NCSY Articles
NCSY’s Outreach Veteran Chairs AJOP Conference and Looks to Future of Reinvigorated Kiruv Effort
February 09, 2012 By Rabbi Dave Felsenthal
"Rabbi Dave" Felsenthal, an NCSY veteran, is now Director of the OU's NextGen Division
I was extremely nervous as I drove into the parking lot at the hotel in Stamford CT, where the annual conference of AJOP - the Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals - was being held. For 24 years the AJOP Conference, currently run by AJOP National Director Rabbi Yitzchak Lowenbraun, has been the only event providing support and training to Outreach professional throughout the Orthodox Jewish world regardless of organization type or size. This year for the first time, the conference consisted of two parts, "inreach" to offer a spiritual pick me up to the general religious community and training for the outreach professionals themselves. Never before was there an inreach segment to the conference, so as chairman of both parts of the conference, I was on edge about the success of this new approach.
I needn't have worried. Both conferences started Sunday morning as separate events. When I saw that the parking lot was full and people were lined up outside the door, I was blown away. "Wow, we really hit them with something very important," I realized. "Rabbi Lowenbraun and the tremendous staff of AJOP took my idea and really brought it to life."
I have been an outreach - or kiruv - professional for my entire career, dating back to 1985 as Head Advisor of Atlantic Seaboard NCSY
Most recently I have been Director of NCSY Alumni Connections, in which we have developed a program of keeping in touch with the thousands of NCSY graduates who have moved onto the college campuses in the past few years, so as to reinforce their teen experiences, and to encourage their growth as young Jewish men and women now that they have reached college and even beyond.
Now, I am Director of the OU's brand new NextGen Division, which involves not only outreach to the alumni of NCSY and other OU programs through Alumni Connections
I have experienced a career as a kiruv professional, which is how I chose to live my life, having once been unaffiliated myself. In tenth grade I made a decision - either I was going to be religious or have no connection with Judaism whatsoever. Once I tried Torah-centered Judaism, visiting with Orthodox Jewish families in the Baltimore area through NCSY, I fell in love with the lifestyle and learning Torah and decided I was going to dedicate my life to bring that experience to my Jewish brothers and sisters."Now, I am "Rabbi Dave," I've been privileged to share that love with hundreds of my own students and being asked to chair the AJOP convention was a landmark event in my outreach career.
An Offer I Couldn't Refuse
Rabbi Lowenbraun was, way back when in Baltimore, my NCSY regional director and throughout my life has been one of my primary mentors so when he asked me to chair the conference, I couldn't say no. I was anxious about the request, however, because he has always had big dreams and I did not want to let him down.
For the last few years there has been a decrease in the number of professional outreach workers in the Jewish community, both because of the economy and the increasing difficulty of finding non-affiliated Jews beyond college age. It was very important to both of us not to let the conference become depressing because of the stark reality we are all facing in Klal Yisroel.
We very much wanted this year's conference to leave everyone invigorated and with a common mission of what we can accomplish if we work together. Therefore, we chose the theme of turning the world of kiruv inside out. We started with the parallel stand-alone inreach conference, not to train everyday religious Jews to do outreach, but rather to give them the chizuk (strength) they need personally to deal with their everyday Jewish lives. We found that we hit a very strong chord, because 400 had pre-registered and we had never run this event before. (Because I didn't know how many would actually show up, it took the full parking lot to calm my nerves.) It was an obvious program to try, and we had all the best speakers of the outreach world for their own conference. So why not provide chizuk to our own brothers and sisters in our internal Orthodox community?
I gave a presentation. At first I didn't know how to teach the group and I started by trying to explain the psychology behind one of my favorite classes for NCSY students - how do you find out the mission God created you for? After two minutes I closed my eyes and made believe that they were my public school non-religious students. The inreach group reacted the same way my public school students did - laughed at the same jokes, asked the same questions. I was teaching them how to identify their central character trait, why they were created and how to make themselves the best Jews they could possibly be and when I was done I felt the same sense of euphoria I do whenever I teach this topic.
Then there was the main conference, which lasted until Tuesday, while the inreach program ended Sunday afternoon. The total attendance of 700 between the two was the largest in the history of the conference. (There was a plenary of both groups which was standing room only.) At the main conference, a whole new world was opened up. We asked ourselves, "Should our main mission be outreach to the unaffiliated or inreach to the affiliated? Or both?
Lively Discussions on Immutable Principles
A lively discussion permeated every session analyzing all of the principles we had always thought to be immutable, such as do we work with drop outs; or between high school, college, young adults, young marrieds or young families, which age group is most important?
Throughout we provided "truth in advertising," to avoid giving participants the misimpression that Orthodox Judaism is all sugar candy, sweetness and light, and thereby ignoring the issues of the affordability of Jewish education tuition (a major OU priority) and how the rest of society seemingly lumps ultra-Orthodox extremists with all Orthodox Jews.
The first class professionalism of the AJOP staff and the high caliber of the presenters - including OU NCSY professionals Rabbi Steven Burg, NCSY International Director as well as Managing Director of the OU; and Regional Directors and CEO's Rabbis Glenn Black (Canada NCSY
The concluding program, Tuesday morning, which was a brainstorming session of leaders of most of the major kiruv organizations -- Aish HaTorah, Gateways, the OU, Torah U'Mesorah, Wolfson College Kiruv Network and many more -- led by master facilitator Marco Greenberg, enabled us to take on the new issues that had been raised and to begin to formulate an action plan for going forward.
We were guided in our discussions by the AJOP commissioned study, conducted jointly by AJOP and Yeshiva University Professor David Pelcovitz and Dr. Judy Kahn, of baalei teshuva (those who were not raised Orthodox but have become Orthodox) who have teens, which found that the psychologically healthiest teenage children are those whose parents themselves became baalei teshuva in their teens and were integrated into their communities through programs such as NCSY.
To return to my previous question, "Should our main mission be outreach to the unaffiliated or inreach to the affiliated? Or both?," the majority agreed that kiruv needs to become more about quality than quantity, meaning more of a healthy step-by-step "full disclosure" integration of the newly religious into the Orthodox Jewish community, with different organizations specializing in different audiences.
I am proud to say that the OU/NCSY will be the role model for all other organizations since this has been our approach at NCSY for almost 60 years.
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