What’s the common thread between chaplaincy in Kansas City and Israel? It’s actually Rabbi Jonathan Rudnick, Jewish Family Services Community Chaplain and Overland Park native, whose commitment to spiritual care literally spans the globe.
You might expect in Israel, a major religious center to the world, that every hospital and nursing home would have a chaplain to address the spiritual needs of patients and their families dealing with illness and death. But in Israel pastoral care is actually a recent addition to the healthcare world thanks in large part to Rabbi Rudnick’s own experience.
As Rabbi Rudnick explains, “In 1999, I was hospitalized for five weeks in Israel for major surgery. I saw that the hospital rabbi was in charge of religious concerns such as overseeing kosher food, prayer services and ritual observance, but he didn’t have a dedicated role in visiting and offering support to me or other patients and their families, providing pastoral care and counseling, or serving those of other faiths.” Isolated and away from home, Rabbi Rudnick acutely missed the presence of a caring spiritual professional.
The next year, when Rabbi Rudnick began his rabbinic studies, he learned about professional chaplaincy training called Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). When he eventually returned to the U.S., he began the nationally recognized, K.C.-based CPE program at Baptist Lutheran Medical Center and Research Medical Center. Upon completion of his training, he returned to Israel and was mentored by Rabbi Pessah Krauss, former chaplain at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, who was volunteering at Hadassah Hospital. Soon after, Rabbi Rudnick and Dr. Nathan Cherny, director of cancer pain and palliative medicine at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, founded B’Ruach, Hebrew for “by spirit.” the first hospital-based pastoral care program in Israel
In 2006, Rabbi Rudnick brought his chaplaincy experience from Israel to K.C. to re-start the Jewish Community Chaplaincy Program. Based at Jewish Family Services, Rabbi Rudnick developed a community-based spiritual care program to meet a wide variety of Jewish needs for patients/families in hospitals, residents in elder-care centers and at home. Rabbi Rudnick is proud of what has grown over the years, and he says what’s most gratifying is “that this model program includes a spiritual care volunteer program, strategic relationships with healthcare institutions throughout the city, and it’s also financially viable and sustainable. Which means that the program can continue helping our community for years to come.”
Rabbi Rudnick’s original dream of promoting access to high-quality, professionally trained, spiritual care for Israelis is at the heart of another organization with which he is now affiliated, called Kashouvot, meaning “the ones who listen.” Rabbi Rudnick collaborates in an advisory capacity with Kashouvot founder Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz, a Harvard graduate ordained at the Conservative movement’s Schechter Institute, and one of three Israelis to have both Israeli and U.S. chaplaincy certification.
When Rabbi Berkowitz went to Israel from the U.S. in 2008, she noticed that while many people were studying pastoral care, only a handful were being employed in the field. Seeing the need for pastoral care in hospital and healthcare settings in Israel, she founded Kashouvot in 2010. Kashouvot is the only Israeli organization whose main mission is to place trained chaplains with U.S.-level credentials in hospitals and nursing homes, supporting patients, families and staff by discovering each person’s source of strength and meaning. As Berkowitz explains, “Chaplains do this through empathetic listening, acceptance, poetry, prayer, music, life-story writing and sensitivity to the patient’s own cultural and spiritual beliefs and heritage. Kashouvot chaplains also visit hospitalized tourists and others traveling to Israel who might otherwise be completely alone during a health crisis.”
Rabbi Berkowitz is pleased to see the program making a difference. “Although the effect of our work is hard to measure in numbers, we can tell we have done a good job when patients say to the chaplain ‘you are an angel;’ ‘you have removed a stone from my heart;’ or ‘I look forward to your visits each week.’ ”
Rabbi Rudnick is a natural partner with his ability to teach both in English and Hebrew, the respect he has earned in the field, and his wish to see the seeds he planted in Israel flourish. Rabbi Berkowitz and Rabbi Rudnick, along with Israel’s newly established Professional Association of Chaplains, share the goal of pastoral care becoming a recognized profession by the Israeli Ministry of Health. With such recognition, chaplains could then be employed (and funded) directly by hospitals and nursing homes just like social workers, psychologists, and nurses. They are also developing an interfaith Israeli CPE group to train Jewish, Muslim and Christian chaplains together.
To learn more about Israeli chaplaincy and hear patients’ stories, visit www.kashouvot.org. To learn more about JFS’s chaplaincy program, visit www.jfs-kc.org.
Thanks to another Kansas City connection, Israeli pastoral care is upgrading its image. Celeste Aronoff, former JFS communications director, began volunteering with Kashouvot in October 2015, assisting with marketing, Web content and message development.
