When Ellen Kagen moved to Anne Arundel County from the Washington, D.C., area, she found that the region’s Jewish community wasn’t quite as interconnected as she thought it might be.
“What I learned was that if you didn’t belong to a synagogue, it was really hard to find community,” she said. “So, in thinking about that, I started thinking, ‘Well, what’s happening to the teenagers, and where do they find community after their b’nai mitzvah?’ I came to learn that there were sort of minimal resources out here.”
With that in mind, she fell back on a tried and true method of linking Jewish youngsters, one that had previously been untapped in Annapolis and its outlying towns: BBYO.
“So, I went to the regional office for the BBYO Northeast Region and asked if it would be possible to start a BBYO chapter here in Anne Arundel County,” Kagen said. “The regional director said, ‘Find me a teenager. Once we have teens, we can work with them.’”
BBYO requires 10 members to start a chapter, which Kagen managed to do by Oct. 30. Since then, the newest chapter in Maryland has been off to a running start.
The first event for the BBYO of the Jewish Federation of Annapolis and the Chesapeake — a new organization in its own right — was an open house that saw 40 young people show up.
“Every parent thanked us and said, ‘We didn’t know what we were going to do with our teens,’” Kagen said.
So far, the new BBYO chapter has started a scholarship fund for its members, organized a trip for a handful of students to attend the organization’s regional conference in January and worked to officially partner with area synagogues.
The most exciting upcoming event for the students who have joined BBYO actually came from an outside source. U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.) invited the entire chapter to the State House in Annapolis for a private tour and briefing with her. Kagen said that she is working to partner the event with area synagogues so all teens, not just ones in BBYO, have this opportunity.
“One of the things we’re thinking about is that we can actually create communitywide events now that we have this founding BBYO chapter here,” she said.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy being Jewish in the U.S. right now, with antisemitism on the rise. That’s one of the reasons Kagen felt that this new chapter is so necessary.
“I feel a special urgency around teens because of what’s going on on college campuses,” Kagen said. “I thought, ‘How can we send our kids off to college really grounded in their Jewish community and their Jewish identity?’ Hillel directors that I know were saying to me, ‘Send us kids who can be leaders on our campus and who can help make our campuses strong.’”
In addition to helping strengthen the resolve of Jewish teens before they go off to college, the new BBYO chapter will assist families in the difficult task of raising a teenager. Kagen said that she has spoken to parents who appreciate this angle of the new BBYO chapter as well.
“Families today need a village now more than ever,” she said. “From the parents’ side, they’re the ones that have been the most expressive and clear that this was needed now. On the other side, the teens are so excited to meet each other.”
So far, those teens have come from all over. Kagen said that this includes all parts of Anne Arundel County — Crofton, Gambrills and Arnold, to name a few — as well as beyond.
“We have had inquiries from Easton and Cambridbge, too, hoping that we can offer this to them,” Kagen said.
One of the most important events that the new BBYO chapter has held so far was a meeting with BBYO seniors from Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
“[They said] ‘Hey, look what you can be,’” Kagen said. “It was peer to peer. It was teen to teen. It wasn’t the parents, it wasn’t the founders.”
Ultimately, Kagen said, the Federation has hope that this new group of teens will create momentum for themselves, their families, their community and Jewish teens of years to come.
“The more opportunities that we can create that offer this to families, the more possibilities there are that Jewish teenagers will find their own Judaism and their own identity and their own empowerment, and go off and raise Jewish families and be leaders in the Jewish communities that they create in the future,” she said.
