The Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award

The Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award

Announcing the Winner of the Inaugural Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award
Ana Robbins, Founder & CEO of Jewish Kids Groups

The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life is proud to honor Ana Robbins with the first Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award.

Ana Robbins

Robbins is the Founder and CEO of the Atlanta, Georgia-based nonprofit organization Jewish Kids Groups (JKG). She started JKG in 2012 to provide camp-style Jewish learning and friendship during the school year to kids in kindergarten through 10th grade. The organization’s largest program, JKG Afternoon Community, combines Jewish education with weekday afternoon childcare to meet the needs of modern Jewish families. JKG’s Jewish After School Accelerator (JASA) program provides synagogues across the U.S. with tools, guidance, curriculum, and financial support to launch their own Jewish after-school programs.

“Jewish after school provides an additional option to the typical Sunday and Hebrew School model, inspiring families to immerse their children in a Jewish social and programmatic context every day instead of just one or two days a week,” said Steinhardt Foundation President Rabbi David Gedzelman. “Now, the kids’ primary social group is Jewish so, for them, belonging to the Jewish People becomes part of their core identity, not an occasional experience. This is life-changing for individuals and families and represents a potential cultural shift for American Jews.”

“Strengthening Jewish pride and supporting a positive sense of belonging to the Jewish People is of critical importance for the future of this generation. We can think of no one who exemplifies Jewish Pride more than Rose Lubin. Ana Robbins’ work in leading Jewish Kids Groups fosters this ideal in a realistic and replicable program that can scale nationally,” said Sara Bloom, Vice Chair of the Steinhardt Foundation.

“I am deeply honored that the Steinhardt Foundation has chosen to recognize me and Jewish Kids Groups with the Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award,” said Robbins. “The funds JKG receives from this award will enable Jewish children across the country to explore their heritage, forge lasting Jewish friendships, build a meaningful relationship with Israel, and ultimately ensure the strength of the Jewish community for generations to come.”

Through JKG’s Jewish After School Accelerator, 11 U.S. synagogues including congregations in Plano, Texas; Livingston, New Jersey; Cincinnati, Ohio; Brookline, Massachusetts; San Leandro and Oakland, California; and across South Florida, are now running their own Jewish after-school programs. For more information and to apply for future JASA cohorts, please visit jewishafterschools.com.

The Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award is an award intended to recognize and promote an individual whose work exemplifies leadership, innovation, and creativity through an initiative that champions the Pillars of Jewish Pride described in Michael Steinhardt’s 2022 book, Jewish Pride.

Rose Lubin

The Award is named in memory of Sergeant Rose Lubin, the Atlanta native who bravely defended and rescued victims of the infamous terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 and lost her life in a subsequent terrorist attack while guarding the Old City of Jerusalem.

By honoring individuals, organizations, and programs that exemplify the pillars of Jewish Pride, this award has the broader purpose of inspiring their adoption as central goals and aspirations throughout the Jewish world and of encouraging new initiatives based on these principles.

There are six criteria for identifying individuals and their programs/organizations for the Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award: three reflecting the Pillars of Jewish Pride and three reflecting desirable programmatic characteristics.

Pillars of Jewish Pride

Individuals nominated for the Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award must have created programs that exhibit at least ONE of these pillars as described below:

  1. Peoplehood

    Background: The Jewish people spans the world, crossing national, cultural, and ethnic lines.

    A commitment to Jewish peoplehood means reaching out beyond your own Jewish circle, learning about world Jewry as well as Jews at home who may express being Jewish differently from yourself, and taking responsibility for the well-being of Jews everywhere.

    A qualifying initiative demonstrably promotes Jewish peoplehood by highlighting and/or exemplifying these ideals. Programs with deep connections to Israel and Israeli life and culture certainly exhibit this pillar, as well.

  2. Excellence

    Background: Over the centuries, Jewish culture developed a particular kind of excellence—what Jewish Pride calls the “creative intellect, applied for the good.”

    This has helped Jews excel far beyond their numbers in science, technology, culture, the arts, and more.

    A qualifying initiative demonstrably promotes Jewish excellence by recognizing or understanding the ways Jews have bettered the world; and/or by preserving or amplifying these specific qualities of excellence.

  3. Joy

    Background: There is an unfathomable joy in being Jewish, one that manifests itself in moments of celebration as well as anguish, but also in everyday gatherings of Jews, in both religious and secular contexts.

    A qualifying initiative demonstrably promotes Jewish pride by tapping into that joy, deepening it, spreading it, and making it an integral aspect of the Jewish experience of the program’s participants.

Programmatic Characteristics

Eligible programs should demonstrate ALL of the following:

  1. Measurable impact: including clear and compelling metrics.
  2. Scalability: potentially expanding to reach a large segment of the Jewish population.
  3. Sustainability: offering a viable pathway to financial maintenance of the program even at a large scale.

Award Amount:

$100,000: $70,000 to the individual and $30,000 to the program. There will be no conditions attached to the use of the award.

Eligibility:

To qualify for the Rose Lubin Jewish Pride Award, Nominees must be:

  • 18 years or older
  • residing in North America
  • associated with a nonprofit organization that serves the Jewish community in North America (Israel-based programs that serve North American Jews are eligible, as long as they are affiliated with a charitable organization or a fiscal sponsor in North America).

The program or its non-profit host organization (if applicable) must be:

  • currently in operation
  • registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization or be fiscally sponsored by one (if located in the US) or registered with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) as a charity or be fiscally sponsored by a charity registered with the CRA.

Please direct all press inquiries to Judy@TheIntelligentsiaAgency.com. For all other questions, please contact jewishprideaward@steinhardtfoundation.org.