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RAJE Rabbi Josh Livingstone a kiruv organization at Northwestern University and then went on to found RAJE Chicago. I now help run RAJE Maryland together with Rabbi Gavriel Horan, who started RAJE in Baltimore around the same time I moved here with my family a few years ago.
How did you get into kiruv? I said to myself, if God really exists, and the Torah is really true, I have to help others learn about it! How can I sit back and keep it to myself when the majority of our brethren are almost completely disconnected? If we really believe that the Jewish people are a family, how can we sit comfortably by as our brothers and sisters are spiritually dying? I personally was almost lost to assimilation. Almost all of the friends that I grew up with are now intermarried. Everybody knows the gut-wrenching statistics about Jewish assimilation and intermarriage. We have the ability to stop it! How can I not do my part to try to help the Jewish people? Tell us something unique about RAJE Russian Jews are very unique for a number of reasons. They are incredibly smart, driven, and intellectually curious - all the ingredients needed to grow in Yiddishkeit. Furthermore, they have strong family values, and due to decades of anti-Semitism that they faced in the Former Soviet Union, have a very strong Jewish identity. According to the PEW study there are approximately 750,000 Jews from the
Former Soviet Union and their children residing in North America, 12% or 90,000 are 18-30 years old. Right now they are still more open to Jewish learning and engagement than your average American Jew. We have one more decade to reach out to them before they are as assimilated as regular Americans. In just 2 years RAJE Maryland has engaged over 70 students in over 30 hours of learning in our Fellowship program, multiple Shabbatons in the community - in Suburban Orthodox, Mercaz Torah U’Tefilah, Kehilath B’nai Torah, and other locations - as well as countless one-on-one sessions. We’ve also taken dozens of students to Israel and Poland on life changing trips. We recently started a weekly intro to Talmud class for our students in addition to weekly parsha and self-improvement classes, as well as social events. Collectively, we have had thousands of hits on my Facebook and YouTube videos and Rabbi Horan’s weekly parsha podcast. I also give a shiur on how to learn gemara b’iyun to bal habatim and make videos on the side to help Jewish orgs get their message out in an impactful way. Check out my YouTube channel! We are really just at the beginning of building the RAJE branch here in Baltimore. We have big plans for the future so stay tuned!
B A LT I M O R E J E W I S H H O M E . C O M
Tell us about your background? I grew up in Chicago in a non-observant - though strongly affiliated - Jewish family. I was always very ‘Jewish’ culturally but didn’t really feel any connection to the more traditional aspects of the religion. I ended up becoming religious while studying film at the University of Michigan after having embarked on a quest to deepen my Jewish knowledge. After spending my Junior year abroad at Ohr Somayach I fell in love with Torah and desperately wanted to go back to yeshiva. After graduating I went back to Israel to Machon Shlomo and then onto the Mir and Jerusalem Kollel (Rabbi Yitzchak Berkowitz). I met my amazing wife Tamar in Jerusalem where we lived until we moved back to America 15 years ago to do kiruv. For the first eight years of my career I ran
Remind our Readers what RAJE is again? Russian American Jewish Experience is a national outreach organization catering towards first and second generation Russian Jews, ages 18-33. Collectively we are one of the most impactful kiruv organizations in the country with hundreds of participants attending our 10-week Leadership Fellowships and inspirational trips to Israel and Europe each year. We have branches in New York City, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey, Miami, and Baltimore and we also have a successful online program for participants all over the country. RAJE has a great track record of making shidduchim. Over 3,000 RAJE alumni have started Jewish families over the past decade with 94% of alumni marrying a Jewish spouse 52% of whom reported having met their spouse at RAJE! This translates into an incredibly low 6% intermarriage rate, in contrast to the 70% intermarriage prevalent in Jewish communities worldwide. We actually just celebrated our first RAJE Maryland
wedding with a local student who met his kallah on the RAJE Poland trip just before COVID started!
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
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