Liberal Judaism’s online Community Briefings return for 2024 – starting this Thursday (11 January) with Charley’s Open House.

Join Liberal Judaism CEO and Progressive Judaism Co-Lead Rabbi Charley Baginsky from 8-9pm. This is your chance to chat about anything that is on your mind regarding faith, community or what lies ahead for our movement.

On Thursday 18 January at 8pm, we will be joined by Sara Kibel, the Director of Community Engagement at PJ Library in the UK – who will be discussing their posting of high-quality Jewish books to families each month and how our communities can get involved.

On Thursday 25 January at 8pm, we are uniting with the Movement for Reform Judaism for an important joint Community Briefing on the Jewish BRCA testing programme. The two guest speakers will be Jnetics CEO Nicole Gordon and Chai Cancer Care CEO Lisa Steele.

They will talk to us about the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and the faults in these that can put you at increased risk of developing certain types of cancer – specifically breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancer.

They will explain how the testing programme works, the benefits of knowing if you have a BRCA gene fault and the range of options available on the NHS to help reduce cancer risk. They will also discuss how the fault can be passed on to your children and options to manage this.

The reason that there is a specific Jewish BRCA testing programme – which you can read more about here – is that having Jewish ancestry increases your risk of having a BRCA gene fault. Around 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jews and 1 in 140 Sephardi Jews has a faulty BRCA gene, compared to around 1 in 250 individuals in the general UK population.

To take part in any of our Community Briefings, please email Alexandra on a.gellnick@liberaljudaism.org for the Zoom link.