new york | It wasn’t long ago that the Jewish organizational world came to grips with the idea that the best way to reach unaffiliated families was by getting them to enroll their toddlers in Jewish early-childhood programs.
But a new study says it’s even better to get to them as soon as their babies are born.
Released in November by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, the study looked at programs in 10 Jewish communities aimed at engaging first-time Jewish parents.
Statistically, American Jews become parents later in life than the general population — often after both parents are professionally established — and new parenthood involves a certain amount of social isolation, according to Mark Rosen, who conducted the study.
Parents often need something to ground and assist them in the period of upheaval after childbirth, Rosen said, and if the Jewish community can provide proper programming, it can engage parents in the community long- term.
“It’s at a point in their lives when you can seize the moment because their whole life turns upside down,” Rosen said. “It’s a real opportunity, but it starts with giving them a sense of Jewish peoplehood, this sense that ‘I belong.'”
Rosen conducted on-site interviews with some 100 professionals running programs such as Shalom Baby — through which federations give parents gift baskets shortly after their child is born — and Parents Place, a drop-in resource center of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco that serves about 30,000 people a year.
The key, Rosen said, is creating programming that’s engaging not just for children, but for parents.
The volunteers working the Shalom Baby program of San Diego’s Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center have contacted some 1,300 new parents since the program began five years ago, coordinator Judy Nemzer said.
Each year the volunteers distribute 270 to 300 baskets containing candlesticks, grape juice, toys, tzedakah boxes and publications about raising Jewish children, along with information about JCC programming.
The San Diego JCC has found that play groups are among its most successful infant programs. It now has 35 such groups, each with 15 to 20 mothers, Nemzer said.
In Denver, 50 out of the 200 children enrolled in the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center’s preschool had been participants in Shalom Baby, according to Caron Blanke, who runs the program there.
Reaching out to new parents has become a key tactic in bringing interfaith families closer to the Jewish fold, said Paul Golin, associate director of the Jewish Outreach Institute.
The interfaith outreach world has been invigorated by the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study, conducted by Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute. That survey showed that in Boston, where the community makes a point of reaching out to interfaith families, some 60 percent of intermarried families are raising their children Jewish.
The New York-based JOI administrates www.themotherscircle.org, an online community of 400 non-Jewish mothers who are raising their children Jewish. It’s designed to give them peer support and connect them with educational resources, such as how to bring up a Jewish child, how to tell non-Jewish grandparents that they are raising children Jewish and how to prepare for a brit milah.
“The Jewish community is now recognizing this opportunity,” Golin said. “If the community is open to these young families, it can make a connection that can last lifetimes. It’s an opportunity we often miss.”
But Donald Sylvan, president of the Jewish Education Service of North America, warns that the opportunity is valuable only if the community figures out not just how to bring in new parents, but how to guide them further into the community afterward.
“It’s the best time if and only if there is an institutionalized follow-up to make sure the parents you are engaging have a road map to get to other engagements,” he said. “Some communities have found that road map, and others have not.”