Journeys:
Adult Jews Living and Learning

Journeys: Adult Jews Living and Learning is the Mandel Center for Jewish Education’s new program designed to strengthen adult Jewish engagement and identity. Through Journeys, Jewish adults will engage in compelling, flexible, and integrated ways of learning that bolster and deepen their sense of Jewish pride and belonging.

Journeys programs are designed to fit within the variety of programmatic offerings and settings available to JCCs and will provide participants with a community of Journeyers who are each exploring their Jewish identity in their own way. It will offer this community the opportunity to gain a greater appreciation of Judaism’s culture, traditions, and sacred wisdom. Ultimately, it will deepen their engagement with Jewish life in our JCCs and in the Jewish community at large.

Journeys’ first program unit, A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and You, is an interactive program on food that invites participants to consider how the acts of eating and drinking are not only physical activities, but also ones with profound personal, communal and cultural meanings. Looking at “Bread”, “Wine” and the experience of eating together (“You”) through multi-sensory and multi-media lenses, Journeyers will experience food in new ways, integrating doing and pleasure with learning and sharing.
In the winter and spring of 2008, A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and You will be piloted at five JCCs across the United States: 1. the Riverdale YM-YWHA (NY), 2. the JCC of Houston (TX), 3. the Levite JCC of Birmingham (AL), 4. the Valley of the Sun JCC of Scottsdale (AR), and 5. the Harry and Rose Samson Family JCC of Milwaukee (WI).

A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and You is the first in a series of Journeys programs. Upcoming programs may include subjects such as laughter, leisure, money and love.