Sara Schreibstein doesn’t have to wait for Take Your Child to Work Day to see her toddler son while on the job. She hangs out with him regularly at Shabbat Tots, a weekly event she leads with the Jewish Federation of Howard County.
For the past year and a half, Schreibstein, 38, has served as the Federation’s program coordinator for families with young children, and she couldn’t be happier with her career. She takes joy from sharing Jewish traditions with children as young as 4 weeks old.
Schreibstein lives in Columbia with her family and attends services at Temple Isaiah.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in, I like to say, an interfaith household, light on the faith. My mom has Catholic upbringing, my dad’s Jewish, but neither were very religious, so we grew up with holidays and not much else. But I am kind of a Birthright success story: I went on Birthright when I was 25 — a little later than most people — and just fell in love with Israel and at that moment started investing more in my personal Judaism.
A few years later, I had a break in my career. I went to school for the first time to be a dance movement therapist. … I decided to go on a Ma’ase program in Israel, which was wonderful. I lived in Israel for 10 months. I was in Akko, and I did dance therapy as well as working with people with disabilities in various villages around Akko. … When I got back from Israel, I got a job at the JCC in Baltimore, managing their inclusion and disability programs, so that was my first work in the Jewish community. I immediately fell in love with the Jewish community and just how inclusive and embracing the Jewish community is of all types of people. I worked there for a little more than five years, and decided I wanted to work not in the Jewish world, but [with] public disability agencies. It was after the pandemic, so it was kind of hard. I missed working for the Jewish community and I think the particular job I had wasn’t a fit for me.
We were living in Howard County, and I had seen the listing for [the Jewish Federation of] Howard County. That was really appealing to me because I wanted to connect Jewishly with other people like me. I was hired in August of 2022, and I was supposed to start work a few weeks before I had my son, [but] I ended up having him first. That delayed things a little bit.
What are your responsibilities as program coordinator for families of young children?
My primary responsibility is managing PJ Library, [a nonprofit organization that mails Jewish books and music to families with Jewish children,] for Howard County. I work with PJ Library National and the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to make sure all of our Howard County families are receiving their content from the library, and we enroll new families. We’re always trying to look out for families who don’t know about PJ Library to get them signed up. We do programming every other Friday or so. We do Shabbat Tots, which is for families with young children to come and do a light Shabbat service and meet and connect with other families with young children, which is always my favorite part of my week. Families get to meet and learn from each other.
What do you enjoy about working with young children?
It’s wonderful to be able to see them experience Judaism at whatever level they are at, whatever level their families are at. The philosophy of PJ Library is that we want families to do Jew-ish, so we’re not a certain denomination; it’s just helping empower families to have Jewish experiences in their lives. I love meeting families and parents and getting to know the kids and seeing them grow. We have one mom who’s been coming this past year, and she started when her son was 4 weeks old. Now, he’s about 10 months [old]. He used to come wearing a sleeper, but a few weeks ago, it was like, “Oh my gosh, he’s wearing real pants. He’s a real person.” Building relationships with the families, it’s really special and seeing them come into their own and have fun doing Jewish experiences with their family.
What do you hope children get out of this experience?
The number one thing I hope kids get out of their experience is just to love who they are. To love their Jewishness and their Judaism and have it be a meaningful part of their growing up. I want them to have fun and make memories. I want parents to feel good about it, too. I would love them to say, “We do Shabbat more.” Or because we got this book about Purim and we didn’t celebrate Purim before, but we’ve been getting used books and now we love to make hamantaschen or things like that. Just finding the fun in it and having this be a meaningful part of our lives starting so young, and then hopefully it’ll last for the rest of their lives.
What’s the importance of Jewish community programming for children?
I just think it’s so important to be part of a community that fully accepts you for who you are. And that’s not just about being Jewish, but all walks of life: LGBTQ friendly, different races, different ability levels. But I think especially now in a post-Oct. 7 world, being able to come into a space where you’re appreciated exactly as you are as a Jewish person, or even as an interfaith family, you’re still appreciated exactly as you are in our space. [People can] come together and be Jewish together and create Jewish moments of joy together.
