Here’s my current daydream of how to make it easier for young Jewish adults to stay engaged or remain engaged when membership at a specific synagogue is not a good fit.
Are you a young Jewish adult between the ages of 18 and 30? Looking for activities and connections? Join the new URJ young adults group. It’s a regional membership that is mobile, social, and flexible.
Temple membership is great for kids, families, and older adults who need the stability and strength of a locally centered Jewish community to draw on. But young adults are more mobile and need a Jewish community that goes beyond neighborhood boundaries. That’s exactly why the new regional membership is perfect for young adults. Fun in-person activities around your region just for young adults give you new experiences and new friends. Online chat groups provide new connections and contacts. Our tikkun olam (repair the world) calendar gives you chances to give of your time and skills and energy to help out around our region in different ways, and our education meetups let you go to local talks and classes with other young adults.
Want religious services? We organize two options, and you’re always welcome to either or both. There’s a monthly Friday night dinner and services just for young adults. On a different weekend, our touring minyan picks a different synagogue each month for either Friday night or Saturday morning.
For High Holiday services, you can choose any local participating synagogue, and we will get you tickets and the schedule of services.
Life can throw us curve balls, and you may want to seek a rabbi’s counsel. We can set you up with a time to meet with someone convenient to you.
This new young adults group is run by a regional leadership team with the full support of synagogues in the region. A portion of the membership fees are distributed to the synagogues, and the rest supports our regional staff and programming. The annual membership fee is a sliding scale based on your income MINUS your loan payments. And when you find yourself settling down more locally and want to transition to a membership at a specific synagogue, know that our programs are open to young adult synagogue members as well.
Whether or not you went to religious school or Jewish camps, whether or not you participated in a NFTY or Hillel group, no matter how you identify or who you date, we want to meet you where you are and help you connect to other young Jewish adults in your area. Welcome!
Monday, October 30, 2017
A little experiment
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2 comments:
This sounds like an excellent idea, and well worth trying in some region with multiple URJ-affiliated synagogues. I suspect Boston, New York, Philadelphia or maybe Cincinnati or SF? It would be lovely, if it could be made to work, and I don't see why it couldn't. Problems, yes, but scarcely insurmountable. And it could well include (or connect with) student affiliations at local colleges and universities as well.
Sadly, it does require the full support of multiple synagogues, so.
Thanks,
-E.
Population density is definitely a big issue, and I'm only familiar with living in the Northeast where the density is high enough to support this.
I think there's a broad recognition among synagogue leadership that synagogues can't get young adults to join. The best they hope for is to get them in the door occasionally. If we can offer them a scenario where they not only get them in the door occasionally, the synagogues also get a portion of the regional dues, I think we can sell that. I also think there's enough foundation money out there to launch this in a test region. The bigger question to me is whether this could be made appealing to young Jewish adults (and with a high enough percentage who can afford some sort of dues structure).
With enough details fleshed out, it should be easier to explain to synagogues why this cannot work for one synagogue to try it on their own even if they wanted to staff up. Perhaps a large enough synagogue that adopted the "church without walls" paradigm could manage parts of it, but they're not going to equal the "here's a list of 15 rabbis you could talk to when you need to talk, here's the list of 10 synagogues you could pick from for Kol Nidre" that a regional approach could manage.
To explain it to young Jewish adults, well, please find someone younger than me to figure that out. I remember being a young Jewish adult and feeling like individual synagogues were completely unapproachable and almost completely uninteresting. I was much more interested in social connections, and geographic proximity was far less important. That still seems true for a lot of people once they get off of a college campus and are suddenly faced with constructing a less convenience-based social life.
Aside from serving that demographic and keeping them connected to Judaism, I like the idea of demystifying the local synagogues and essentially allowing some early hint of synagogue shopping (hey look, it's ok to walk in the door, and they do vary a bit), and of trying to restore/construct a sense of the longer-term transactional nature of supporting Jewish institutions -- we need to do that for more years of our lives so that the institutions can be around when we need them for various reasons (almost none of which apply to many young adults). People have long vanished from the rolls of institutional support from the time they leave college until they get married or have kids. But that interval has gone from a few years to many years because of societal changes, and that's part of what's driving the current membership crunch that so many synagogues have.
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