West Linn family thrives on PJ Library

By Jacob Berkman

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Pam Vergun and her 6-year-old Marshallese daughter Miko and 5-year-old African-American son Isaac found the process of converting to Judaism made easier and more joyful by the free Jewish books they receive from the PJ Library each month.

Vergun married a Jewish man, Rob Vergun, and together they adopted their two children through international and domestic open adoptions.

They belong to Beit Haverim/SMJC (South Metro Jewish Congregation), a Reform congregation in West Linn, just south of Portland.

As much as they love books and enjoy their connection to Judaism, they had few Jewish books for their children until a fellow congregant told them about the PJ Library program funded by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation: Each month the foundation gives away a Jewish-themed book or CD to children aged 1-6.

The first book the Verguns received was “Mrs. Katz and Tush,” by Patricia Polacco, about an older Jewish woman who lost her husband, yet who beats her loneliness by becoming close friends with an African-American boy.

“I couldn’t have thought of a better book to start off with for a family like ours that is interfaith and multi-ethnic,” said Vergun, an author herself. “The books are aimed at children, but they are also aimed at teaching adults.”

Vergun, a Stanford- and Princeton-trained Ph.D. sociologist, has a book due out this spring from Algora Publishing. “A Dimly Burning Wick He Will Not Quench: Children in the Ruins of Hiroshima”(www.a-dimly-burning-wick.com) is written for adults but shares, according to its author, many of the qualities of the books she and her family have received from the Grinspoon Foundation.

Each month when the books arrive, the family curls up in bed and reads them together. Vergun says the experience has helped Miko and Isaac deepen their understanding of being Jewish and made the family feel more at home in the Jewish world, while also sparking positive discussion.



And they have found the books particularly poignant.



In November, Vergun and her children underwent a formal conversion through Beit Haverim/SMJC. The process included immersion in a mikvah.

Vergun says she was looking online for a book that dealt with conversion and children and the mikvah, and could find only one: Brynn Olenberg Sugarman’s “Rebecca’s Journey Home,” a story about a Vietnamese girl adopted by a Jewish family.

She ordered the book in September from Amazon.com. Two days later it arrived—from the PJ Library.

Rabbi Annette Koch of Beit Haverim/SMJC said Vergun shared the book with her at a Sunday school session. “I was impressed with how it handled the issues of adoption and conversion in a straightforward but very sensitive way,” said Koch.

Harold Grinspoon started the PJ Library two years ago in western Massachusetts, where his foundation is based, modeling it after singer Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which gives away some 450,000 free books each month to children up to age 5.

In Grinspoon’s version, the books are aimed not just at literacy but at forming Jewish identity.

They are geared toward an age cohort that Jewish sociologists say is increasingly important not only because it is a critical developmental time Jewishly, but because reaching out to young children is a way to draw them into Jewish preschools and also to engage young parents in the Jewish world.

Besides working with individuals and families, Grinspoon’s project is also about working with the Jewish communal establishment to advance an innovative initiative.

Though many of Grinspoon’s mega-donor peers are trying to work outside the Jewish federation system, Grinspoon is working purposefully within the establishment.

PJ Library—as in pajamas—now gives books to 12,500 children in 52 communities. In about 65 percent of the communities, the local federation is implementing and administering the program, and enrolling new participants.

It is also handling complimentary programming, such as holiday programs and sleepovers that are tied to the PJ books.

In the Portland area the PJ Library is operated under the auspices of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation where Development Director Julie Diamond has oversight responsibility for the program.

The Oregon Jewish Community Youth Foundation, which operates within the framework of the OJCF, discovered the program and made the first local gift to it.

Later, according to OJCF Executive Director John Moss, local philanthropists stepped forward to fund the local program.

Those funders are Eve Stern, Shrilee Lenske, Lila Goodman, Lois Schnitzer through the Leonard and Schnitzer Support Foundation of the OJCF, Renee Holzman and Elizabeth Menashe.

Moss said Portland was one of the first U.S. communities to join the program.

Grinspoon covers the overhead for shipping and a significant cost of the books, asking the local community to pitch in only $60 each year per child enrolled in the program.

The foundation also announced last month that it would issue challenge grants to pay up to $10,000 per community toward a staff member to oversee the program and follow-up initiatives. It also announced that for every two children a community enrolls and pays for, Grinspoon would pay for a third.

The program is about to add 16 new communities, 12 of them run by federations.

“He has created a model where if you supply a little energy and a little capital, he will give you the tools to succeed in your community,” the president of the Jewish Funders Network, Mark Charendoff, said of Grinspoon.

The model of giving Jews a no-strings-attached gift to help draw them into the Jewish fold follows the highly successful model of birthright Israel, which gives away free trips to Israel to Jews aged 18 to 26. Grinspoon is also a major funder of birthright.

But the Jews who receive the free books seem more concerned about the effect they have had on their families than on their checkbooks.

Lou Davis, 40, had never really affiliated with anything Jewish since he became a bar mitzvah. He and his half-Jewish wife, Jennifer, were nominal members of a Conservative synagogue in Northampton, Mass., but he was having a hard time articulating any kind of Jewish belief to his children, Benjamin, 4, and Isaac, 2.

“I have a lot of issues with religion and with God. They are not really a part of my life,” said Davis, a marketing strategist. “But I wanted my kids to know about it and to feel Jewish. Our inclusion in the PJ Library has given me the ability to conceptualize some Jewish lessons for them.”

Grinspoon said that the idea behind the PJ Library is simple.

“Reading to kids is a basically fundamentally important thing,” the philanthropist explained. “Why not read them a Jewish book?”

For more information about the PJ Library program, visit www.pjlibrary.org.