Creative Spiritual Care for Processing Gender-Based Violence in Jewish Spaces

This event, hosted by the SRE Network team with Karen Erlichman and Rebecca Katz was held on:

December 17, 2021 9:00 am PT/12:00 noon ET (75 min session)

Ongoing investigations in the Jewish community around safety, respect and equity, with the release of the HUC-JIR report, have brought to light and resurfaced both decades-old and more recent gender-based violence and harm in our institutions and community. This truth-telling has raised painful questions around institutional accountability, complicity and "good old boys" mindsets. While bringing these stories to light can be a powerful tool for catalyzing greater institutional and communal accountability, doing so can also leave us as individuals with the need for processing our own grief and anger around both what we have directly experienced and what our community is holding.

Creative and spiritual care can be a powerful tool to process and transform what we are experiencing for greater clarity, healing, and support. Members joined the SRE Network, Karen Erlichman and Rebecca Katz for a virtual vigil of collective spiritual care and creative process. Using the Jewish Studio Process, we gathered to witness each other and go inward—checking in with ourselves and our individual + collective bodies about what is emerging in this moment. No artistic experience was necessary; we used whatever art supplies we had on hand.

Karen Erlichman (she/her) provides psychotherapy, spiritual direction, So(U)L coaching and mentoring in San Francisco, employing a mind-body-spirit approach to wellness and trauma healing. Karen has also been a Jewish communal professional for over thirty years. Rebecca Katz is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator. She operates from a foundational belief that everyone is creative. Having worked in the Jewish social justice movement for the past decade, Rebecca leads communications, events, and strategic partnerships at Lilith magazine.

Rebecca and Karen completed the Jewish Studio Project Creative Facilitator Training Program in 2020.

For more information and resources on this session, please email info@srenetwork.org.

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