(JTA) — JDC Entwine – the initiative for young adults of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion – has established a Jewish leadership fellowship.
The Weitzman-JDC Fellowship for Global Jewish Leaders was announced on Monday.
The graduate fellowship was founded by Jane Weitzman, a JDC board member, and her husband, shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, to provide HUC-JIR rabbinic, cantorial and Jewish education students expertise in Jewish needs around the world and in Israel, according to the announcement.
“While all major U.S. universities today have top graduate programs developing the next generation of leaders to face the challenges of our changing world, there is a desperate need in the North American Jewish community to immerse our up-and-coming leaders in issues confronting Jews internationally,” Jane Weitzman, a board member of JTA’s parent organization, 70 Faces Media, said in a statement.
Over the next five years, the Weitzman-JDC Fellowship at HUC-JIR will train 15 fellows, giving them a deeper understanding of global Jewish issues that they can bring to their congregations, classrooms and communities across North America. As part of the program, the fellows will travel to some of the 70 countries that JDC provides services.
Weitzman-JDC Fellows will work from a special curriculum developed with HUC-JIR to foster the concept of global Jewish responsibility and activism on Jewish issues among their congregants, students and the wider North American Jewish community, the statement said.
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