Engaged in a Good Story
by Michael Jacobs
Atlanta Jewish Times
September 13, 2007
In the age of iPhones, BlackBerries, texting, IMing and e-mailing, an old-fashioned conversation between two businessmen during a spring stroll has cleared the way for young families in Atlanta to build the foundation for Jewish education and continuity at home.
Befitting the People of the Book, that foundation doesn't rely on computer software or Web sites, but books, shared between parent and child in a classic example of l'dor v'dor (from generation to generation).
The books are part of the PJ Library, a concept that is simple but powerful: Deliver a free Jewish-themed book to any Jewish child under age 7 each month, and watch Jewish identity and knowledge flower in the children and their families.
"Reading stories and listening to music together are among the most powerful and nurturing early childhood experiences. The PJ Library will turn these special moments into Jewish moments," philanthropist Harold Grinspoon, who founded the PJ Library, says in promotional materials for the project, supported by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation.
The idea is simple, but the stakes are huge. If the PJ Library succeeds in Atlanta in its largest test, the result should be a tighter-knit, more affiliated, more involved Jewish community in which most children enter elementary school secure in their religious identities.
Among Jewish Atlanta's 120,000-plus community members are an estimated 10,000 children under age 7. But the 2006 Jewish Community Centennial Study of Jewish Atlanta found that those children are a challenge as well as an opportunity. A quarter of children ages 6 to 17 being raised Jewish had not received any Jewish education, and that figure was two-thirds for children in intermarried households - an increasing portion of the households in Jewish Atlanta. And only about half the children in intermarried households are being raised Jewish.
Those children's wavering connections to the Jewish community begin with their families. Only one-third of the households in Jewish Atlanta are synagogue members, and 42 percent have some kind of Jewish communal connection. The community study found that only 19 percent felt "a lot" connected to the Jewish community.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta has recognized that the problem of communal engagement begins when families are starting. Two of the five outcomes Federation has adopted for its allocations process - engagement and identity - address the problem. In the area of identity, Federation is spending money to connect with couples before and immediately after they give birth. The hope is that education and engagement in the preschool years will create lifelong habits for the children and their parents.
The PJ Library couldn't be a better match for those Federation efforts.
"We're clearly focused on that outcome of identity and engagement," Federation President Steve Rakitt said. "This is a tool we feel would be a wonderful way of doing that."
"This hits right in our sweet spot," said Marty Kogon, the chairman of the Federation board.
Rakitt said the match with the PJ Library was beshert (fated).
"We instantly recognized it as just a wonderful, wonderful program that fit exactly what we were looking for," Kogon said.
But sometimes fate needs a matchmaker. In this case, Jay Kaiman of the Marcus Foundation filled that role.
The occasion was the national conference of the Jewish Funders Network, the organization of family foundations and other major Jewish philanthropists, in Atlanta in March. Grinspoon attended the conference to speak at a session on teen philanthropy and to promote the youth-focused initiatives of his foundation, including the PJ Library.
Both Grinspoon and Kogon happen to be walkers, Kogon said, and Kaiman put them together and insisted they take a walk together and get to know each other. After a long walk during which Kogon discussed Atlanta's needs and Grinspoon explained the program, Kogon said, "I was, A, exhausted and, B, excited."
It was easy to conclude that Federation and Grinspoon both wanted the PJ Library in Atlanta, but the scale of the undertaking required months of work by the staffs of the two organizations. Consider that in April the PJ Library proudly announced that Houston had become the largest community in the program with 600 participating children and that nationally the PJ Library had reached the milestone of mailing out a total of 5,000 books a month to its roughly three dozen communities. (The growing initiatives now has 44 "community partners" listed on its Web site, www.pjlibrary.org. But some of them are individual programs or synagogues in cities, so that such places as Denver and Ann Arbor, Mich., are listed twice.)
The Atlanta project is more than five times the size of the Houston program, and when Atlanta fills all of its funded PJ Library slots, it will increase the national book distribution by about 60 percent.
Just finding 3,250 children to sign up could be a daunting task, particularly because one of the goals is to reach unaffiliated families. Federation is launching an all-out effort with a banner at the top of its Web site, www.shalomatlanta.org, and a mass mailing of 23,000 books and introductory PJ Library materials to the entire Federation database. It's the Grinspoon Foundation's biggest mailing.
The books should arrive in homes this week, coinciding with announcements at synagogues during the High Holidays.
Rakitt said the hope is that book recipients who don't have young children will spread the word and the free books to their friends and relatives, even if they don't live in metro Atlanta. In fact, grandparents are welcome to sign up out-of-town grandchildren if they are willing to pay $60 per year.
Among the Atlanta-area children, Federation hopes to fill every one of the 3,250 slots as soon as possible and to build a waiting list. Wait-listed people would move into the program as other children moved away or aged out of the program or, perhaps, as more money became available.
While the Grinspoon Foundation pays all of the program's administrative costs and contributes to the expense of the books and their accompanying educational materials, the foundation's community partners must come up with the local matching funds to cover $60 per child per year. Grinspoon recommends that families be asked to contribute $18 per year after the first year, reducing the local organization's cost to $42 per child per year, but Atlanta's program is free to local participating families for all three years of the initial grant.
That grant came from the Marcus Foundation through Kaiman, the matchmaker for Kogon and Grinspoon. At $60 apiece for 3,250 children, the Marcus Foundation is committing $195,000 a year for three years, a total of $585,000.
Three years should be enough time to judge not only whether people buy into the program, but whether participation leads to greater Jewish engagement. The Grinspoon Foundation found just such a positive effect when it surveyed participating families in its home region of western Massachusetts in December: 88 percent said the books sparked Jewish conversations at home, and 95 percent said they would like to be informed about and would attend Jewish community programs.
Community involvement is a crucial part of the PJ Library. It's about more than books, Rakitt said.
Federation hired a PJ Library coordinator, Shellie Carr, and part of her job is to develop partnerships.
The Marcus JCC has grabbed the opportunity. The center is hiring a part-time PJ Library educator, who will run programs just for PJ Library families, based on themes in the books.
Federation also is talking to synagogues and preschools about implementing their own PJ Library family programs and hopes to get Jewish Family & Career Services involved.
PJ Library families also will be able to take their own steps beyond the books. Each book comes with a reading guide for parents, and the reading guides will be available at the Web sites of Federation and the PJ Library.
Those guides explore the Jewish themes in the books and offer ideas for experiences that build on the themes, such as baking a round challah for the High Holidays.
Federation got a hint of the excitement inherent to the program while the Web pages for the program were under development in August. By mistake, those pages, buried within the ShalomAtlanta site, were made accessible to the public. Federation discovered the mistake when dozens of people unexpectedly registered.
"As somebody who has some knowledge of the Internet, I was astounded that people found it. We already have a sizable number signed up just based on word of mouth," Kogon said. As people learned of the program, they e-mailed friends with children to let them know. "It underscored the personal nature of this."
One of those who signed up before Federation went public was Joanna Estroff, mother of 2½-year-old Emma and sales coordinator for the Jewish Times. Estroff said she enrolled Emma as soon as she received an e-mail message with a link to the Web site. She also forwarded the message to other young Jewish families.
Emma has an extensive library, including such Jewish-themed books as the Sammy the Spider series, and regularly reads with her parents. But Estroff recognized the value of the PJ Library as a way to increase Emma's Jewish knowledge in a way that's fun for the whole family.
"This is a concrete example of the kinds of things happening every day through all our affiliates in Atlanta and around the world," Kogon said. "It's real people being helped in real ways."
The Reading List
The PJ Library has a book selection committee composed of librarians, educators and other experts. The committee creates a new list of books and music - generally, 11 books and one music CD - for each age group each year. So all 2-year-olds in the program across the country this fall, for example, will all get the same book on Chanukah at the same time.
Although the selection committee refreshes its book lists for the start of each school year, some books are considered classics and are expected to remain on the lists year after year.
Two examples of the lists from the 2006-07 school year:
Age 1
• The Opposites of My Jewish Year by L.N. Dion.
• To Everything by Bob Barner
• It's Hanukkah! by Santiago Cohen
• A Child's Hanukkah by the Jewish Wedding Band (music CD)
• It's Tu B'shevat by Edie Zolkower
• Bible Heroes I Can Be by Ann Eisenberg
• What I Like About Passover by Varda Livney
• Let's Visit Israel by Judye Groner
• Sunrise, Sunset by Sheldon Harnick
• The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Dr. Wendy Mogel
• It's Challah Time! by Latifa Berry Knopf
• Tamar's Sukkah by Ellie Gellman
Age 5
• Bagels From Benny by Aubrey Davis
• Rivka's First Thanksgiving by Elsa Okon Rael
• When Mindy Saved Hanukkah by Eric Kimmel
• My Newish Jewish Discovery by Craig Taubman (music CD)
• The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco
• Raisel's Riddle by Erica Silverman
• Mrs. Katz and Tush by Patricia Polacco
• A Sack Full of Feathers by Debby Waldman
• Much, Much Better by Chaim Kosofsky
• The Children's Jewish Holiday Kitchen by Joan Nathan
• Abraham's Search for God by Jacqueline Jules
• When the Chickens Went on Strike by Erica Silverman