Interfaith Study Pinpoints Success

This article originally appeared in the Boston Jewish Advocate and is reprinted with permission of the author. Visit www.thejewishadvocate.com.

Designing outreach programs to welcome and engage interfaith couples and families tends to be as much art as science. You can't be sure exactly what's going to work.

Now a new study, designed to spotlight the effectiveness of Greater Boston's outreach programs, has given high marks to the local efforts. Long considered a national leader in working to build a welcoming climate for interfaith families and in funding interfaith programming, Combined Jewish Philanthropies made this issue a priority more than six years ago. To analyze the effectiveness of local initiatives, the Jewish Connection Partnership, managed by the New York-based Jewish Outreach Institute, awarded CJP an evaluation grant.

With nearly 200 respondents--mostly unaffiliated, relatively long-term residents of Greater Boston--findings revealed:

97 percent reported their participation in the programs had been helpful, especially high ratings to the teachers.

39 percent reported increased involvement in Jewish life.

28 percent moved toward synagogue membership. The percentage of respondents who were synagogue members increased from 20 percent to 48 percent, while two-thirds of those who were not members at the time of the survey (and who responded to a question about their plans) said they plan to join a synagogue.

Two-thirds of those respondents with children indicated that they raised or planned to raise their children as Jews and were planning Jewish birth and bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies for their children.

"One of the greatest things these programs do is get couples talking," says Stephanie Wallace of Newton who, together with husband John, recently completed the Reform movement's "Yours, Mine and Ours" program. "At the same time, they link you with a community of others working out the same issues." The result is improved understanding, she adds. "What other people are sharing is sometimes what you're feeling but you haven't been able to say. When facilitators are able to talk about these sensitive issues without the intense emotions, that really helps all of us."

The study's positive results are heartening to those committed to this agenda. "The underlying message is that people involved in interfaith relations are interested in getting more involved in Jewish life," says Edmund Case, Publisher of InterfaithFamily.com and the study's Project Director. Sherry Israel, a professor at the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University, developed the survey questions with Egon Mayer of the Jewish Outreach Institute. The responses were analyzed by local sociologist Shirah Hecht.

What struck Dr. Paula Brody, Director of Outreach Programs and Training for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) Northeast Council, was the 20 to 25 percent of respondents who moved from describing themselves as "interfaith" at the beginning of their program to "Jewish" afterwards. "That's a major identity shift," she says.

"The study shows that outreach works," says Mitchell Shames, Chair of CJP's Task Force on Services to the Intermarried. "Good programming is effective. It does strengthen the community."

Shames' task force recommends funds be allocated to local outreach efforts. CJP now funds the programs of the UAHC (Reform), the Keruv Program and Gerim Institute (Conservative), as well as those of Jewish Family and Children's Service and Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston.

"Year after year, we've seen these programs really take root," says task force member Margot Davis who, with her husband Jon, has taken interfaith family programs sponsored by their temple. "As they grow in strength and positive responses, it becomes clearer and clearer that they're what the community needs, that they represent one of CJP's most forward-thinking initiatives."

Or, as task force member Esta Epstein puts is: "The results show that all of our efforts are going in the right direction."

The findings also have implications for communities elsewhere. "Given the range of outreach programs available in Boston, these results indicate that potential participants were very successful at choosing different programs to meet their different needs," says the Jewish Outreach Institute's Gail Quets.

"CJP is very proud to be sponsoring the widest array of outreach programs to interfaith families in the country," says CJP President Barry Shrage. "Our future depends on creating a warm and vibrant community filled with learning and caring and justice so that all of our children and grandchildren will want to be part of it. This research is encouraging and our committees will be looking at it to understand what it means for our programming in the years ahead."

For more information about CJP-funded interfaith programs, visit the website InterfaithFamily.com or call Judith Krell at CJP at (617) 457-8592.

Deborah Fineblum Raub is Director of Media Relations for Combined Jewish Philanthropies.