About Kolot Chayeinu

“Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives is a Jewish congregation in Brooklyn, where doubt can be an act of faith and all hands are needed to build our community. We are creative, serious seekers who pray joyfully, wrestle with tradition, pursue justice, and refuse to be satisfied with the world as it is. We share a commitment to ending structural racism and becoming an antiracist congregation. And, as individuals of varying sexual orientations, gender identities, races, family arrangements, and Jewish identities and backgrounds, we search for meaningful and just expressions of our Judaism in today’s uncertain world.”

Learn more about Kolot: https://www.kolotchayeinu.org/

About Our Project

The Kolot Chayeinu Oral History Project features the personal narratives of Kolot community members past and present to document the congregation’s collective history. The points of focus for this project are community, or what compelled people to join Kolot and what it means/meant to be part of it; growth and endurance, examining Kolot’s evolution over the years; and challenges, exploring obstacles that people have faced while being part of Kolot. 

The people being interviewed, called narrators, offer a wide range of perspectives on and experiences of Kolot. The various roles of our narrators include clergy, founding members, educators, newer members, board members, staff, members of working groups, b’nai mitzvah students, and more. 

We are currently in the first phase of the project, beginning in 2022. As we grow in skills and wisdom, and expand our team of interviewers, we aim to include more voices from the community to further build this collective history.

Our Goals

  • To capture the heart of Kolot Chayeinu in an archive accessible for educational and research purposes, preserving Kolot’s legacy in the history of American Judaism 
  • To deepen and build relationships within the Kolot community through initiating meaningful conversations, events, and creative collaborations
  • To strengthen Kolot by amplifying a wide range of voices and providing space to reflect on Kolot, past and present, to better inform the future

About Our Team

The Project Design Team is a group of Kolot members that has worked together since May 2022 to bring this project to life! 

The team completed a two-day oral history training (pictured above) with Suzanne Snider of the Oral History Summer School in May 2022. We have since worked collaboratively to design and plan the Kolot Chayeinu Oral History Project. Each member of our team is in the process of participating both as an interviewer and as a narrator, with each other.

Phase One Collaboration with Middlebury College 

Kolot Chayeinu worked in collaboration with Middlebury College during the first phase. Kolot member Professor Lana Povitz taught the course Jewish Oral History to a group of Middlebury students in the fall of 2022. Students were trained in oral history and explored the history of Kolot and its place within contemporary American Jewish life. Each student conducted an interview with a Kolot community member as part of our oral history project. You can learn more about the students on the Interviewers page.

Bringing the oral history project into a classroom setting was a unique and transformative experience. Learn more about what this process was like for the students by reading a reflection from interviewer Remi Welbel.

Phase Two

As the interviews conducted by Middlebury College students have wrapped up, the attention of our project has returned to Kolot. In phase two, we are focused on ensuring the longevity of our project. We have begun training Kolot members to become interviewers using resources from the Oral History Summer School and phase one. The website will continue to be updated as our project design team and newly trained members conduct interviews. As more interviews take place, we hope to capture a wider range of stories and experiences and deepen our engagement with the community. On June 3rd, 2023, we held an afternoon of listening, sharing, and connecting with the larger Kolot community. Find out more about this event and others here.

The project design team continues to be the heart of our project. We meet regularly to plan events, discuss the interviewing process, and brainstorm how we can achieve our agreed upon goals.