May 25 – 27, 2021
The JFCS MOSAIC Awards are a long-standing tradition for the Louisville community. Over the years, we have honored refugees, immigrants and first-generation Americans who call Louisville home and have made significant contributions in their professions and our community.
Last year, in response to pandemic realities, we opted to wait to honor our 2020 award winners and make our 2021 event all the more memorable. Given continuing public health realities this year, we are again adapting the celebration.
The JFCS MOSAIC Awards event supports our critical work with refugees, immigrants and underserved individuals and families throughout every zip code in Greater Louisville. Much like our MOSAIC honorees, our clients go on to be change agents in the lives of their families and our community.
This year, we will honor our 2020 MOSAIC Award winners alongside the clients we work with each and every day. To celebrate, we will host a three-day online giving and story-sharing campaign from May 25 – 27.
People throughout the Jewish community and across Greater Louisville turn to JFCS to better understand themselves or better their future. They come to us at the beginning of a career, the end of life and everywhere in between. They come for parents, for children and for themselves.
Shortly before the COVID crisis, we asked our staff to describe the barriers JFCS clients face and the feelings that result from those obstacles. Across the variety of services and the range of people we see, the words our staff used to describe the emotions they encountered were strikingly similar: constricted, stuck, tight, caught, trapped, confined, contained. In a word, mitzrayim.
Mitzrayim — the narrow place where our humanity is constrained. For our clients, and indeed for all of us as human beings, mitzrayim is not a place called Egypt or a thing of the past. Mitzrayim is a present tense combination of forces that curtail the fullest expression of our lives.
This past year has been such a narrow place, and through it all, JFCS has been here to expand possibilities so that each person and every family could meet their life’s challenges with confidence.
This meant weekly calls to isolated seniors so they would know they are not alone. It meant home delivery of food and essentials to families who would have otherwise gone without. It meant rethinking careers and small businesses. It meant counseling sessions by phone or video, and homecare with PPE and temperature checks. It meant coordinating plans for eviction prevention and re-housing.
Because of our dedicated staff, volunteers and supporters — who, together, ensure that possibilities are available for all — JFCS has been here to widen the narrow places our clients often find themselves in, to expand their possibilities and to celebrate their successes alongside them.
You, too, are important in this work and your generosity to JFCS is needed now more than ever. This Passover, we invite you to join us in expanding possibilities for all in Greater Louisville to live with dignity and purpose. With your generous financial support, JFCS will continue to be here for each person and every family moving through the narrow place into possibility.
With appreciation and warm wishes for a meaningful Passover,
Deb Frockt, CEO
Jewish Family & Career Services joins with the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies’ response to the violent attacks against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community in Atlanta. Tuesday’s events added to the ongoing external stressors affecting individuals, families, our community and our country. JFCS is here to help anyone in Greater Louisville who would benefit from counseling or other supports during this time of distress.
Contact us at services@jfcslouisville.org or 502-451-6342 x153.
Statement from the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies (NJHSA) in solidarity with Asian-American Pacific Islander Communities
March 19, 2021 – The Network of Jewish Human Services Agencies stands in solidarity with Asian American and Pacific Islander women and their communities against hate and violence and expresses deep sorrow for the lives that were senselessly taken in Tuesday’s shootings in the Atlanta area. We are horrified by this violent and senseless tragedy and our thoughts are with the families of the victims.
Regardless of the motive, it is clear that the rise in extremist rhetoric and hate speech has created an unsafe environment for people of Asian descent and other marginalized communities, including women. Crimes against Asian Americans have escalated over the past year and we must stand together to fight this dangerous hatred. Between March 2020 and February 2021, the Stop AAPI Hate National Project received 3,695 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents.
As a network of agencies providing a range of services, including to those who have experienced trauma, we are proud to support those in need regardless of faith or ethnicity and welcome those in the AAPI community who seek assistance. As Jewish tradition cites, may the memories of the victims be a blessing, and may their memory remind us all to redouble our efforts to support victims of hatred, discrimination, and gender-based violence.
Judy Halper, Board Chair
Reuben D. Rotman, President & CEO