Recently, I participated in a webinar entitled “Inclusion and Sensitivity.” It was impressive not only for the content but for the fact that it was a collaborative effort of the Conservative Movement’s Ramah Service Corps and the Union for Reform Judaism’s (URJ) Camps. The coordinators of both training programs realized that the topic of inclusion was “important, beneficial and useful for all of the fellows in their current and future work.” This collaboration between camping groups of the Conservative and Reform Movements is one of many wonderful partnerships emerging.

This year, “Hineinu: Jewish Community for People of All Abilities,” a cross denominational partnership for inclusion was announced. In Boston, members of Yachad (Orthodox), Tikvah Ramah (Conservative) and Jewish Gateways (community) have participated in several joint activities. Staff members trained in Ramah’s disability camping programs often go on to work for Yachad (Orthodox), and teach in religious schools of various denominations.

This year’s GA, which took place two weeks ago near Washington, DC, featured a two hour session entitled, “Disability Inclusion and the Federation Movement: Why, How, and the Time Is Now” and a one hour session entitled “Access Granted: Creating Inclusive Communities;” presenters and attendees represented every part of the Jewish World.

I am privileged to regularly speak with my colleagues from Yachad, URJ, JCC camps, and The Foundation for Jewish Camp””to name a few. We share best practices and resources; we discuss sensitive matters, we support each other in our work and we celebrate successes. Increasingly, we in the camping world are speaking to our colleagues in day schools, supplementary schools and informal Jewish education. I speak and meet regularly with my colleagues at Matan and Gateways: Access to Jewish Education. We attend the same conferences, participate in the same webinars, and deal with many of the same issues.

Our campers in the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah in New England are constantly showing us that each program, organization and movement has something important to contribute. A “typical” Ramah (Conservative Movement) camper may come from a Reform temple and attend year round social activities sponsored by Yachad (Orthodox) or Friendship Circle (Chabad). And they may attend a specialized secular program or college, vocational training program and sometimes even a Catholic school.

I believe we are on the road to internalizing the simple wisdom we read each year on Sukkot in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. In Chapter 4, verses 9-12, we learn, “Two are better off than one ““ because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up the other, but woe to him that is alone when he falls; for he has not another to help him up.” The biblical commentator Rashi says it quite simply: “Two are better than one” – “IN EVERY WAY.”

May we continue to find ways to work together”“to help our campers, our families and ourselves!

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On Nov. 11 and 12, 340 companies filled 400 booths in the 80,000-square-foot exhibition hall in the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, N.J. – all part of the 26th annual Kosherfest, the trade show of the kosher food industry.

Kosher is big business. The number of Americans who are believed to keep kosher year-round is 1.3 million, and the number of goods produced in the U.S. with a kosher symbol exceeds $300 billion in sales. More than 200,000 items on U.S. supermarket shelves are under kosher certification – with approximately 2,500 items newly certified in 2013.

As attendees approached the exhibition hall, they were greeted by a truck offering free samples of Tofutti “Cuties” – before even entering the hall! I always find it helpful to sit for a few moments with a map and schedule or even come up with a game plan. I usually set out down the aisles – in order – from booths 100 to 753. Time permitting, I might catch one of the many mincha minyans held throughout the day, or watch some of the Kosherfest 7th Annual Culinary Competition, featuring three chefs and hosted by Chef Paula Shoyer. But visiting the booths – for info and samples – is key!

It is always comforting to see old familiar ‘faces’ – Guss’ Pickles, Gold’s, Empire Kosher Poultry, and the KOF-K and Star-K kosher supervision agencies. Many of these old reliable companies are still producing new products. Manischewitz, for example, debuted its Gluten Free Brownie Mix, Gluten Free Matzo Ball Mix and gave away cans of its Kosherfest 2014 “Best New Kosher for Passover” Carrot Cake Macaroons. They also invited visitors to enter their Chanukah House Kit contest. Empire was proudly showing off their Gourmet Spicy Apple Chicken Sausage, a blend of sweet and spicy with no nitrates or fillers.

Along with the food, there was also some fun. Entertaining the crowd were two gregarious Japanese men, who spent two days making sushi at their booth to promote extra spicy Srirachi sauces: chili and spicy mayo.

Many companies are offering healthier products, often geared to such specialty markets as gluten free. ProTings chips, in such tasty flavors as key lime, sea salt and tangy southern barbeque, have 15 grams of protein in a four-ounce bag and they are vegan and gluten free. Matt’s Munchies, the premium fruit snack, is gluten free and vegan, and Mauzone Mania offer low in carbs, high in fiber treats like biscotti, breadsticks and flatters. Azuma Gourmet has been producing seaweed salad for fifteen years; for the past four years, their sesame seaweed hummus, hijiki quinoa salad and seaweed salads have been available in Costco. Deebee’s won the award for best overall new product/best new frozen dessert. Their “teapops” are organic, gluten free, pareve and only 25 to 50 calories, and come in such flavors as minty mint, tropical mango and toasted coconut.

Despite the surge in healthy, more traditional meat products still abound. Attendees couldn’t get enough of such products as Jack’s Gourmet Beef merguez; U.S. Bison was promoting kosher bison meat – grass fed, antibiotic free, organic certification pending.

Many products come with interesting back stories: On the market only five months, NoMoo Cookies took home the 2014 Kosherfest New Product Competition (Best New Breads and Baked Goods) for its ginger cookie. The company was launched by an architect who loved to bake. His cookies, in eight flavors, are pareve. Allie’s GF Cookies was founded in 2014 by Allison Luckman, who was motivated to create her gluten free baked goods when her son, who suffers from an egg allergy, said, “I don’t like the sweets out there – can you make it taste better?” Allie started baking him special treats. She now bakes gluten free, nut free, coconut free, kosher baked goods, including cakes, rugelach, brownies, cupcakes, mousse and more.

I was delighted to discover one company at Kosherfest from our own Nutmeg State. Raul and Marissa Felix started the Connecticut Coconut Company in 2005. Their plant is in Shelton and their warehouse is in Waterbury. Originally from the Philippines, the Felixes are eager to explain why the coconut tree is considered “the tree of life.” “You can build your house from the wood of the tree, you can drink coconut milk, and you can get oil, flour and sugar! You can live from the coconut tree and have income from it!” Their organic coconut sugar is two years old and is under Star-K kosher supervision. “The response has been very positive. Everybody loves sugar and ours is raw and unrefined,” notes Marissa Felix.

(Source: http://www.jewishledger.com)

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Two years ago, a delegation of Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) and Jewish Funders Network (JFN) members visited eight Jewish summer camps in the Northeast in three days. Despite their different locations (from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts), sizes, and movement affiliations, the camps had one important thing in common: They were successfully including campers with disabilities in the camp community.

The long bus ride provided opportunities for discussion and processing of all the group was seeing and experiencing. The energy, enthusiasm, sharing, and creative thinking led to an amazing back-of-the-bus brainstorm—how about a one-day conference on disabilities inclusion in the Jewish community after the GA 2012 in Maryland? Thus, “Opening Abraham’s Tent: The Disability Inclusion Initiative” was born.

Jewish Federations of North America President and CEO, Jerry Silverman, literally ran straight from the halls of the GA to Opening Abraham’s Tent to welcome the 120 attendees. The audience members and speakers from across North America and Israel, assembled on short notice, were a “who’s who” of the Jewish disabilities world; each made his or her way to Baltimore to be part of this historic meeting.

I was proud to represent the National Ramah Commission at the convening. Looking around the room, I saw so many colleagues from across North America, and from many different organizations in the Jewish disabilities world. Many of us reflected proudly on how we got our start in this field by working with the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah. Since 1970, the Tikvah Program has been a pioneer in serving and including campers with disabilities and in training staff members for this important work.

In recent weeks, Ramah has taken this to the next level by creating the position of director of the National Ramah Tikvah Network, a position which I assumed last month and which is funded by the Oppenheimer Haas Foundation. The National Ramah Tikvah Network will expand its efforts to support the Ramah camps’ efforts to raise funds and create new programming to meet the needs of this vitally important population.

Now, two years later, nearly to the day, the GA returns to Maryland. So much has happened in the disabilities inclusion world since that initial meeting to establish Opening Abraham’s Tent. Much of the Jewish world—from synagogues to organizations to funders—is making strides toward inclusion and serving people with disabilities. We need to keep the people engaged in this effort and the issue high on the Jewish communal agenda. The work is not over.

The topics of disabilities and inclusion are now more openly discussed in religious schools, synagogues, camps, Jewish organizations, and even in the Israel Defense Forces. As a result, new disabilities and inclusion initiatives are being launched, and existing ones are being expanded throughout the North American Jewish community and in Israel. We are proud that many of the individuals establishing, leading, and staffing these initiatives and programs gained their skills and knowledge in the disabilities field by having trained and worked at Ramah’s Tikvah camping programs.

Here are just several examples of new initiatives or expansions of already existing disabilities inclusion programs:

  • The Shefa School, a new Jewish day school in Manhattan serving children with language-based learning disabilities, opened this past September.
  • The Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) recently hired a full-time director of their disabilities initiative. This will allow more camps to receive resources, support, and training as they expand services to campers with a wide range of disabilities.
  • Two new Tikvah programs for campers with disabilities will be opening by summer 2016 at Ramah Darom in Georgia and Camp Ramah in the Poconos. They will be staffed through the growing pipeline of young adults who have participated in National Ramah Tikvah Network training, which now includes staff from all other Jewish camps and is funded with the support of the Neshamot Fund of UJA-Federation of NY.

-Hineinu: Building Jewish Community for People of All Abilities, a cross-denominational partnership, recently produced a free, 32-page guide designed to increase disability inclusion in synagogues.

– JCC camps across the United States and Canada continue to expand services for people with disabilities.

– Yachad, the National Jewish Council for Disabilities, continues to evolve and grow, now offering “shadow programs for maximum inclusion, where campers are FULLY integrated into a typical bunk together with supportive  ‘shadow’ staff.”

– The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and Ruderman Family Foundation launched a new Inclusion Initiative, with the goal of improving attitudes about inclusion and disabilities and ensuring full inclusion and participation of people with disabilities and their families in every aspect of Reform Jewish life.

This increased disabilities inclusion awareness and these new and expanded initiatives are due in large part to increased collaboration and sharing among Jewish institutions and organizations. In the Ramah camping movement, we have always believed that the best results come from joint efforts, and we have been eager to share best practices derived from our 45 years of experience in inclusion of Jewish campers with disabilities.

With generous funding from the Covenant Foundation, Ramah recently convened thirty camp directors, disabilities program coordinators, funders, and key shareholders from across the entire Ramah movement for a day of strategic planning around disabilities camping. This effort was an exciting milestone in our efforts to think together about ways we can both strengthen inclusion within Ramah as well as share our expertise with other camping movements and educational organizations seeking to create programs for children with disabilities and include them in every aspect of Jewish life.

Last week, I had the privilege of having dinner in Ra’anana, Israel, with Herb and Barbara Greenberg. In the late 1960s, these two humble Long Island public school teachers had the visionary idea to create a Jewish overnight summer camp program for campers with developmental disabilities. Despite opposition and concerns that it would lead to “normal kids” leaving, decrease the level of Hebrew, be too costly, and otherwise negatively impact the Ramah camping experience, they went ahead with their idea, with the support of a lone Ramah director, Don Adelman (z’l).

Now, 45 years later, Tikvah serves 320 children, teens, and young adults with disabilities in the Ramah camps throughout North America and also offers family camp and vocational training programs, as well as the launch of new inclusion programming in the Ramah Israel Seminar summer travel program. We all benefit from the Greenbergs’ and Don Adelman’s efforts and look to them as inspiration as we train the next generation of young people dedicated to making a place for everyone inside the Jewish community’s tent.

 (Source: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com)

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Original Article Published On The Jewish Telegraphic Agency

SUNRISE, Fla. (JTA) – It wasn’t Tel Aviv, but thousands of people chanting his name at a Davis Cup match following a grueling victory was a pretty good way for Israel’s Andy Ram to leave the game of tennis to which he had devoted more than half his life.

Ram, 34, and his longtime doubles partner, Yoni Erlich, had just outlasted the Argentine duo of Federico Delbonis and Horacio Zeballos in a five-set match on Saturday that lasted nearly three-and-a-half hours.

With Ram sprawled out on center court — on his back, in tears — the crowd waved Israeli flags and “Todah [Thank you] Andy Ram” signs in Hebrew and chanted “Andyoni” and “Tishaer [Stay],” suggesting that he put off the retirement he had announced recently.

His teammates, wearing “Todah Andy” shirts, surrounded Ram, hoisted him in the air and carried him off the court. They proceeded to dump an ice-filled bucket on his head.

He would stay on the court for 20 minutes signing autographs and posing for pictures.

At a news conference afterward, Ram talked about his actions following the match, with Erlich and coach Eyal Ran at his side.

“I ran out of energy,” he said. “Then, as I was looking up at the sky and the birds, I got very emotional. And I cried like a baby.

“I thought of my father who couldn’t be here. I thought of my mom who was here. I left home at 14 to play tennis. Most of our relationship was on the phone. It meant the world to me that she was here.”

The doubles victory had put underdog Israel ahead 2-1 in the team match, but Argentina took both singles matches the following day to advance in the international tournament.

Despite the thunderous reception — as well as the Hebrew music heard frequently during the changeovers — Ram and his Israeli teammates lamented that the match was not played in central Israel, as scheduled, rather than South Florida.

In July, the Argentine Tennis Association requested a change in venue from the Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv due to security concerns surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The International Tennis Federation informed Israel in August that the match had to be moved. Israel appealed but lost; it would have to serve as host in a different location.

The Sunrise Tennis Club was selected from among several options. Much of the crowd there backed the Israelis, with a section of Argentines clad in light blue and white shirts rooting on their guys.

“We are playing here in the U.S.; it is a good feeling and yet it is not the best feeling,” Ram told JTA on Friday. “It was supposed to be in Israel. I wanted to play in front of my home crowd.”

His teammate, Dudi Sela, was a little more direct.

“The ITF made a mistake,” Sela told JTA. “We were looking forward to playing in front of 11,000 people cheering for Israel.”

Asi Touchmair, the chair of the Israel Tennis Association, noted in a statement that Israel has hosted the Davis Cup during times of war and military operations without having to move the matches.

Despite the distance and the logistics difficulties involved, Touchmair said, “we decided to play the Davis Cup in South Florida due to the warm and welcoming relationship that Israel receives from the United States, and where an atmosphere of a ‘home away from home’ will be experienced by our Israel Davis Cup team.”

Among those who made the trek to Sunrise was Andrea Eidman, an Argentine sports journalist who came from Buenos Aires.

“People asked me, who do you cheer for? And honestly, I didn’t care!” she said.

Eidman added, “For me, being present at that tennis court … with the Hebrew music going on and on, with the Israeli flags, the ‘Hatikvah,’ the shofar — it was a party from beginning to end!”

Ram, sitting in the stands on Friday with Erlich, 37, and cheering on his teammates during singles’ matches, told JTA he had no problem looking toward the future.

“I try to put it behind me, like in the past,” he said. “I am the kind of guy who is always thinking, ‘What’s next?’

“It was fun. It was a good time. Next is to focus on my kids [aged 5 and 7]. To see them growing, to be great athletes. To find myself, my way.”

Ram and Erlich – natives of Uruguay and Argentina, respectively — reached as high as No. 5 in the world doubles rankings. They advanced to 36 finals and won 20 of them, including the 2008 Australian Open. Ram also won the Wimbledon mixed doubles in 2006 and the French Open mixed doubles in 2007.

Ram is particularly proud of his Davis Cup record of 19-5 following the one final victory – achieved despite pulling muscle in his left leg late in the fifth set.

“I sent Jonathan on a suicide mission,” Ram joked. “He said, ‘Just get the serves in. I will do the rest.’ ”

Erlich’s particularly strong volleys powered the duo in the final set in 91-degree heat.

Ram spoke of his partnership with Ehrlich.

“When we go on court together, magic happens. We communicate. We know what the other one will do,” Ram said.

Erlich offered, “We had motivation, energy and a lot of belief.”

Eidman summed up what much of the crowd was likely feeling on seeing Ram’s finale.

“I felt like crying when Andy Ram said goodbye to tennis,” she said, noting that the Argentina team’s Jewish captain, Martin Jaite, was playing in his final match, too.

Eidman also said, “I would have loved to travel to eretz Israel instead of America. … It hurt my heart not to go to Israel because of the war.”

But, Ram said, “11,000 people screaming Andyoni is amazing!”

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