Beit Am gets grant

By DEBORAH MOON

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Beit Am in Corvallis has received a $24,000 grant from the Legacy Heritage Innovation Project for its Project Keshet (Rainbow): Multiple Paths to Shared Light, designed to integrate religious school students and their families into the life of the community.
    
Beit Am is one of 20 new recipients of the grant, which is renewable for up to three years. According to its Web site, “The Legacy Heritage Innovation Project is a non-denominational initiative to support synagogues which are creating new paradigms for congregational education, introducing systemic change through an integrate, family-based approach.”
    
“We feel like a little fish in a big pond,” said Beit Am Rabbi Benjamin Barnett, noting the project received applications from communities around the world. “We feel pretty honored Beit Am in Corvallis has something they are interested in funding.”
    
Project Keshet will continue and expand on last school year’s pilot project to hold some religious school sessions on Shabbat in conjunction with services. The grant enables Beit Am to hire a consultant to help the community develop a vision statement and to adapt educational practices from other communities.
    
Barnett said the grant will help Beit Am “hone in on our priorities.”
    
“One Shabbat morning each month, we will come together for a Shabbat Keshet,” explained Barnett of the expanded program. “Once or twice during the year, we will also gather to learn and celebrate on Shabbat afternoon, culminating with Havdallah. Shabbat Keshet gatherings at Beit Am will involve: communal prayer and ritual; Torah study for children and adults exploring a common theme; and integrated learning for all ages. … Almost every month will contain a communal holiday celebration as well.”
    
“Beit Am has always spread our tent as wide as we could, being the only synagogue in the immediate area,” said Barnett. “So while maintaining our diversity, we are hoping that this endeavor can help us articulate and be directed by more of a shared vision. Through this gathering of our community’s interests and passions, we hope to more actively and effectively connect with one another, with Jewish tradition, and with God, even as we pray differently (including those who do not pray so much) and live different kinds of Jewish lives.
    
Beit Am President Scott Leibowitz said that Beit Am serves people in many different niches—those who attend Friday night services, those who attend services on Shabbat and those who enroll children in the Sunday school.
    
“Often people don’t know people in the other groups,” said Leibowitz. “We want to try and mix them and make education integrate with religious life and make it more participatory.”
    
The congregation’s religious school principal Sarah Sapon-White agrees: “As a small and relatively isolated Jewish community, Beit Am has always functioned amazingly well as an ‘umbrella organization,’ offering many options for involvement with different approaches to prayer, educational and social activities.”
    
She said Keshet offers that diverse membership “a wide range of ways and venues in which to connect and, hopefully, build relationships with other Jews of all ages, orientations and interests.”
    
Sapon-White said that with a consultant’s knowledge and resources, “we will benefit from curricular ideas and best practices that are already out there and spend our energy on modifying them to fit our unique community rather than starting from scratch.”
    
Barnett said the Legacy program expects grant recipients to make systemic changes rather than simply building one program. He said he hopes the Keshet program will do that.
    
He noted that Beit Am has grown from about 100 families to 130 families in the three years he has served the community as its first full-time rabbi. Since there are a limited number of Jews in Corvallis, he said future growth will come from expanding the community’s core and involving more people in Beit Am in relevant ways. He said he believes the grant will “build a strong web in the community.”
    
“I really hope this program and grant is an opportunity for us to pen our doors wider to Jews of all stripes and non-Jews in our community,” said Barnett, noting that nearly 75 percent of the religious school students are from interfaith families. “I’m always asking, ‘how do we make this welcoming and meaningful to the non-Jewish parents who have made commitments to raise Jewish kids?’ I want us to do everything to help this be meaningful.”