What's Up? Bnai Mitzvah & Teen Projects For Justice
What’s Up?!#jewishyouthartjustice is a year-long, twice a month, experiential program in which 13-18 year-old students explore ideas and action of tzedek (justice) from the personal, to the local, to the global, drawing wisdom from progressive Jewish texts and traditions. After exploring our own relationship to community and justice, we spend each session focused on a different aspect of social justice beginning with issues related to the SELF and moving outward to HOME, LAND, MOVEMENT and finally EARTH. Each category will be framed by a specific Jewish text and will be explored using theatre, creative writing, photography, film, blogging, twitter, and other forms of media. Throughout the year, students get the opportunity to learn with guest artists and community activists from different parts of New York City. Students have the opportunity to process this learning by generating creative projects that will culminate in an original multimedia educational performance piece to be shared with the whole Kolot community.
SAVE THE DATE: Tuesday, May 15 - for the What's Up?! performance for the whole congregation
Go to the What's Up blog
A required part of the Bnai Mitzvah process?
Kolot Chayeinu has always held that doing social justice is a crucial element of being a Jew and of being a Jewish community. Several years ago, through an evaluation of the values and needs of our congregation and families of bnai mitzvah students, we decided that doing tzedakah (social justice work) is also a crucial element of the process of becoming bar or bat mitzvah: a responsible Jew. The committee that created our then-new bnai mitzvah program urged that social justice be the theme of a post-b’nai mitzvah year, to allow the students some room to explore without the pressures of learning to chant Torah while attending afternoon school AND to give them an engaging experience that might counter the let-down and disengagement many students were feeling after the bar/bat mitzvah.
