new york | Benjamin Gittleson had some unusual weekend plans. He took the half-hour ride from Gaithersburg, Md., to the northeastern area of Washington for a day in the park — Watts Branch Park, once known for drug pushers and addicts, piles of decaying trash and thatches of overgrown brush.
Gittleson joined 100 to 150 other area teens from the Jewish Youth Philanthropy Institute in a day-long cleanup effort at the city park.
“A lot of high schoolers see community service as something they’re not looking forward to,” says Gittleson, a 10th-grader in Rockville, Md. “This activity, among others we do, is enjoyable, and you really feel like you’re bettering the community and making a big difference.”
The park initiative was one of 33 civic service projects in which young Jews from across the United States and Canada participated April 17. The efforts were part of J-Serve 2005, billed by its organizers as the first-ever North American day of service for Jewish teens.
The J-Serve program corresponded with Youth Service America’s National/Global Youth Service Day, an annual event where young Americans and youth abroad engage in tens of thousands of service projects. Organizers estimated that 4 million young people in more than 100 countries took part this year.
“It’s always nice to be part of something bigger than yourself,” says Rabbi Sid Schwarz, president of Panim, The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, which is among J-Serve’s national planning organizations, along with the North American Alliance for Jewish Youth and the Jewish Coalition for Service.
Schwarz says J-Serve’s emergence reflects a recognition among Jews that community service may be a draw for young Jews not otherwise engaged in Jewish activity.
“In the long run, my view is that the trick to getting unaffiliated Jews to plug into Jewish activity is to make it consonant with what’s happening in the wider culture and society,” he says. “I believe that in three to five years’ time, this is going to be the biggest thing in the Jewish community.”
The Jewish world has been slightly behind the curve as far as general service programming is concerned, some J-Serve organizers say.
“The general community has been doing much more in the way of universal services than the Jewish community has been doing,” says Simha Rosenberg, executive director of the Jewish Coalition for Service. “In some ways we’re catching up.”
Jews were engaged in civil issues “at other points in the American Jewish experience,” she says, but a “focus on Israel and Jewish continuity may have slowed Jewish involvement in this sort of thing.”
Nevertheless, Rosenberg says, “I think that this is something that is growing in Jewish life, and I see it as a really positive trend.”
Jewish youth groups have participated independently in the national/global youth service day, but not under the aegis of any national Jewish organization.
As part of J-Serve, among other projects, teen volunteers in Miami created a luau-themed picnic for underprivileged kids; a group of young Jews in Irvine collected leavened breads during Passover and distributed them to local homeless people; teens in Detroit helped seniors in assisted-living and nursing facilities; and children in Overland Park, Kan., made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for a local shelter.
Area organizing groups in each city were urged to make sure that some component of the day linked the activities to Judaism.
The Jewish component is essential, Schwarz says.
“We have a vested interest in getting people to put a Jewish language on [the volunteer work]. To understand that the activity that they’re engaged in” has been going on among Jews for centuries, Schwarz says. “What we’ve learned big time here at Panim is that if you don’t give it language and labeling, people don’t get it.”