Rabbi Benyamin Moss is the director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth Atlantic Seaboard Region, meaning he oversees the youth organization’s work for much of the mid-Atlantic, but he started in Baltimore as head of the local district.
This gives him unique insights into the Charm City market as NCSY takes part in a variety of work, especially — and perhaps most importantly — its efforts to equip Jewish youth with strategies to fight antisemitism in their community.
“We believe that the greatest way to fight antisemitism is, first of all, be literate. They have to understand the issues. They have to be knowledgeable. When people are saying things about Judaism or Israel, you have to know what they’re talking about,” Moss said. “But we find the greatest defense against antisemitism is a great offense, and that means to be incredibly Jewish, and to understand what it means to be part of the Jewish community and how great it is, and the Jewish values that have kept us the people that are for thousands of years.”
To that end, NCSY has clubs in schools around the Baltimore area that help Jewish students learn about their own culture and how to defend it when people attack them. Those clubs exist in a dozen non-Jewish private and public schools, environments that have more need for their services than Jewish day schools.
“We feel like the best place to meet teens is where they are, which is high school. So we have these clubs — we bring in some food and we have different activities. If it’s around the holidays, we’ll do something kind of seasonal and holiday related. We’ll talk about Israel. We have mental health awareness month, where we talk about Jewish wisdom’s take on mental and emotional well-being,” Moss said.
Obviously, school is where kids spend most of their time outside of the home, but it’s also a place where there are teachers and administrators who have the ability to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
“So, besides that safe space where Jewish kids can feel connected in school, we try to do that out of school as well, in a larger way,” Moss said.
NCSY in Baltimore has a program where every Monday night, 40-80 kids meet at a local coffee shop and have the chance to socialize with each other.
“It’s a really wonderful community that’s developed, and that, of course, leads into Shabbat meals and holiday programming and Shabbatons,” Moss said.
NCSY and their Baltimore cohort are focused on combating antisemitism, of course, but it’s also about, as Moss said, helping the kids be proud to be Jewish. One of the ways that they do that is the Senator Ben Cardin Jewish Scholars Program, named after the longtime Jewish United States senator from Maryland.
As a part of that program, students meet for 10 weeks and learn leadership development skills. They study Jewish texts and wisdom. The teens have mentors who are in their 20s and 30s who can help them on the path to becoming community leaders in Baltimore.
The teens also get to meet peers from other area schools and hear from experts in their field.
“We’ve heard from people like Amy Shlossman, the president of Sinai Hospital, or Ron Attman, CEO of Acme Paper and Supply Company, or Adam Neuman, the chief of staff for the president of the Ravens, or Judge Karen Friedman, who’s a federal judge,” Moss said.
“It’s a really cool thing to meet these very influential people and learn from them, and perhaps even develop a relationship with them.”
The NCSY Baltimore chapter also gives students a chance to impact legislation related to antisemitism directly. Each year, the leadership cohort travels to Washington, D.C., where they lobby alongside the Orthodox Union.
All of this comes at a crucial time, not just in the lives of teens, who are about to go to college, but at a time when antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments are magnified more than they have been at any point in recent memory.
“There are kids who never once thought about what it means to be Jewish, and now, because it’s on social media and on the news, it’s everywhere,” Moss said. “Kids now are thinking about what it means to be Jewish, and they’re heading towards college campuses where there have been a lot of challenges for Jewish students. So it’s on people’s minds in a way that it has not been.”
