What is KERUV?

The FJMC KERUV Initiative is about Welcoming and Accepting.
It is about Welcoming and Accepting People as they are.
It is not about conversion.
It is not about preventing intermarriage.
By us, intermarriage has already happened.
People will make their own choices about conversion – both whether and when.
The question is about Welcoming and it is about the Children.
And it is not about, “What did I do wrong.” You didn’t.
It is about where we are as Jews in America in the 21st Century.
We are a lay group. We are the boots on the ground.
We are men and we are women.
Some belong to FJMC clubs and some don’t.
Some rabbis who have reached for this program have clubs and some don’t.
It doesn’t matter.
This KERUV Initiative is FJMC’s gift to the Conservative Movement.
     250 Rabbis have participated in our 24-hour rabbinical think tanks.
     150 lay people have taken our 2-3-day lay training seminars.
We have been at this since July, 2001.
Sometimes we think that we know what we are doing. 
Mostly, we simply continue to learn and grow.
Ours has very much been a journey of understanding how the various pieces of this puzzle fit together. 
And as we learn, we both modify our training and expand our programming.
We do not pontificate.
We do not make uniform declarations of how the Conservative Movement should behave; or how it should welcome people; or statements that are exclusionary either overtly or covertly.
We work with individual rabbis and synagogues who want to work with us.  
We put in a lot of time.
For all of us, this is a passion. 
We believe that this is the most important issue of the 21st Century.
This is who we are and this is what we think works. 
We certainly know that this is what works for us.

Written by Harvey Braunstein and Steve Lachter, two of “us” who have been on this journey since its inception