About SVIVAH
SVIVAH is a women-designed, women-run, women-centered community dedicated to exploring, designing, and discovering a more nourishing, inspiring, and connected Jewish communal experience for women. The purpose of “community” is to make us stronger, nurture our values, show us where we belong, inspire and enable us to achieve more than we can alone. It is time for women to ensure that our Jewish community fills these universal communal needs for ourselves. As an inclusive, women-only space in the Jewish community, SVIVAH serves as a training ground, a safe space for skill-building and exploration, a “dugout” to empower women to be at their best when they go back out on the “playing field” of our professional and social spheres. SVIVAH is committed to creating communal conversations and support for women’s health, wealth, spiritual, professional, and personal empowerment as a vehicle for strengthening us as individuals and making us more powerful as a collective. It is a space for meaningful interactions with like-minded, like-hearted individuals and an opportunity to be strengthened by what we have in common, while growing from the ways we differ. Let us not waste the incredible strength and value of our diverse, multigenerational Jewish womanhood. Women are strengthened by each other; the Jewish community will be better for our strength.
Of us. By us. For us.
In an ever-increasingly egalitarian global society, there is need for a women-only space for Jewish women to convene, connect, and build confidence through community. There is proven scientific benefit to women connecting meaningfully with other women. Neurologically, women benefit from the community of other women – women who share their values and life-experience. We want to invest in connections built on shared experience rather than common demographics or location. We want to widen the pipleline to the bounty of community resources intended to help us live our strongest lives. In times that are increasingly fraught by “the plague of loneliness”, lack of connection, limited time, why not maximize the purposefulness of our Jewish community and its value to its women? Women are stronger with community – let’s give it to them.
We want to see “Jewish Community” become synonymous with “Empowered Women*”. Join us.
Our Origins
SVIVAH launched in December 2018 as a pilot in the greater Washington DC area, with a goal of bringing women together over shared values and shared experiences across communities, while also widening the pipeline to the available resources, services, and programmatic content intended to support our strongest Jewish lives. In its community-building phase, SVIVAH attracted an audience of over 400 women ranging in ages, locations, and affiliations. Organizational partnerships continue to grow as agencies, in partnership with SVIVAH, think creatively about providing valuable content in a women-only context.
In our first months, SVIVAH offered access to varied female pastoral caregivers, fostered deep connections over the universal experience of transition and loss, inspired a communal approach towards amplifying and validated women’s anger, and even experimented with comedic improv. Our programs are designed by our community of women and engage multiple service providers, agencies, and educators dedicated to women’s wellness, spiritual nourishment, and empowerment. We are creating meaningful connections across generations and affiliations. We are facilitating conversations about the lives of women that need to be addressed as a collective. We are destigmatizing life-moments of challenge by reframing them as opportunities for tremendous growth and communal strength. We are committed to valuing the work of our educators with appropriate compensation. We built HerTorah, a program dedicated to women’s voices and perspectives in Jewish scholarship. We are crafting a Jewish communal experience that is valuable and relevant to the lives of Jewish women as women – not as mothers, not as future partners, not as volunteers, or philanthropists – simply as the powerful women we are.
Our Commitment
We aim to be inclusive, open-minded, and respectful of every path every woman is on. And we are glorious in our diversity. If you are interested in being part of a Jewish community of women, we welcome you fully and ask that welcome your fellow sisters in the same way.
While SVIVAH is a “gendered space,” we leave the defining of both “Jewish” and “woman” to you. If you want to be in a circle of “Jewish women", you belong here and welcome. And if your experience with us does not meet our stated values, please let us know. We want to make it right and it’s important to us that we do.
We are a beautiful sisterhood -- may our differences intrigue us and help us grow, while our commonalities unite us and help us flourish.
Guidance team
SVIVAH is first-and-foremost a lay-led collective. From its start, it has been an exercise in responsiveness; seeking to uncover, understand, validate, and explore the varying needs and interests of women along their Jewish life journeys. While we do have a group of passionate and committed creators and guides, each member of the Guidance Team considers herself a follower rather than a leader - beholden to the larger community of women and devoted to representing the voices of our collective to the best of her abilities. The Guidance Team commits to being comprised of representatives of our entire collective, ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table in our community.
Creators
The SVIVAH Creators and staff are the good folks who work hard every day to find new ways to bring our community together, to forge new bonds, and tackle new topics. They are our advocates in the larger Jewish community. They spend all their time focused on “the Jewish woman’s life journey” and exploring ways to make that path smoother, more enjoyable, richer, and more communal.
Acquired wisdom
One of the primary goals at SVIVAH is to bring together women from various points on the Jewish woman’s life journey so that we can all learn from each other and gain strength from the experience of others. It is precisely for this reason that we continually consult with our advisory committee. We consider ourselves so blessed to be able to learn from and engage with experts who have so much knowledge and experience to share. Their expertise offers insight to our community of women in a variety of ways, lifting us all up with their wisdom in the process.
