Jewish Community Programs

Since March 2020, when Covid-19 first altered our daily lives, public health officials warned of a potential surge in drug overdoses.

JCFS supports Chicago’s Jewish community members on many paths from constriction to expansion. In this spirit, we offer links to haggadot and Passover readings that reflect both ancient and contemporary ways that we experience bondage, the struggle for freedom, and ultimate liberation from slavery.

It is critically important that we engage with our young children and provide age-appropriate child abuse prevention education, as this is a key strategy in keeping children safe.

Overdose deaths are skyrocketing as a result of the devastating effects of synthetic opioids like fentanyl which are being unleashed by bad actors into the black-market drug supply.  Now more than ever, psychoactive drug use can be deadly. 

Overdose deaths are skyrocketing as a result of the devastating effects of synthetic opioids like fentanyl which are being unleashed by bad actors into the black-market drug supply. Now more than ever, psychoactive drug use can be deadly. 

This is still hard. And we wish it weren’t. We wish we were wistful about 2021 coming to an end. 
We wish the pandemic was definitively coming to an end. And so, as we look ahead to 2022, let’s begin to imagine how we will recover from this crisis.

There are many ways to affect healing. Jewish Law requires us to seek the best medical care we can.  But our Torah also recognizes that there are other paths to healing that walk hand-in-hand with medical care. 

Our lives have been turned upside down during this pandemic in one way or another. As we try to make sense of all this, we may find an underlying theme: Loss. Perhaps we can use some of the rich Jewish tradition of mourning loss as a framework to look at and maybe understand what we are experiencing.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. What does that mean? Verbal, physical and mental abuse come from all walks of life, varying age groups, all backgrounds and education levels and it occurs in all our neighborhoods, but it is not always easy to detect.

Since 1996, the Orthodox Network has presented the day-long training many times.  The Network’s bi-monthly meetings, which moved successfully to Zoom in 2020, have helped hundreds of colleagues from many agencies to form professional relationships and learn about services, best practices, and community needs.