Meet Our New Grantees

Youth & Young Adults

All-Night Shavuot, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
Reboot
Awarded $250,000 over two years for general support

Several years ago, the Righteous Persons Foundation partnered with the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies to develop Reboot, a project to encourage Jews in their twenties and thirties to look at the role of identity, community and meaning in their lives. What started as an experiment has since become a successful program, igniting a growing group of young Jews to feel positive, even enthusiastic, about their Jewish identities. The signature activity of the program is the annual Reboot Summit, to which close to 300 young writers, filmmakers, musicians, global activists and nonprofit leaders have attended. While they come to this weekend disconnected from the traditional community, they leave having had a profound experience and with a desire to continue these conversations with others, both in their home communities and nationwide.

Inspired by their experience at the Summit, participants have gone on to create ways for others to engage. A group of Rebooters recently organized an all-night Shavuot program at the new Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. The event drew over 3,000 young people, with another 1,000 turned away for lack of space. One long-time funder in the city called it the "biggest and best thing to happen to Jews in San Francisco." Other Reboot participants have launched the literary magazine Guilt and Pleasure; begun an archival Jewish record label (which has been featured in Rolling Stone, NPR, etc); started Jewish-related salons in cities across North America; created Jewish-related films (screened at Sundance, the Tribeca Film Festival, etc.); and much much more.

National Yiddish Book Center
Awarded $80,000 over two years to be matched by their membership for a Jewish Cultural Fellowship Program

Since 1980, the National Yiddish Book Center has saved nearly 1.5 million Yiddish books, welcomed hundreds of thousand of visitors to their building in Amherst, and created programming and recordings to open these books (which they see as windows into a lost culture) to a wider, non Yiddish speaking world. To reach a new generation, the Center is expanding its annual summer internship for college students by creating a Jewish Cultural Fellowship where students serve as "Jewish cultural ambassadors" at their respective campuses. Specifically, each student selected will receive training and a stipend to create public programs that explore modern Jewish and Yiddish traditions through language, literature and culture. Over time, the Center hopes to grow the program, thus creating a network of Jewish cultural activists who can help a newer generation celebrate and continue its heritage.

Challah for Hunger
Hazon - Challah for Hunger
Awarded $60,000 over two years for capacity-building

In 2004, Eli Winkelman, a college sophomore, began baking challah from her mother’s recipe Friday afternoons. Seeing how many students suddenly wanted the bread, Eli decided to bake for a good cause, and convinced fellow students to bake loaves each week to raise money for hunger relief and genocide intervention. Soon the program (which she called "Challah for Hunger") was picked up by students at other campuses around the country Within a couple of years, these schools had raised $55,000 for hunger programs, encouraged hundreds of students to write letters to public officials and exposed thousands of students to the Jewish value and notion of tikkun olam and Shabbat.

Given this success (Bill Clinton included Eli in his book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World), Winkelman is now working to expand the project to college campuses nationwide. To do so, she paired up with Hazon, a Jewish grassroots organization that works on food and environmental issues.

JDUB event
JDub Records
Awarded $80,000 over two years for capacity-building

Seeing the influence of music on their peers, two NYU students launched JDUB records in 2002 as a way to cultivate new Jewish music and engage young people in an exploration of their heritage. Since then, JDUB has evolved into a recognized nonprofit record company that has introduced proud Jewish voices into mainstream culture (they discovered Matisyahu). In addition, JDUB launches community events and festivals, drawing more than 300,000 people in 100 cities worldwide, as a way to connect young adults to Jewish culture. Because JDUB is based on the medium of music, they create common, positive, and non-threatening experience for Jews of all backgrounds.