuring that students in grades six and higher understand healthy relationships.
“Our teen curriculum was, like, my baby when I started at JCADA” in 2022, Wistreich said. “I spent an entire year creating it and refining it and building it from scratch.”
With the younger middle school students, she focuses on healthy friendships as the basis for healthy relationships later in life.
“That’s really important,” Wistreich said. “If they can understand things about respect, consent and honesty and self-care and time to themselves and individuality, then they’re more likely to have healthier, better relationships in the future.”
She aims to make these conversations fun and interactive for the kids and teens: “There’s zero part of me that wants to stand in front of a room of seventh graders and lecture and give a PowerPoint.”
Instead, the teens are able to move around and participate in small-group, hands-on activities.
Wistreich also leads the clergy programs, helping local rabbis, cantors and community leaders create safe, informed spaces for survivors of intimate partner violence. She enjoys the multifaceted aspect of her work.
“I find that I have a really nice mix of creativity, whether that’s creating curriculum or designing graphics and social media posts,” Wistreich said. “I really like to use this creative brain mixed with the very analytical, logistical side of me, whether that’s administrative duties or the actual logistics of a program … like structuring our social media plan to work the best given the algorithm.”
She sees her role with JCADA as a “really beautiful combination of those two sides of who [she is] as a person.”
“And then the best part is this combination of bringing my Jewish self and my Jewish education and Jewish background to my social work, clinical [domestic violence] educated background and being able to merge those two worlds together,” Wistreich said.
Wistreich was raised in a Jewish household in central New Jersey, where she and her family attended a Conservative synagogue. “My shul was, like, my second home growing up,” she recalled.
A Hebrew school regular, she had positive relationships with her clergy members.
“My parents made a very intentional effort to help my brother and I really learn about our Judaism, and not just learn about it, but instilled in us what it means to be Jewish and why it’s important,” Wistreich said. “A huge part of my upbringing was being Jewish.”
She began tutoring b’nai mitzvah students at the age of 13 through high school, then continued tutoring as an undergraduate, in addition to teaching Hebrew school classes. Her minor is in Jewish studies.
“It’s always been a part of my life,” Wistreich said of Jewish education.
Long interested in the FBI and “Criminal Minds,” Wistreich enjoyed taking sociology classes in high school. She went on to major in sociology and criminal justice, where a course in interpersonal violence focused on a different type of violence every week — domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, hate crimes and more.
“That was really my eye-opening moment that that’s the area I wanted to be in,” Wistreich said. “I thought about how all forms of violence are interrelated with each other, and how it really comes down to gaining and maintaining power and control over a vulnerable person [or] a group of people. Whoever the victim or survivor is, it’s all the same.”
After undergraduate, the New Jersey native earned her master’s in social work with a certification in violence against women and children from Rutgers University. She worked as a therapist for domestic violence survivors and children who grew up in violent homes, experience she still draws upon while leading JCADA’s educational adult programming.
Wistreich spoke to the importance of communal awareness around domestic violence.
“Something I’ve learned over the years is that even if you don’t think you need to be involved, you need to be involved,” she said. “There is such a common misconception of ‘This doesn’t affect me,’ ‘This isn’t in my community,’ ‘This isn’t something that I deal with,’ ‘This isn’t something that somebody I know deals with.”
Intimate partner violence thrives in silence, according to Wistreich. She hopes to continue teaching the community for this reason.
“At JCADA, we talk about, ‘We’re not going to stop until we’ve educated all 300,000 Jews that live in the DMV,’” Wistreich said. “I think for me, personally, that really is my goal. My goal is to educate as many people as I can, bring in as many voices as I can, share my experiences and knowledge with as many people as I can in order to make this a safer community.
