There’s a tradition at  Tufts Hillel that when we say the motzi on Friday nights, everyone reaches  their arm toward the center of the table and puts a hand on the challah.  Last Friday night, for the first time,  several of those hands belonged to young adults with special needs.  As I looked around the room at  students, professors, Hillel staff and even the university’s President  connected to one another and reciting the motzi in unison, I realized that, at  that moment, no one could really tell who had special needs and who did not.

That was a highlight for  me, watching the vision that has lived only in my mind for quite some time come  to fruition before my eyes.  I grew  up with a younger brother who is hard of hearing, and it only took witnessing  one teasing comment from another kid, a family friend who called my brother  “ear boy” because of his hearing aids, to ignite my passion for advocating for people  with special needs at a very young age.   Fortunately, in high school I found a program that provided me with a  deeper understanding of the special needs population through a combination of  formal education and hands-on experience.   The Gateways Sunday Program (then called Etgar L’Noar) provides a Jewish  education to children with a wide range of special needs, and trains 50 to 60  teen volunteers each year to be one-to-one aides for the students.  I wrote my college essay about my  experience in this program, and went on to study Child Development at Tufts University,  graduating magna cum laude in 2009.

So, after graduating and exploring  the desolate job market for a few months, my next move was to call Arlene Remz,  Executive Director of Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, to ask if she would please let me intern in her office,  hoping that I had made an impression as a teen volunteer.  Graciously she complied, and my  internship quickly turned into a real job, as Program Associate.  During one of my first days on the job,  I attended a meeting with a group of parents who wanted Gateways to design a  Jewish education program for their young adult children with special needs, who  were all about my age.  I was  thinking about the role Judaism had played in my life for the past few years and  realized that, like most young Jewish adults in the US, my campus Hillel had  shaped my Jewish identity as a young adult, providing a forum to explore  Judaism through education, socialization, volunteerism and spirituality.  Then it occurred to me that people with special needs were simply not a part of this experience, and that if I had not  found a way to incorporate this population into my definition of my Jewish  community since I left high school, then most other people probably hadn’t  either.

The idea came rushing into my head: to design a program that incorporates fundamental elements of the Gateways Sunday Program, like using one-to-one peer aids, but to adjust everything --  content, structure, location -- to be appropriate for young adults.  The program would have to take place on  a college campus, I imagined, and be designed to include young adults with  special needs in existing programming at the respective Hillel with the support  of undergraduate volunteers, who would also participate in a concurrent  training program.  In addition to  providing necessary Jewish engagement for young adults with special needs, this  program would leave an impression the greater Hillel community, thereby influencing  the standards of future Jewish leaders around inclusion.

Lucky for me, Tufts University, my alma mater, was poised and ready to take on this mission. Tufts  Hillel, through their Repair the World initiative, partnered with Gateways,  Boston’s central agency for Jewish special education, to pilot this innovative  new program that aims to challenge -- and change -- the way we view, treat and  interact with people with special needs in our community.  Now, the greater goal is to develop  emerging adults who are not only aware of people with special needs, but who  value and expect a community that is inclusive of all Jewish people.

With the support of Gateways and my CJP/PresenTense Fellowship, and with the partnership of Tufts  Hillel, I was able to launch this brand new program last week. And, it was a  huge success. Everyone in the program -- the volunteers and the young adults  with special needs -- had a fabulous evening.  “The best part,” according to Marie, a bright young woman  with Down Syndrome who is enrolled in the program, “was when we did the Kiddush  together. The whole table and the whole room, it was like one big community and  I felt part of it.”