Who's Who in Outreach : Rachel Cowan
Long before I made outreach to interfaith families and
unaffiliated Jew a professional calling, it was a personal
quest. I was raised a Unitarian in Wellesley, Massachusetts,
a descenedant of the Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower.
Little did I imagine when I married Paul Cowan in July
of 1965, that thirty years later I would be a Reform rabbis
and an outreach activist, working for the Nathan Cummings
Foundation as director of Jewish Programs. Yet such are
the vagaries of American and Jewish history.
The birth of our children, coupled with my beleif
in the importance of grounding them in their Jewish
heritage and Paul's emerging interest in his own long
dormant Jewish identity awakened in me a desire to find
my spiritual home in the midst of the Jewish people.
The evolution of our nuclear family led me to convert
to Judaism fifteen years into our marriage. It also
led me to recognize the often circuitious ways that
interfaith families find their way into the Jewish community.
Unfortunately, the Jewish community often fails to
appreciate the time many interfaith families need to
make that complex journey. I have devoted much of my
time and energy in the last ten years to developing
programs of outreach, training outreach professionals,
and helping to support the work of such pioneering organizations
as JOI, in the hope that future generations of interfaith
families will find the path to Jewish community better
lit and better paved than Paul and I did.
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