| LOS ALTOS, Calif., April 3 (JTA) — Anyone who walked
into Albertsons here on Sunday would have run right into Margie
Pomerantz’s Passover table.
There she sat, next to the kosher food display right inside the
supermarket’s front entrance. A big handwritten sign reading
“Passover in the Aisles” hung down from her table, on which lay
piles of Passover recipe books, Haggadahs and other holiday
resources.
Pomerantz
and her fellow volunteers from Congregation Beth David, a nearby
Conservative synagogue, were out looking for Jews. In a supermarket.
Unaffiliated Jews, if possible, but they weren’t being picky.
They handed out information and collected names. Someone from the
synagogue will call later with an invitation to a Shabbat service or
other Jewish program.
Scenes like this, with a non-aggressive method of doing outreach,
are being repeated across the United States this week and next, in
dozens of communities.
It’s all part of Passover in the Aisles, a pre-holiday initiative
conceived of by the Jewish Outreach Institute.
Some Jewish groups have been doing this kind of outreach for a
decade or more, but the biggest push seems to have come in the past
three to five years.
No one has a ready explanation for that timing, but synagogues,
JCCs and federations who have developed such outreach programs all
say they’ve noticed the growing trend.
It is based on the idea of “public space Judaism” — taking
programs out to where people are instead of waiting for them to walk
into a synagogue or JCC.
“If we wait for people to come to programs within the four walls
of our communal institutions, we’ll be waiting a long time,” says
Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach
Institute, which provides guidance for such programs. “This is an
attempt to bring Judaism to where people are.”
Passover is a particularly good time for this kind of outreach,
Olitzky says, both because it is one of the most widely celebrated
holidays among all Jews, even the unaffiliated, and because it
requires people to go to the grocery store to buy matzah and other
Passover products.
Olitzky’s group urges synagogues, federations and other Jewish
groups to set up temporary shop in grocery stores, offering food
samples, holiday information and friendly advice to Jewish shoppers.
Volunteers are urged to be welcoming, but to avoid asking questions
that might be seen as too private.
Beth David’s assistant rabbi, Aaron Schonbrun, went to a Jewish
Outreach Institute conference last year and says he was astounded at
the concept of liberal Jews doing this kind of outreach. It wasn’t
what he learned in rabbinical seminary.
“We learned at the conference that you can’t expect people to
just write that check to the federation, especially not my
generation,” says the 29-year-old rabbi. “We talked about how to
engage Jews in Judaism, not Reform or Conservative or Orthodox, but
Judaism.”
This is the second year Beth David has done Passover in the
Aisles. By 3 p.m. on Sunday, after three hours in the store, there
are just nine cards filled out at the Los Altos Albertsons, an hour
south of San Francisco. But the volunteers have talked to dozens of
shoppers.
“People are reluctant to walk up to a table,” Pomerantz admits,
noting the shoppers who warily eye the volunteers before grabbing
their Passover items and hurrying past. “But those who come over are
very appreciative of what we’re doing.”
One young woman who did fill out a card was Galit Azulay, newly
arrived from Israel with her husband, who is studying for his
doctorate in the area.
“We’re here to buy food for the seder,” she says, adding that the
couple aren’t affiliated and don’t plan to be. She didn’t pick up
any of the information, but entered the raffle for a seder plate.
Carol Greenberg also stopped by the table. A member of a local
Reform congregation, she congratulated the Beth David volunteers on
their outreach efforts. “I’m so excited to see you here,” she
exclaims. Greenberg picked up a copy of their recipe book.
“I find that congregations’ recipes are much better than books,”
she says. She also took one of the children’s Haggadahs, which she
plans to give to her newborn niece. “It’ll be a nice gift from her
aunt, her first Haggadah.”
Store manager Aide Garcia says she couldn’t be happier to host
the event. “It increases our business a lot,” she confides. “It’s a
way to promote our kosher food.”
The JCC in Columbus, Ohio did its first Passover outreach in a
Wild Oats supermarket in 2003. They chose a new neighborhood in the
northwest part of the city, an area where young, professional Jews
have been moving, to improve their chances of reaching the
unaffiliated.
“In the core community, we have an affiliation rate of 90
percent, versus 20 percent in the northwest, where most of the
growth is happening,” says Lindsay Folkerth, outreach director for
the JCC’s J-Link project. J-Link is a community outreach program
created two years ago by the local federation following a
demographic study of the Columbus Jewish community by JOI.
The program, based on the JOI model, is called “A Taste of
Judaism,” and in addition to the raffle and informational booklets,
volunteers offer samplings of charoset and chocolate macaroons.
In its three years of outreach programs at Passover and Chanukah,
for which J-Link volunteers go to toy and pet stores, Folkerth
estimates they’ve collected 1,000 names of local unaffiliated Jews.
Those who want to be contacted are called, and many have
subsequently showed up at other synagogue or JCC events. A survey
last year found that 90 percent “feel more connected to the Jewish
community because of J-Link,” she reports.
Folkerth says that one woman who had a Jewish father but was not
raised Jewish came up to volunteers at a Passover table and related
how her father gave her a Star of David necklace on his deathbed,
urging her not to forget her heritage.
“She told us she’d always felt uncomfortable in synagogue,”
Folkerth says. The woman spent a long time talking to the
volunteers, and has since become “very involved” in the Jewish
community. That outreach table gave her the road in she needed,
Fokerth believes.
Seattle Rabbi Dov Gartenberg says his congregants “thought it was
a little strange” when he set up a Passover outreach table in a
local supermarket more than 10 years ago. That was before he heard
about the Jewish Outreach Institute program.
He now runs food booths at a Whole Foods store before Passover
and Rosh Hashanah, and has teamed up with a popular local chef to
offer tastes of Jewish holiday foods. This month they’re offering a
different charoset each week, along with recipes.
Gartenberg uses the tastings as a teaching opportunity. “As they
taste, I say, this is what this food symbolizes, and it becomes a
basis for conversation.”
Gartenberg gets a lot of non-Jews at his booths, some of them
dating or married to Jews, others who are just curious. He sees that
as an important part of his outreach.
“Not only are we reaching out and touching Jews, we’re sharing
good will with the non-Jews who come up,” he says.
SAJES, a central agency for Jewish education on Long Island, did
its first street outreach 10 years ago before Sukkot. They set up a
sukkah-building demonstration in front of a Home Depot.
“It attracted everyone, from people who had never built a sukkah,
to those who build one every year,” says outreach director Shellie
Dickstein. “I thought, we’re on to something.”
After that, SAJES created a task force to look at how to do this
kind of outreach before every Jewish holiday. They especially wanted
to reach intermarried families “to send the message that we’re
welcoming, we want to meet you,” she says.
With an initial grant from the Jewish Outreach Institute,
Dickstein’s group created the “Celebrations” outreach model. They
run a Passover Extravaganza, taking over an entire shopping mall and
holding simultaneous events in several stores
Some people who run Passover outreach programs say their goal
isn’t to collect potential members. Roberta Matz, outreach
coordinator at the Center for Jewish Life and Learning of the Jewish
Federation of Greater Philadelphia, says most people don’t like to
give out their names in such venues.
Passover in the Aisles is valuable, she says, “for putting a face
to the community,” letting Jewish — and non-Jewish-shoppers — see
that the local Jewish community is warm and welcoming. | 
