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CLAL Awarded Grant For Jewish Spiritual Guidebook For Palliative Care

Guide to Offer a Jewish Perspective on the Spiritual Needs of Patients and Their Families, and Tools for Caregivers and Health Experts

By Judy Epstein, Director of Public Affairs 

Recognizing CLAL’s groundbreaking work in the Jewish healing movement, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation has awarded a grant to the organization for the creation of a Jewish spiritual guidebook for palliative care for patients and their families.  The guide will also address many of the concerns of caregivers, chaplains and health care professionals in their work with terminally ill patients, and is the first of its kind to be developed.     

CLAL faculty, working with Joseph J. Fins, M.D., Director of Medical Ethics at the Cornell campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital, who will serve as an advisor on the project, will bring together Jewish wisdom from traditional texts, stories and personal experiences with professional medical perspectives.  The guiding principle will be to create a framework in which patients can evaluate the decisions regarding their care, and the “quantity” and “quality” of life issues at stake.  

“Today, the issues of purpose and meaning for those facing chronic and terminal illness are too often left to the ‘deathbed’ or to hospice care,” said Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, Ph.D., psychologist and CLAL’s Director of Organizational Development, who is also the project’s academic advisor.  “But in the Jewish tradition we learn that if people live lives of purpose, integrity and meaning, they will have a more complete vision of themselves as they get closer to death.  How they’ve lived will provide the spiritual foundation for how they approach death, and it is important for caregivers to help them to reconnect to that vision.” 

Quality of life issues, encompassing medical and spiritual care for those with chronic illness, will be discussed in accessible language for a broad audience. Medical care, as seen through a sacred scope, will be discussed, as well as the ways for patients to discuss their concerns with their caregivers. Topics will include self-reflection, forgiveness, facing loss, finding hope, reconciliation, coping with pain, making peace and encountering death. 

Ultimately, our work will help both doctors and patients to understand that the choices that are made in medical care should be made in conjunction with the spiritual needs of the patient,” said Rabbi Daniel Brenner, the Director of CLAL’s National Jewish Resource Center, who is director of the project.

The one-year grant will cover the design, creation and distribution of the guidebook.  First available online at www.Jewishhealing.net, the guide will be made available to rabbis, lay leaders, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices affiliated with Jewish communities around the country.

“We are very excited about this important initiative.  It highlights CLAL’s expertise in meaningfully linking our tradition with critical contemporary concerns.  It also enables CLAL to reach people across the continent with an accessible, spiritually rich guide to the ethical dimensions of palliative care,” said Donna M. Rosenthal, Executive Vice Chairman of CLAL.


    



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