by Sharoni Sibony
When JCC Association of North America was preparing to launch its campaign, Eight Guiding Principles for Accessibility and Inclusion, I was commissioned to illustrate the principles—a huge honor!
They selected me, in part, because of a series of works on paper I had done a year earlier for JDAAIM at my local JCC, a series I called “My Body’s Keeper,” which wove together the visual vocabularies of communal Jewish prayer and my own objects of pain management for fibromyalgia, a condition I’ve been living with since my late teens. In that project, I considered how we embody our spiritual lives, how illness affects our relationship to community and belonging, and how our communal spaces can be more spiritually centering places of recursive healing, strength, and support.
The illustrations for the Eight Guiding Principles were an opportunity for me to elaborate on these questions. I had the chance, through Sierra Weiss, JCC Association’s access and inclusion specialist, and Liviya Mendelsohn, the organization’s consultant on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, to attend a series of webinars launched during JDAAIM 2022 in which staff from different JCCs presented strategies they were implementing to make their JCCs more accessible and inclusive. I also consulted with members of JCC communities across North America, hearing directly from people with disabilities and chronic illnesses about their own interactions with JCCs. In addition to my own reading and research, this consultation fed into my illustration work in all kinds of subtle ways.
I became aware of the wide range of amazing initiatives at different JCCs that create access points for people who historically have been excluded and underrepresented in communal spaces. I learned, for example, about JCCs that host wheelchair basketball and chair yoga; add closed captioning, video description, and/or ASL interpreters to their lectures and film programs; offer a cooling sprinkler at the end of each pool lane so folks with low vision or blindness will sense the drop in temperature and know they’re coming to the end of the lane; and how disability justice education is finding a home in early childhood education settings.
Some of these initiatives made their way into the illustration for Negeshut/Accessibility, in which a young man with cerebral palsy—who himself works at a JCC—reaches his hand out across the page to welcome us into a vibrant JCC full of such opportunities. As a former staff member at my local JCC, I was enormously proud to learn of all these projects that are creating opportunities for people to engage intellectually, athletically, educationally, and spiritually in the fullness of what a JCC can offer.
For JDAAIM 2025, my JCC, Toronto’s Miles Nadal JCC, showcased the Eight Guiding Principles and these images in the Jacobs Gallery. The exhibition includes a white board and markers, and every week we put up a different question for community participation—questions such as: “What does CARE mean to you?” and “What does ACCESS mean to you?” and, by writing their answers on the board, people call our attention to everything from the size of text on signs to the love and acceptance they seek in community.
To complement the exhibition, I’ve been running “Access to Art” workshops on Sunday afternoons throughout February that explore different ways to center the experiences of disability and illness through visual arts. Instead of paintbrushes, we’ve used canes, fidget toys, foam rollers, pill bottles, and other objects connected to our disabilities and illnesses as mark-making tools, and we’ve made a vibrant abstract painting that will hang in the gallery for the last week of JDAAIM. We’ve also converted pill bottles, syringes, tensor bandages, and other materials into “caregiver puppets” to represent the kind of support we want to receive and give.
The JCC Movement does a fabulous job bringing together the best work from the field and allowing staff to share their successes and challenges, while also inviting individuals from beyond the movement to add guidance, depth, and possibility to our conversations. The Eight Guiding Principles will continue to serve as a goalpost for staff across North America, inspiring us to stretch the bounds of inclusion in ever-expanding ways.
Sharoni Sibony is a Toronto-based community weaver and organizer, artist, and educator across multiple disciplines and numerous organizations. In February 2025, her art exhibition, “Holey Wholly Holy,” was on display at the Miles Nadal JCC in Toronto.
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