It´s two days before Passover, and music teacher Sivan Vigder sits on a leather couch in one of the classrooms at the Jewish Community Center on Amsterdam Avenue. It’s time to start Hashirim Shelanu (“Our Songs”), the JCC’s Hebrew music class for toddlers, but so far only two tiny students have arrived—sisters, accompanied by their nanny.
Vigder shrugs, unconcerned. “Israelis are late always,” he says. Sure enough, more toddlers and caregivers begin to trickle in, and Vigder and his accompanist pull out their respective instruments—a guitar and a giant bass. What follow are 45 minutes of Hebrew songs, from a welcome song to the alphabet (“Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet…”) to Hebrew versions of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” and the “Hokey Pokey.” Vigder plays plenty of Passover favorites, too, including an energetic rendition of “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
Even during this quiet holiday week, the 11 floors of the JCC in Manhattan are far from empty. On the sixth floor, swimmers do laps and enjoy the view through the glass windows surrounding the pool, and on the seventh floor, women play mahjong in a multi-purpose room featuring a state-of-the-art media center (where, just a few months ago, community members of all ages gathered to watch the Presidential Inauguration). There’s an Asian cooking class going on in a classroom on one of the basement floors, while all the way upstairs, nursery schoolers enjoy recess on the rooftop playground.
With a 96-page catalog of classes and a 10,000-strong community of Upper West Side families that frequent its lobby, elevators, classrooms, and studios, the JCC appears far too established to be only eight years old. And it’s this thriving community that inspires the center’s expansive family programming.
“Our mission is to reach
a broad constituency of families,” Heather Brown, director of young
family programs, says. “We’re here to build community, and our classes
really are built around that vision. We’re trying to capture everyone
where they’re at, and to engage them in other activities that they might
not normally do.” The center offers young families, Jewish and
non-Jewish alike, everything from cooking to arts to swimming to
gymnastics to parenting classes. The JCC also runs the The Saul and
Carole Zabar Nursery School—which serves 180 children ages 2-5 years—and
two pre-nursery programs, “Not Quite Nursery” and “Magic Clubhouse.”
There are even seminars for parents on navigating the city’s preschool
admissions process, as well as regular community events like Family
Shabbat Dinners on Fridays. And the programs keep evolving, since staff
members have always encouraged parents to let them know if they have a
need the center can meet. “From 1990 until our doors opened in 2001, our
primary job was to listen to all kinds of people tell us their dreams
for a Jewish Community Center and to share with them our vision for an
inclusive center built on Jewish values in the broadest sense,” says
Rabbi Joy Levitt, the JCC’s executive director (who was recently
featured on Newsweek’s “Hottest Rabbis” list). “Everything we do is
because someone, somewhere, asked us to do it.” In fact, the JCC’s
special needs program evolved out of just such a circumstance.
“When
a group of parents of special needs children told us they needed
babysitting help at night, we created a training program for teens to
learn to care for children on the autistic spectrum. We give their names
to parents after they complete the training,” Levitt says. Today, this
training program continues, along with extensive in-house programming
for families of individuals with special needs. Melissa Lader, director
of school-aged special needs programs, works to enable every special
needs child and family member to participate fully in community life—a
job that requires an all-encompassing definition of the special needs
buzzword “inclusion.”
“Inclusion is a great thing, and one way
to look at it is ‘mainstreaming’ children [including kids with special
needs in mainstream classrooms], but we also recognize the need for
special needs-specific classes,” Lader says, adding that parents choose
which type of class is best for their child.
Suzanne Peters,
whose 12-year old son, Jack, has special needs, says the JCC’s
accommodating programming and accessibility has made it her family’s
“home away from home.” “Family events can be challenging in other
places, whether it’s physical accessibility or the child has odd
behaviors, and I think the biggest issue that most special needs
families face is isolation,” Peters says. “Here, you know that you’re
welcome.”
Peters and her husband, Tim, are both members of
parent support groups at the JCC. Their younger son, six-year-old Drew,
attends a class for siblings of children with special needs.
Dava
Schub, associate executive director of programming, says that what
makes the JCC’s passion for serving all types of people—old and young,
typically developing and those with special needs, privileged and
underserved—is, in fact, its distinctive identity as a Jewish Community
Center.
“One of our goals is to lay down multiple paths into
Jewish life, and we get all types of people through our doors,” Schub
says. “We have three letters in our name, and they all hold real weight.
We are deeply and meaningfully ‘Jewish,’ we are a ‘Center’ of a lot of
stuff both Jewish and not, and ‘Community’ is our middle name. We’re
here for both the Jewish community and to enrich the NYC community at
large.”
The center’s next community enrichment project is a
large-scale one. As part of an environmental fellowship of Jewish
organizations throughout the city, the JCC recently held a “charrette,”
or design workshop, with a sustainable design firm to think about how
the center can reduce its carbon footprint.
“I hope that we
always see ourselves as a place that leads by example,” Schub says. “We
can work hard to reduce our carbon footprint, but as a place that
welcomes in thousands of people every day, how can we think about
inspiring them to do the same? That educational impact beyond our doors
is really important to us.” Also included in the center’s mission is a
commitment to supporting families through difficult times—and given the
current economy, Schub says, all of the staff members are taking a fresh
look at what it means to “be there” for others.
“Right now, we
are very conscious of the need to be with our community, even if that
just means that the person they see as they walk in the door understands
that they could have had a really tough day,” she says. “That’s what we
are as a community center—a place that serves people at all ages and
stages of life, and embraces them regardless of their challenges, and we
know that being an inclusive community is always an evolving process.
We’re always trying to be better at that.”%uFFFD
