When Rabbi Shelley Waldenberg was a 6-year-old boy walking to school in the Bronx, a very bad thing happened one snowy morning. A boy from a neighboring school pelted him with a snowball and shouted, “Christ killer. Dirty Jew.”
Such experiences often end up being formative. In Waldenberg’s case, the story is one he now shares with students at Catholic high schools to illustrate how much things have changed.
“Sixty years ago, I would not be standing in a Catholic high school,” Waldenberg said recently to a group of 160 students at an all-boys school in San Francisco. “But you and I, Jews and Catholics, are writing a new story.”
The rabbi was speaking to the student body at Stuart Hall High School as part of a lecture on the Jewish understanding of Jesus — one of many facets of Judaism he teaches at 14 Bay Area Catholic high schools.
Waldenberg is the current Jewish educator for the Catholic Jewish Educational Enrichment Program, which started 14 years ago with a grant from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation. It is run by the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
Waldenberg is a warm and engaging guest speaker. Clad in dress slacks and a maroon sweater layered over a striped blue button-down and a tie, he is a consummate storyteller.
He integrates personal anecdotes from life — his father’s, his daughter’s and his own — into all of the courses, which consequently gives them the feel of an episode of “This American Life” rather than a high school religion class.
“I wind up teaching through the prism of my own life experience because it seems to connect with them,” Waldenberg said.
In addition to “A Jewish Understanding of Jesus,” other popular topics include “The Jewish Wedding: Love, Sex and Marriage” and “Roots of Anti-Semitism: Then and Now.”
The topics are an outgrowth of the class curriculum, so that Waldenberg’s presentations do not come “out of left field.” He simply presents the Jewish perspective on what the students are already studying.
Three years ago, Catholic educators joined the program and started visiting and speaking at Jewish high schools and synagogue schools. Diane Bernbaum, director of Berkeley Midrasha, said the Catholic educators serve as an important resource for her teachers and students.
“It’s important for students to be exposed to other religions within a Jewish context,” she said.
The program, known as C/JEEP, is not merely an ecumenical gesture but an ongoing exchange, Waldenberg said. It is funded by the Bay Area AJC and the Catholic Diocese of Oakland and San Francisco. Past rabbi teachers have included Robert Daum, Yoel Kahn, Bridget Wynne and Elisheva Sachs.
“Fifty years ago, the very idea of rabbis teaching in Catholic schools, and Catholic teachers teaching in Jewish schools, would have been unheard of — but not anymore,” said Waldenberg, who retired from Temple Isaiah in Lafayette.
It’s an important change, the rabbi noted. After so many centuries apart, Jews and Catholics became suspicious and fearful of one another, with no real relationship or interactions.
This distance fueled centuries of ignorance, acrimony and prejudice and made it so that “non-Jews often don’t know anything about Judaism, and Jews know nothing about Christianity except what they see on television,” Waldenberg said. “So [C/JEEP] is about creating bridges of trust and understanding.”
Roy O’Connor, head of the theology department at Stuart Hall, said the Jewish perspective diversifies and enriches his school’s theology curriculum.
“What C/JEEP and Rabbi Waldenberg are so good at doing is bridging the gap
of this ‘other-ness,’” O’Connor said. “Students may think that they are different. But the rabbi says, ‘No, we’re not — we’re the very same in how we live our lives and the goodness we’re trying to achieve.’
“I think that helps a great deal in calming the fear that comes from not knowing the other.”
Susan Epstein, an AJC board member, said if there were more funding, she’d love to see the program expanded. It’s “an amazing bridge,” Epstein said. “C/JEEP reaches students and teaches them at an age when they’re asking all kinds of important questions. This is creating relationships for them that they’ll carry into adulthood as the future leaders in their communities.”