Section archive - Informal Education

The JustCity Leadership Institute (June 25–July 9, 2017) is JTS’s award-winning pre-college program, training high school students in the fundamentals of Jewish change leadership in collaboration with AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, Camp Ramah, United Synagogue Youth, and American Jewish Society for Service. JustCity brings rising juniors and seniors together to live on JTS’s New York City campus, take college-level courses, engage in social justice work, and build community through vibrant Jewish programming.

Shira’s religious crisis was only one in a series of events that led to the creation of the religious guidance program at Kohelet Yeshiva High School. After repeated conversations with disheartened students and discouraged faculty, it seemed as though more and more students were floundering as they mindlessly went through the motions of a religious lifestyle and yet failed to find meaning. Frustrated with Judaism and disillusioned with religion, these students were struggling with deep questions while longing to connect to someone and something beyond themselves.

The current study was designed to explore the delayed effect of participating in youth mentoring programs, training in civic engagement, and activism on a sample of 337 Israelis 5 to 10 years after serving as student mentors. Qualitative and quantitative findings showed that these former mentors' perception of the contribution of mentoring was correlated with their current civic engagement attitudes and activism.

As appreciation of the impact of Jewish camping has grown, so have efforts to increase the number of campers able to participate in these settings. Inclusion of campers with disabilities, though not a new phenomenon, has likewise expanded. As more services are provided to campers with disabilities, more camps are hiring an Inclusion Coordinator to spearhead and manage these initiatives. This article explores the work done by these professionals and the challenges they face in doing so. The work of Inclusion Coordinators is discussed in the context of the evolving nature of camp-based inclusion efforts as a whole. The authors see inclusion at summer camps as an area in which much creative work has been done, and would benefit not only from additional resources but also from increased coordination as “a field.”