SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Bettina Kurowski is
the chair of the 2008 fund-raising campaign of the Jewish
Federation of Los Angeles and active in her Conservative
synagogue.
She’s also a grandmother of three young
grandchildren. They give her great "naches," or joy, she says,
but she’s
also
worried -- the children’s father is not Jewish, the kids are
being raised in an interfaith home and Kurowski, for all her
Jewish involvement, is not sure what role she should play in
passing on the Jewish heritage that is so dear to
her.
“My husband and I are the keepers of the Jewish
tradition, the culture and values of Judaism -- what it really
means to be a Jew,” Kurowski says. “I took it upon myself to
study how to be the best grandparent I could be while
acknowledging the non-Jewish side of their family.
"I didn’t want to give the children the sense that there’s
something wrong with people who are not Jewish, but I still
want to give them a sense of pride in being Jewish. It’s a
fine line.”
Looking around, Kurowski found few
resources for grandparents like herself. She says she’s the
only one in her circle of friends whose children intermarried,
and she felt the need to share her concerns with others in her
situation.
This week, she’ll get that chance when the
Grandparents Circle holds its first meeting at Valley Beth
Shalom, Kurowski’s congregation in Encino, Calif.
The
Grandparents Circle, which is launching pilot courses Jan. 8
in Los Angeles and Jan. 29 in Atlanta, is a new program
created by the Jewish Outreach Institute to help grandparents
present their Jewish heritage to their grandchildren in
intermarried households.
Grandparents meet in groups of
20 to 25 for five weeks of guided discussion, share their
concerns and learn specific skills for passing on Jewish
history and tradition without forcing it on the
children.
“They want to pass on their Jewish identity
and background, they want to share their history and who they
are with their grandchildren, but it has to be done in a way
that’s interesting to the grandchildren," says Liz Marcovitz,
a program officer at the institute. "You can’t just start
talking about Judaism with no context.”
The course is
inspired by “Twenty Things for Grandparents of Interfaith
Grandchildren to Do,” a 2007 JOI publication.
When Kurowski read the book last year, she and her husband
donated the funds to build a curriculum around it. Her
federation has earmarked funds to run the pilot course, and
Kurowski says it hopes to expand the course to other
synagogues in the Los Angeles area.
Marcovitz says the
Jewish communities of Chicago and Hartford, Conn., among
others, are interested.
Eventually the JOI plans to set up a national listserve for
all such grandparents, whether they have taken the course or
not.
Suzette Cohen is organizing the program in
Atlanta. She notes that the city’s Jewish community, which has
a 60 percent intermarriage rate, is in its sixth year of
running The Mothers Circle, a JOI support group for non-Jewish
women raising Jewish children. Many of the Jewish parents of
those intermarried couples have asked for a similar program
for them.
“They often dance around the issue, afraid of
doing or saying the wrong thing” and offending their child or
the non-Jewish spouse, Cohen says.
The first Atlanta
circle is already oversubscribed; a second group is filling
quickly.
The gist of the book and the course is to
teach by example: Invite the grandchildren to Passover seders
in your home, show them photos of your family, light Shabbat
candles and tell them why it’s important to you.
Build “layers of Jewish memories,” the book suggests, that
will remain with the children as they grow to
adulthood.
Grandparents are an often overlooked
influence on the lives of their grandchildren, says JOI’s
associate director, Paul Golin. The institute's extensive
research on the adult children of intermarried couples found
that one of the major influences on the religious identities
of these young adults was their grandparents.
But it’s
not a straight shot.
“It’s not about parenting, it’s
about influence,” Golin says. “It happens holistically. If the
grandparents are just who they are and have contact with the
grandkids, they’ll have that influence.
“That’s why we
say, just be the best Jew you can be. You don’t want to come
across as a Hebrew school teacher.”
The Grandparents
Circle is designed for Jewish grandparents whose intermarried
children are open to it. If the grandchildren are being raised
exclusively Christian, Golin notes, it is a much more delicate
matter.
That's the situation facing Rose Sowadsky, an
Atlanta-area grandmother whose two grandchildren are being
raised Methodist.
The children "are aware" she is
Jewish -- they were at her home Christmas Eve and saw she had
no tree -- but they have never asked her about it.
"They must have been well prompted at home," she
supposes.
Sowadsky does not expect to have any
influence on her grandchildren's religious upbringing, but she
signed up for the Grandparents Circle for moral support.
"I want to see how others cope with it," she
says.
Many participants come to the group as couples,
and many others are single women, usually widowed, like
Sowadsky, or divorced.
Dr. Bob Licht, a semi-retired
Los Angeles dentist, is the lone single man in the Los Angeles
group. When his wife of 62 years passed away last summer, he
felt he needed help passing on his Jewish heritage to his
4-year-old great-grandson.
The boy’s father, Licht’s
grandson, is Jewish, but the boy’s mother is not. Licht says
his children and grandchildren, including the boy’s father,
received an appreciation and understanding of Judaism from him
and his late wife.
Now that she is gone, Licht feels
somewhat adrift. The boy had a brit milah, but Licht wants to
make sure he continues on a Jewish path.
“I wish my
wife were here to help me with it,” he says. “She was better
prepared. Now I’ve got to figure it out. I want to learn as
much as I can, and that’s why I went to the first meeting. I
want to do the right thing.”
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