JEWS FOR NJ.ORG

This is a hard time for the Jewish community, both at home and out in the larger world.

The October 7 attacks have unleashed torrents of antisemitism in a way that makes no logical sense, but there is no logic to hatred.

Some parts of the Jewish community are at loggerheads with other parts, genuinely unable to believe each other’s politics or general worldview.

And it’s gone beyond vitriol on social media, with a young couple shot dead in Washington and marchers devoting an hour on a Sunday to remembering the hostages incinerated by Molotov cocktail in Boulder.

The community’s having to think about security and look around corners in ways that are new to most of us.

But oddly — or no, maybe intuitively — there are other, opposite things going on at the same time.

The community is coming together. Jews who hadn’t given it much thought are discovering pride in that identity, being strengthened by it, and strengthening each other. Creativity, light, and joy are being unearthed.

The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey has launched a new project to help focus and nurture the community as it grows. Jews For NJ’s goal is to help local Jews find each other, find what they need, and maybe find new meaning and purpose in Jewish life.

It’s being introduced with a video that shows Jews all around North Jersey — of all ages, life stages, and visible levels of observance, in easily recognizable places — looking happy, engaged, and generally glad to be who they are and where they are.

That video is not only a glossy introduction to Jews For NJ but also an accurate view of the community.

“Jews For NJ is about the people in our community engaging in Jewish life on a level that makes them comfortable,” the federation’s CEO, Jason Shames, said. “I believe that having access to information and services and being part of a collective is the best way to doing that. We want people to feel good, to feel connected, and to feel part of the Jewish community. And Jews For NJ is far more, far broader, than just federation, or any agency.”

It’s hard to define Jewishness. The question of who is a Jew has raged around the Jewish world in general, and in Israel in particular, where the answer to that question has legal implications, for generations. That means that the question of how many Jews there are in Bergen and Hudson counties doesn’t have any definitive answer. But there are about 125,000 people who live in self-described Jewish households in the two-county area, Mr. Shames said, and about 609,000 of them in the state.

That’s a lot of Jews in a pretty small area. Many of them already are deeply rooted in the community, but others flutter around its edges.

He has been able to feel the change in community even before Jews For NJ, Mr. Shames said. Last weekend he went to a Run For Their Lives rally in Tenafly. Run For Their Lives is a worldwide effort to remind people that there still are hostages captured in Israel who are languishing in Gaza. It was at a Run For Their Lives gathering in Boulder, Colorado, the week before where a would-be assassin threw flames that did serious harm, while yelling “Free Palestine.”

There were maybe 100 people at the rally in Tenafly, early in the morning; that’s many more than had come out before the attack.

Jews For NJ offers information that draws people in. “It’s access to the Jewish community,” Mr. Shames said. “It’s Jewish education but not just Jewish education, Zionism but not just Zionism. If a senior is interested in getting kosher meals, they can. It’s a whole range of things like that. It’s opportunities, from life to death, to engage in the Jewish community.

“Everybody has to find what they need and what they want. We’re offering a massive campaign that doesn’t have a specific agenda, and is about information and access to information and programming.

“When people start to attend more events in the community, and feel more emotionally more connected, we’ve done our job.”

Because the project’s core is online, “we’ll be able to measure what we’re doing,” Mr. Shames said. The federation did surveys and learned about the community in 2014 and 2021, and that information proved invaluable. “In five to seven years, we’ll be able to see where the numbers are,” he said.

“We want to see more kids in day school, more kids in Jewish camps; more seniors in senior programming, more people involved in public advocacy.”

But there’s no need to wait that long. Jews For NJ is launching as a work in progress; as people’s needs and desires come clear, the project, by design, will evolve to meet them.

“We don’t want people entering the system when there’s a crisis,” Mr. Shames continued; a crisis with seniors needing healthcare or adolescents needing mental health care or families needing food, or even if another weather disaster like Hurricane Sandy destroys roads and houses and cars and livelihoods. “This is a much better way of doing it, if people are on the radar already, working with our agencies. It makes it easier to help them,” he said.

“As a federation executive, I want to make sure that every Jew feels like they’re a part of something. And now, post October 7, this is our moment. This is when we should be doing something. Our leadership sees it. Our staff sees it. I see it. This is our moment.”

Daniel Herz is the president of the federation. As he talked about Jews For NJ, he repeated something he’d said in an interview with the Standard soon after he took office last year. “My number one objective is to bring the community together. If I can sum up all of what we’re doing with Jews For NJ, it’s that we’re bringing the community together.”

He talked about the meeting that the federation convened at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly last October to commemorate the first anniversary of the atrocities of October 7. “We were in partnership with the Kaplen JCC, the Israel-America Commission, the New Jersey Board of Rabbis, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County, and the leaders of other Jewish organizations. I believe that there were over 100 organizations.

“And we had somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 people together there.”

It was an evening when metaphor became fact. All those thousands of people gathered under one huge tent. It was a literal big tent, big enough for everyone who wanted to be covered by it.

“It was emblematic of what we’re doing,” Mr. Herz said. “We have a large tent, and our purpose is to unite our community, all of it, Israelis and Americans, the religious and the unaffiliated. We all came together as one.

“And our voices when we speak together, our community when we stand together, is so much stronger. I believe that we can do anything when we’re united as a community.”

It’s important to realize that Jews For NJ is not a defensive organization, Mr. Herz added, even though the time we are living through is horrible. “This is an outreaching, not a withdrawing,” he said.

“We’re not just responding to rising antisemitism. We are proactively shaping what comes next. Over and over again, people ask, ‘What can I do?’ ‘What can we do?’ There’s so much coming at us. But what we can do is come together.

“By coming together, we strengthen our impact, and we also strengthen our ability to create opportunities.

“This is an opportunity for people who are engaged and people who have been less engaged to come together, to have a strong voice and also to find joy and laughter and peace and hope.”

Laura Freeman is the federation’s managing director of marketing and communications. She’s spearheaded the project’s creation, working closely with lay and professional leaders and an outside company to come up with the website that will welcome people into the project.

In part, Jews For NJ “is a digital marketing campaign intended to make people say, ‘I want to be part of it,’” Ms. Freeman said. “It’s about helping them recommit to being proud, being strong, and being engaged.”

Although the federation is creating it, it’s not a federation project, she said. The goal is not to raise money for federation, or to increase its members. Instead, it’s to help the community of which the federation is a vital part to flourish.

It will use some Yiddish words and concepts, Ms. Freeman said; after doing some surveys, she knows which words everyone knows, and can connect to, and which words some people don’t know, and might find offputting.

The campaign’s marketing materials are visually recognizable; they’re cartoon-y line drawings, simple, accessible, and appealing. “More Mitzvas, Less Mishegas,” one says. “Join Jersey’s Biggest Mishpocha,” another urges. The tone is light and approachable.

“Jews For NJ will help people connect,” Ms. Freeman said. “It could be as simple as I need resources for my parents, or I want to volunteer somewhere, or I want to join a synagogue but want help in figuring out which one. Or I want to know which day school is right for my child.

“These connections have nothing to do with the federation,” she said. Instead, they’re about the broader community.

“Jews For NJ wants to meet people where they are and provide them with an on-ramp for more engagement. But it is not prescribing what that engagement will look like.

“The worst thing we could do as a community is to stop being publicly Jewish, because we’re afraid. This is saying that we are still here, we are loud and proud and we are not going anywhere.”

Marcy Cohen of Englewood and Miri Lipsky of Tenafly are both on the federation’s board of directors, and both are marketing professionals.

“Marcy and I were brought in to work in conjunction with Dan and Laura and Jason,” Ms. Lipsky said. “We were brought in for our creativity and expertise, and also because we do a lot of outreach and community building in our jobs, and in our lives.

“And there’s also the passion that we bring to this project. Building community is very important to me.

“We view this as an umbrella campaign under which we can unite the Jewish community of Bergen County. We were tasked with this overarching task.

“This is both the opportunity and the challenge of Jews For NJ. It is meant to be an overarching campaign that includes the entire Jewish community.

“This is something that we’d always hoped to do, but then after October 7, when the community felt so disconnected, and everyone was doing such a good job of moving things forward in their own silos, that our view was that we could unite everyone,” Ms. Lipsky said.

“They could break down the silos — the shuls and schools and agencies — that all are doing similar work, and instead they could do it together.”

Like Mr. Herz, Ms. Lipsky was struck by the literal big tent the community provided on October 7, 2024, at the commemoration. “It was a partnership effort,” she said. “It showed the depth and the breadth of the community.” Like that evening’s program, Jews For NJ “is spearheaded and run overall by federation, but the vision of the entire community coming together under that one tent, with different fundamental beliefs but for the same goal — that’s ultimately what this campaign is about.

“The core is connection,” she said.

“This effort is really about bringing the larger northern New Jersey community together, at this time, post October 7, when so many people are feeling scared and fragmented,” Ms. Cohen said. “We just want an opportunity to bring people together.

“We know that antisemitism is on the rise in America, and we’re all thinking about our brothers and sisters in Israel. When we have the opportunity to come together in New Jersey, we all feel that we are having an impact.”

Ms. Cohen also was moved by the October 7 commemoration. “It was an incredible show of support from people of all different denominations, from the shuls, from the shuls, from the community,” she said.

“And more recently, just a few weeks ago, I went to the celebration about Edan Alexander’s release in Tenafly.” (Mr. Alexander, who grew up in Tenafly and whose parents and siblings live there still, was the last of the Israeli-American hostages in Gaza to be released. He was held captive there for 583 days; he was 19 when he was captured and 21 when he was set free.)

“You felt that you were part of something bigger,” Ms. Cohen said. “It was so emotional. Everyone is looking for the opportunity to connect with each other. To feel stronger. Because we are stronger together, as one community.”

The Jews For NJ campaign “is going to be phased in, and this first phase is awareness,” she explained. “It’s to raise awareness of our desire to bring the community together. That includes everyone, of every generation, in every neighborhood. No matter where you are in northern New Jersey, we want you to feel that you can connect to this initiatve.”

More of the campaign will be rolled out in the fall and summer, she continued; it will be based on the interests of the people who are involved.

Learn more about it at jewsfornj.org.