Kyriya Leshenuyi

This is a Jewish companion guide to be used in conjunction with Full of Ourselves; A Wellness Program Advancing Girl Power, Health and Leadership (FOO), a wellness curriculum (Steiner-Adair,C. and Sjostrum, L. published by Teachers College Press 2006- available at amazon.com) that aims to bolster girls’ self- and body-esteem. In response to the call to raise strong and healthy Jewish girls, and a request for help within the Jewish community for effective eating disorders prevention, The Hadassah Foundation generously provided a grant to develop, evaluate, and re-design a first-rate Jewish guide to FOO. Bishvili: For Me is the result.

Bishvili was developed with several goals in mind. The primary objectives were to develop a Jewish Guide to Full of Ourselves that would appeal to Jewish Day Schools and camps, in order to respond to the need for raising strong healthy Jewish Girls and the primary prevention of eating disorders and body image dysmorphia in Jewish Girls. Bishvili was developed with the intention to strengthen Jewish Girls body and self esteem by strengthening girls connection to Jewish values, rituals and practices. We developed specific new activities that are integrated into Full of Ourselves that draw from Jewish text, values, practices with the hope that the additional Jewish activities would both 1)help girls get distance from mainstream values that make girls vulnerable to low body/self esteem, eating disorders, unhealthy relationships and risky behaviors, and 2) strengthen girls connection to their Jewish identity/religion as a source of spiritual nourishment that increases their self and body acceptance.

Bishvili includes empowering Jewish texts specifically chosen to help strengthen girls’ self-esteem, particularly texts that encourage nourishing and respecting one’s body and soul, taking a stand, and assuming personal and social responsibility to make the world a better place. The activities in this guide infuse FOO with Jewish values, songs, prayers, and rituals
chosen simultaneously to strengthen girls’ connections to healthy values in Jewish culture and to weaken girls’ vulnerability to dominant messages in popular culture that undermine their healthy development.

Here are a few points specific to this Bishvili companion guide:
We expect Bishvili to be used in many different Jewish settings: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform schools; summer camps; after-school programs; etc. We invite and expect adult leaders to revise sessions and activities to suit your particular group of girls.

We respect that there are countless ways of approaching prayer, of addressing God in prayer, of reciting blessings. It is beyond the scope of this curriculum to offer them all. We attempt to take a middle road, respecting tradition while also respecting that this is a program for girls.

Most of the material in this guide supplements or modifies existing activities in FOO; in these cases, we provide a cross-reference to the corresponding page number in the FOO curriculum. Other activities are brand-new to Bishvili.

For practical details about the Full of Ourselves program and useful advice about how to lead program sessions—from group size and session length to recruiting girls and working with a co-leader—see the “Commonly-Asked Questions” section of Full of Ourselves.

How do I get Bishvili; For Me and Full of Ourselves?
Thanks to generous funding from The Hadassah Foundation, Bishvili is free and you can download it from this web site! You need to purchase Full of Ourselves which can be done at amazon.com or at ww.tcpress.org. Once you have a copy of FOO you can print and insert the units from Bishvili in the workbook.

Which Jewish girls should participate in Bishvili: For Me
This prevention program is aimed at a general (i.e., healthy) population of all Jewish girls; no one need be at risk to participate. Bishvili has been written so that adults working with Jewish girls in any Day School, camp, youth group or after school program can partake. The Jewish texts, rituals and writings are designed to be ‘user friendly’ among all denominations. Leaders of Bishvili should understand and communicate to the girls that in order to be effective, every group member needs to commit to attending all of the sessions; this is not a drop-in program.

What is the best size for a Bishvili group?
Ideal group size is 8-15 girls.

Who should lead the program sessions?
One or, preferably, two women are needed to facilitate group sessions. You can be teachers, counselors, youth group leaders, clergy, cantors, nurses, after-school personnel, therapists, moms: anyone who shares a commitment Jewish Girls’ healthy development and to the ideas presented in this curriculum. You also must be available to dedicate 2-4 months to this educational endeavor. Because the program is largely discussion-based, it helps if group leaders have experience guiding discussions. Guide is the operative word: think of yourselves as guides rather than teachers.

Give me an idea of what happens during a Bishvili/ Full of Ourselves group.
Each Bishvili: For Me /Full of Ourselves unit takes 45-60 minutes to complete. Through dozens of activities-discussions, art activities, role plays, guided meditations, etc.-girls explore a range of topics to help sustain them in their mental, physical and social well-being. Topics include self and body acceptance, media literacy, nourishing emotional hungers, and the power of healthy relationships. Each unit ends with a "Call to Action"; girls translate new-found knowledge into positive action at school, at home and in the wider world.

How are the younger girls involved?
The exciting second program phase is where some of the most profound learning takes place. The 6 th, 7 th or 8 th graders, now mentors, design and lead a predetermined number of sessions for 4 th or 5 th grade girls. They draw upon suggested activities in a second curriculum titled Throw Your Weight Around: A Guide for Girl Leaders.

What are your goals?
Numerous! Most importantly, we want Jewish Girls to gain higher levels of body and self acceptance, higher levels of self esteem and confidence, as well as a wider range of coping skills to use in response to stressful situations-rather than turning to a fad diet or a bag of chips! Jewish Girls are bombarded by dominant Western culture with all its unhealthy messages about dieting, shopping, body size and shape preoccupation and dangerous messages that direct girls to disordered eating and dangerous eating disorders. We hope to strengthen Jewish Girls’ connection to healthy and inspiring Jewish culture, text, traditions and values that can help girls resist unhealthy secular cultural messages, and simultaneously strengthen a healthy connection to their bodies, to eating, to relationships-as well as strengthen their connection to Judaism! Ideally, by program’s end, girls will be able to draw on messages in Bishvili and FOO and demonstrate healthier eating and exercise habits, advanced leadership skills, the courage to speak up in the face of "weightist" teasing and bullying, and proficiency with basic media literacy skills.

How do you know if the program’s a success?
We extensively evaluated the FOO program with more than 1000 girls in five states. Participating and control group girls answered a research questionnaire pre-program, post-program and six months later. Research reveals that Full of Ourselves is feasible, that it causes no harm, and that it effects positive changes in several key areas. This is the first prevention program of its kind to effect sustained positive changes in girls’ body image, body satisfaction and body esteem, important risk factors in the development of eating disorders. The program also resulted in sustained positive changes in girls’ knowledge about health, nutrition, weightism and puberty. (see Steiner-Adair, C., Sjostrom, L., Franko, D., Pai, S., Tucker ,R., Becker, A., Herzog, D Primary Prevention of Eating Disorders In Adolescent Girls; Learning From Practice. The International Journal of Eating Disorders. Vol. 32,4, pgs 401-411. A. Wiley Co 2002)We evaluated Bishvili: For Me in three Jewish Day Schools and the

Bishvili Research and Evaluation Summary

Agency
Bishvili was evaluated at three school sites.
The Rashi School in Newton Massachusetts, Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Overland Park, Kansas, and The Hebrew Academy of Tampa Florida. We were able to have a good geographic distribution and a range of pluralistic/reform, conservative and modern orthodox students, with a sampling trend towards reform and conservative. Leaders were either school guidance counselors or teachers.

We were interested in whether the activities we created were responsive to the objectives of each unit, if they were positively or negatively received by the students, how user friendly they were for the leaders, and how the Jewish content was perceived and received by the girls.

Qualitative results reveal that the content of Bishvili was overall successful in making Jewish connections to the content of FOO and increasing girls connections to Jewish values. Approximately fifty percent of the girls reported that participating in the program gave them “new or different ways to think about what it means to you to be Jewish” (“Bishvili built on my Jewish values,” My Jewish Values are Stronger” ) . No one reported any negative impact ( ie:no one said it made me feel worse about being Jewish) so we can modestly assume that for half the girls, they were identified to begin with (“I don’t think it changed my opinion of being Jewish”), and for the other half, participating in Bishvili gave them new insight and appreciation for their Jewishness. Interestingly, not one student referred negatively to a Bishvili activity (“I didn’t like the fat myths, I didn’t like the cafeteria role plays”). With regard to girls differing takes on non Jewish components, there was no consensus that any one activity should be deleted, reaffirming the overall applicability of all activities, given the range of learning styles (“I loved the journaling” “Too much writing”) and personalities.

Adult leaders referred to several Judaic components that seemed to really add value to the overall program, and the general consensus at each site was that Bishvili is a positive program that meets its goals.

We extend heartfelt thanks to the many people who contributed to the creation of Bishvili.

First we extend sincere gratitude to The Hadassah Foundation, its commitment to Jewish girls everywhere, and its comprehensive understanding of the complexities of research, evaluation, and program development. We would like to thank Linda Altshuler for her tireless commitment, vision, and help with this project. Bishvili would not exist without her ongoing guidance and help. Thanks to both Linda and Rabbi Jacqueline Ellenson for helping us to create (and join forces with) an extraordinary group of women leaders and educators within the Jewish community who became our advisors. Rachel Mehlsak, past Program Coordinator at the Hadassah Foundation, took meticulous care copyediting different versions of the document and we are grateful to her many contributions to the final version.

We extend sincere gratitude to our advisory board of exceptional Jewish educators who gave us thoughtful, specific input on each of the program units. We thank these women for giving so much of their time and themselves to this work: Elaine Cohen, Shoshana Jedwab, Jo Kay, Naomi Less, Lori Skopp, Jennifer Tobenstein and, in particular, Rabbi Rona Shapiro, who joined this project early on and stayed deeply connected to it through the duration as a “go-to” text expert, Hebrew translator, and activity designer. Her spiritual guidance and insight run throughout this curriculum. We are also grateful to the advisory board for conceiving the title of this guide. Last but not least, we want to thank Cheri Ellowitz for her meticulous final reading of Bishvili.

We field-tested Bishvili in three wonderful Jewish day schools across the country, involving more than 60 girls and six adult leaders who offered us invaluable written and verbal feedback. We offer a rousing round of applause to the following leaders for their time and commitment: Joni Fishman, Dean of Students at The Rashi School in Newton, MA; Colleen Pleiss, counselor at Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Kansas City, MO; and Melissa Sheer and Andrea Friedman-Rodriguez at the Hillel School of Tampa, FL. It takes a village to prevent eating disorders and raise strong healthy girls and we want to thank Sharon Greenwood for bringing Catherine to Kansas City and commend all those at the Jewish Heritage Foundation and KSU for their comprehensive commitment to this work. We also offer gratitude to The Ophelia Project of Tampa, a leader in community-based outreach and education on behalf of girls.

Thanks also to Beth Klarman, Eleanor Friedman and Barbara Dobkin (Founding Chair of The Hadassah Foundation), who have been passionate about raising healthy Jewish girls long before this project began, and without whom Bishvili would not exist. It was through these women that Catherine began working in Israel, and had the honor of collaborating with Alice Shalvi, Yael Latzer and Diana Flesher, who inspired this project years before it took shape and continue to be cherished colleagues and essential to this work. Todah rabah!

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