Avodah provides its Jewish Service Corps Members with a house, a program, and a framework for building Jewish community together. But what they actually build inside it—the specific relationships, the trust, all the good that comes out of a group of people living in a bayit (communal home)—that part is theirs. This year’s Corps Members just had their Service Corps siyyum (closing celebration), marking the end of a year spent serving at their placement organizations, living communally, and learning together. That chapter has closed, but what they built together hasn’t.
As we enter Elul, the month set aside each year for reflection before the High Holidays, we’re taking a moment to look back at what this past year looked like through the eyes of one Corps Member: Haylee, who spent her year as the Program Coordinator at Jewish Queer Youth (JQY) in New York. She split her days there with evenings at the bayit, where she lived with fourteen other Corps Members placed at different nonprofits around the city.
A place to be both
As Haylee puts it, JQY exists to help Jewish teens from unaccepting households “survive and thrive.” A clinical team handles the survival half: free therapy, social work, help securing housing or employment. Haylee’s work was the other half, making room for joy, organizing birthday parties, holiday celebrations, and events nearly every week for teens ages 13 to 23. “It’s essential,” she says, “because we create a place where they can be completely themselves, both Jewish and queer.” That kind of work runs on trust, something she credits partly to her psychology background. “Psychology comes into my job a lot, because a lot of the work that I do is relational,” she says. “It means a lot to me when they feel like they can trust me, and I feel like I can trust them.”
Where systemic change and direct service intersect
JQY’s focus isn’t on policy advocacy, but Haylee, who studied public policy alongside psychology in college, saw the effect that New York City’s policies on education and queer and trans rights had on the well-being of the teens she works with. She says, “Everything is impacted by who’s in charge, who has power, who’s making decisions on behalf of young people and queer people.”
A future that already exists
Many of these teens come from ultra-Orthodox or Orthodox homes, where being openly queer or trans isn’t always safe. That’s part of why a space that’s both Jewish and queer matters so much. “You don’t have to check your Judaism at the door,” she says. “You don’t have to check your queerness at the door.” For a lot of these teens, it’s the first time they’ve known another religiously Jewish, queer person exists at all. JQY exists so kids don’t have to carry that alone, so they know “you can be religiously Jewish, you can be queer. It exists. There’s a future for you.”
What proximity builds
One of the more compelling parts of Haylee’s year was simply who she lived with. Her housemate Sophia worked at Eshel, an organization serving LGBTQ+ Orthodox adults, older than JQY’s 13-to-23 range. Haylee found it genuinely special that she and Sophia, doing similar community-building work under the same roof, ended up staffing joint events side by side. Getting to know Eshel through Sophia and their partnership helped reassure Haylee that her teens don’t age out of JQY into nothing. There’s a whole infrastructure of organizations, built through relationships just like this one, ready to support them next.
A living room conversation with her housemate Mimi, who serves at PACT (Protect All Children from Trafficking), turned into a real partnership, combining PACT’s healthy relationship curriculum with JQY’s expertise supporting queer youth from Orthodox backgrounds. Haylee holds a lot of pride knowing that she and Mimi were able to create a professional partnership between two non-profits in her first year out of college.
Not every solution requires a formal partnership between organizations. Sometimes, it just requires a personal connection. Hannah, a housemate working as a college counselor at Adams Street Foundation, helped one of Haylee’s students when they needed help with a scholarship application that fell out of Haylee’s usual scope of work. Hannah got on the phone with the student directly and walked them through it. “They’re whole people, and you need all of us,” Haylee says. No single person, or single organization, can be everything a kid needs. The networks created by Avodah’s participants and alumni help weave those resources together into a community of care.
What she’s asking of the rest of us
Given the current political climate and the shrinking protections available to trans and queer youth, Haylee has two asks. She points to a close-to-home example first: both NYU Langone and Mount Sinai stopped offering gender-affirming medical care to patients under 18, a shift tied to threats against their federal funding. “It’s a really hard time to be, especially trans, right now,” she says.
Her first ask is to extend the same empathy you’d give a queer friend or family member to people you might not assume are queer at all. “A lot of the kids that come through our office don’t appear stereotypically queer,” she says, “and they deserve everyone’s kindness and empathy.”
Her second ask is simpler still: show up for the queer and trans people already in your life. She means something concrete, like inviting someone to dinner, throwing a birthday party for someone navigating a difficult relationship with their parents, driving someone across state lines if that’s what’s needed. “Whatever it is,” she says, “supporting the queer and trans kids in your life is very important.”
What’s next for Haylee
This fall, Haylee is starting her Master’s in Social Work at Columbia University. It’s the same relational work that made her year at JQY what it was, building trust with people who needed someone in their corner, and helping them feel like whole, unedited people. She isn’t leaving that work behind; she’s building on it. She’ll continue living with other members of her cohort, some of whom are staying on at their placement organizations, others moving into new roles entirely. The paths are different, but the foundation is the same. That’s what we hope for every Corps Member: that what they built in the bayit carries into whatever comes next.
