Centering collaboration in building Jewish community

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on November 26, 2024

Moses went and sat in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and did not understand what they were saying. His students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, as this too was part of the Torah that he was to receive. (Babylonian Talmud, Menakhot 29b)

What does 21st-century Judaism look like? Will we recognize it?

In the 1990s, Jewish leadership in Portland, Ore., explored the idea of a community building
where different Jewish organizations could come together and share infrastructure costs. At the time, it was voted down. Then the 2008 recession reopened the question urgently.

Shrinking congregation sizes, Jewish community centers reorganizing and an aging Jewish population in need of more social services were already hallmarks of the early 21st century; and the diminishment of the middle class meant that the support Jewish organizations could count on was diminishing as well.

Click here to continue reading

___________
Kalyn Culler Cohen is a social-purpose business strategy consultant. She is a former chair of Congregation Shir Tikvah’s Steering Committee and led the Yibaneh Committee, which was tasked with defining steps necessary to create a multi-use Jewish space in southeast Portland.

Rabbi Ariel Stone has collaborated in founding Jewish community organizations and shuls from Ukraine to Oregon, midwifing emergent forms of Jewish expression including TischPDX and the EJC alongside Shir Tikvah. She is on the national mentor team for the Clergy Leadership
Incubator (CLI), a two-year rabbinic fellowship program directed by Rabbi Sid Schwarz.