Lindsey Silken and I recently attended TribeFest which is a conference of the Jewish Federations of North America. It was an entertaining, interactive and educational celebration that drew around 1,500 Jewish young adults (ages 22-45) from across North America to the city of New Orleans. Some of the attendees are professionals at Federations, synagogues, Jewish Community Centers and other Jewish organizations and some are volunteer leaders or involved as young adults in the Jewish community. InterfaithFamily had the pleasure of co-leading two sessions.

Our first session was lead with HIAS. HIAS is an international Jewish non-profit that protects refugees. I am proud that the Jewish community keeps its ancient mandate to protect the vulnerable and the stranger in our midst in this way.

Why were IFF and HIAS paired to run a session? We share the mission of being welcoming and we spoke about what it means to welcome. Whether welcoming interfaith families to Jewish life or helping those fleeing persecution to get acclimated as our neighbors, we need to grapple with insider/outsider mentality, what it means to lower barriers to participation and how to quell assumptions we make about others.

Our second session involved several other organizations including JFNA and the LA Federation, Big Tent Judaism and Keshet, all working, again, to widen the doors of entry to Jewish life for the diverse range of people who may be interested. In the break-out part of the session, we lead a group which went deeper into the conversation of how to be welcoming. What does an organization have to do to be welcoming? Is there a standard formula that can be instituted across the board in Jewish life to yield welcoming success?

The people who joined our group said that in each denomination and in each circle of Jewish life, the institution would have to figure out what criteria they could uphold that would signal the most welcoming culture and climate they could. For some synagogues which are largely interfaith communities, the only way to truly be welcoming may be to have clergy available to officiate and even co-officiate weddings. If there are many in the community who aren’t Jewish who are actively invested in supporting a Jewish partner or raising children with Judaism, it may be that the only way to be truly welcoming is to celebrate them when ushering in Shabbat by lighting the candles, for example (a ritual traditionally reserved for Jews because of the language of “being commanded”). In congregations made up of a community cognizant of Jewish law, there would be other examples of being inclusive and welcoming that they would want to specifically enumerate and articulate. (We’ll share more specifics of what we came up with in a future blog post!)

It’s not enough to say that a congregation is welcoming. The community has to be able to describe what welcoming means to them. When you think about how you welcome people to your home, you know what you do, how you do it, how you feel doing it, how hopefully your guest feels and what you show and teach your children about graciousness. And a congregational family should know how they welcome both newcomers and regulars to the building, to classes and to gatherings.

Although we could scarcely agree on which things a congregation could or should do to be welcoming, everyone thought that one action that indicated “welcome” was that any couple—interfaith couples included—should be greeted with “mazel tov” when they announce their engagement.

We also had an interesting conversation about the word “inclusive.” What does it mean to include people in the life of the synagogue? By definition, does that act change the nature of the situation that existed before the person was included? Do we include people by having them join what we are doing or does adding someone to the mix necessitate being flexible and dynamic?

There were few easy answers but lots of good questions and discussion. The attendees care about their Jewish lives and the future of Judaism in America. It could have been because we were in New Orleans, but there was a palpable energy and harmony to the buzz of voices.