Making a Moonshot Philanthropic Bet on Philadelphia’s Jewish Community

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Zev Eleff | Courtesy of Zev Eleff

Zev Eleff

In November, the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education convened a meeting of national Jewish professional learning providers in Washington, D.C. The scores of participants studied CASJE’s recent findings on the value of professional development in the Jewish arena, particularly in the field of Jewish education.

We swapped notes on how to best deploy continuing education. Some, me included, hypothesized that more substantive and creative professional development would do much to rebuild the Jewish nonprofit professional pipeline.


I departed the CASJE conference with two takeaways. First, there’s a risk-taking moonshot-level philanthropic bet to be made on Jewish professional development, how creative and better continuing education can be leveraged to better staff and animate programming and services for the Jewish community. Second, it ought to happen in Philadelphia.

The constellation of Philadelphia-based Jewish nonprofits stands at a transformative moment. Over the past two years, many of our local organizations have hired new leaders.
For example, 16 Jewish nonprofit CEOs attended a meeting in January convened at Gratz College and in coordination with Jewish Learning Venture. Three-quarters of the leaders present were recent hires with a mandate to grow their institutions.

What about the value of professional development in our agencies?

With the support of 25 organizations, Gratz College recently surveyed 115 Jewish professionals, every subset but congregational rabbis.

Two-thirds of the respondents boasted more than 10 years of working experience in the field. Most of this group — a high quotient of day school and synagogue educators — reported that all or most of their work requires Jewish content knowledge or expertise in the Jewish community. The majority possess graduate degrees in Jewish education, Jewish professional studies or received rabbinical ordination.

In concert with the findings from CASJE, this veteran cohort — again, mostly educators — receives steady doses of professional development, often free of charge. But they also relayed that they could use more of it and would like to see more creative, research-based offerings.

New Jewish professionals (some that just started their careers and others who recently transitioned from other professional places) tell a different story, one that better foretells the sustainability of our Jewish nonprofit sector.

Most in this group work in non-classroom settings: They’re situated in informal education, human service agencies or administrative positions. Their organizations don’t provide the same amounts of in-service programs deployed in school settings. Three-quarters take part in continuing education outside of Jewish professional studies, but just 15% participate in professional development that might be characterized as Jewish education or Jewish professional studies.

What explains this group’s low participation in Jewish professional development?

Just 30% of their work, they say, requires Jewish content knowledge. In follow-up questions, the same professionals indicated that their job would benefit from deeper Jewish content and that substantive Jewish professional development, if made available and at low costs, would help them increase their capacities in the workplace.

The throughline is the urgent need for skills-based professional development offerings that improve the sacred work of Jewish nonprofits. From board management to text-based learning. From mental health awareness to Hebrew education, and then to program evaluation best practices.

A transformative investment in Jewish professional development for Philadelphia’s Jewish nonprofit sector would test the impact of continuing education on the wider community.
Months ago in these pages, I wrote about Philadelphia’s “broken Jewish education pipeline.” I tabulated more than a dozen recent Jewish population studies and showed that Philadelphia’s enrollment numbers, compared with its peer communities, ranked at the bottom in every Jewish educational setting: from early childhood to high school, from youth group to camp. I’d wager we would find similar low figures for engagement with Jewish adults.

Hence the moonshot. Our local heads of school and Jewish nonprofit CEOs represent a new generation of leadership, ready to put our people in the very best position to succeed. Together, they want Philadelphia to emerge as a model Jewish community. They have already made a bet on themselves and their colleagues.

To support them, we’ll need to further uptrain and sometimes reskill our teams to better serve and support our communities. The data suggests it’s a risk worth taking.

Zev Eleff is the president of Gratz College and a professor of American Jewish history.

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