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The Jewish Emergent Network is a collaborative community comprised of leaders from seven path-breaking Jewish organizations across the United States.

These seven participating organizations do not represent any one denomination or set of religious practices. What they share is:

-a devotion to revitalizing the field of Jewish engagement

-a commitment to approaches both traditionally rooted and creative

-a demonstrated success in attracting unaffiliated and disengaged Jews to a meaningful Jewish practice

-a willingness to operate outside of traditional institutional models and rethinking basic assumptions about US Jewish communities with regard to prayer, membership models, staff structures, the religious/cultural divide, and physical space

The Network launched its first major project, a Rabbinic Fellowship, in 2016, placing select, early-career rabbis into each of the seven participating Network organizations for a two-year period to train them to take on the challenges and realities of 21st-century Jewish life in America.

IKAR’s partners in the Jewish Emergent Network are: Kavana in Seattle, The Kitchen in San Francisco, Mishkan in Chicago, Sixth & I in Washington, D.C., and Lab/Shul and Romemu in New York.

“Denial of death is actually a denial of life, because confronting death, rather than hiding from it, can imbue our lives with meaning and purpose and can remind us of the eternal power of love.” — Rabbi Brous, In the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Two years ago, Rabbi Brous and Death Over Dinner founder Michael Hebb discovered their deep, shared interest in creating space for people to have real and rich conversations about death. They both recognized that these conversations not only better prepare us to approach life’s most challenging moments, but also help us articulate and affirm who we are and what we care about.

So we started working with a team of rabbis, theologians and medical and wellness experts to create Death Over Dinner Jewish Edition. This joint program of IKAR and Reboot builds on Hebb’s original Death Over Dinner idea to help open up conversations about end of life wishes, funerals, mourning, the soul, and the afterlife through a Jewish lens and over a good meal.

Through our slate of programming and guest speakers, we’re providing the community with a number of opportunities to go deeper on this topic – and also to host dinners in their homes. Won’t you visit the site and follow the steps to design a dinner for 5-10 friends or family? We’ll hold your hand every step of the way to help you lead a meaningful conversation over the meal. Promise.

Together, let’s start to break the social taboo around death, dying and living.

*DoD Jewish Edition was created in partnership with Reboot and is supported by a generous grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.