Initial Actions for Trauma Prevention

Mental health

Research (initial work to identify and understand the problem)

With a focus in the private sector, for over 40 years, the JLE has sustained a model for individual and intergenerational community health and resilience in the face of ongoing challenges of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish actions. From our perspective, some root causes are the wide distribution of unclear ideas and misconceptions that stereotype multiple voices of the Jewish community. As a result, some people may respond with irrational emotions and behaviors that can perpetuate ideas expressed as traumatic events. There is no fixed definition of trauma. It is a growing mental health problem that the LA County Department of Public Health describes as a response to an incident that is distressing, disturbing or life-threatening with long-lasting and profound consequences for an individual, families, and whole communities. Recognizing some limitations to our model, the JLE initiates a private-public collaboration to identify and understand anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish actions.

The JLE builds private-public capacity as it researches prevention of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish actions by 1) identifying and understanding the problem. The JLE proposes collaborations with the LA County Office of Violence Prevention for data sharing and reporting guidance including monthly requests for self-inflicted, interpersonal, and school related datasets involving anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish bullying and violence in public health Service Planning Areas 4-6. Data will be used to inform the topics discussed at three quarterly forums during the funding period. Members from the JLE and neighboring communities will be invited for an open forum discussion to clarify ideas about Jewish tradition and culture. 2) Collaboration with the Library Foundation of LA and LA County Library to assist the JLE in developing a shared collection for Judaica preservation. The JLE will oversee and coordinate shared library collections on behalf of its current and new community partners. Oversight includes acquisition, collections management, organization, support of shared physical library collections, digitization, and patron subscription management. The JLE would take responsibility for the system-wide negotiation and licensing of shared digital materials for the Joel Levey Judaica Library. 3) Affirming Jewish tradition and culture through the production and recording of clarifying and relevant video series for all ages that aligns with the scope and sequence of community partners.

To help sustain awareness of the trauma prevention initiative, the JLE intends to present quarterly progress and highlights at regular meetings and during the Trauma Prevention and Gun Violence Awareness months at the Board of Supervisors for Los Angeles County. With community partners the JLE intends to identify sensitive and specific indicators of anti-Semitic attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors in neighboring communities as well as commonly measured indicators of hate crimes. Neighboring communities will be identified by zip codes within a 10-mile radius of the JLE and will include vulnerable populations in the public education system and community nursing homes. With feedback from community partners during the third quarter, the JLE will beta test video broadcasting of its series to five thousand sustained subscribers in LA county. To connect direction from executive management with feedback from frontline workers, the rate of scaling will be influenced by collective negotiation.

The JLE defines success by maintaining current daily operations that include complimentary classes, an extensive Judaica Library, guest lecturers, counseling, Holiday and Shabbat user-friendly services, and hosting community events as it builds capacity for public collaborations. This includes connecting centralized communication, resources, and data sharing with three LA county community partners by the end of the second quarter. Proposed collaborators include the Culver City public school district, LA County Public Health Office of Violence Prevention, and LA County Public Library. Success will be measured by the identification of early indicators of anti-Semitism by the end of the last quarter, the achievement of fundraising goals by the end of the first quarter and ROI at the end of the initial funding period.