-
I grew up attending New Light Congregation in Pittsburgh, a small conservative shul. I think there were maybe 10 children in the community, 3 from my family. I memorized and chanted haftarah, gave a d'var torah, and lead a few responsive readings in English. We had an elevated kiddish for our hamisha community and the handful of family who made the trip to join us. I was struck to realize that other than my non-practicing grandmother, we had no other Jewish family in our lives.
-
The senior year Israel trip was the main reason I stayed in our community teen Jewish education program in Pittsburgh. I'm so glad I did. I credit both the program and that trip for developing a strong sense of Jewish identity and solid knowledge base.
-
I pieced together small jobs all over the greater Pittsburgh area teaching Religious School, serving as NFTY youth advisors, and working in the offices of several Jewish agencies. At some point, the work shifted from a means to support myself through college to guiding me toward a career in Jewish Education. I also met my husband while doing data entry for Hillel one summer.
-
I moved to Boston to study at Hebrew College in the MJED program. They had just moved to the Herrick Rd Campus. I also continued to teach and eventually began working in the administration side of things.
-
My husband and I put our Jewish education and programming talents together to bring our Jewish wedding to life for our family and friends, many of whom were not Jewish. It was such a fun day. I was studying in this program then!
-
I spent most of my adult life living in Akron, OH. I volunteered and worked in every agency and congregation in the community.
During my time there, the Jewish community continued to experience significant constriction. This lead to a lot of communal anxiety and siloing as independent programs sought to hold on to their relevancy. -
Becoming a Jewish parent was meaningful for all the normal reasons, but also because it made the work that I was doing make more sense. As he grew, I understood the stresses and pulls that parents had in a way that I didn't previously.
-
Eitan's presence in our lives shaped my entire family's Jewish journey. Born with hypospadias, he wasn't able to have a traditional brit milah at 8 days. This gave us the opportunity to redefine how to celebrate the simcha of his birth at a time and in a way that worked for us.
-
Yael was the first female Levinstein born in over 100 years. It felt like a big deal at the time.
-
Ruby's presence in our lives shifted our ability and desire to participate in Jewish life in Akron. Finding ourselves priced out of participation in organizations and schools that we worked and volunteered in made me feel rejected by and angry with the community leaders and structure. I'm still working to shift that anger into action.
-
This day broke my Jewish heart.
I grew up at New Light and taught religious school for the other two congregations sharing the Tree of Life space. This event traumatized me, as it did many others. It ripped through my sense of safety, specifically in distinctively Jewish spaces. This event changed the way I view the world and guided me more toward exploring how we heal and how we teach and talk about our collective Jewish pain.