Jessica Tilson had only been back in St. Louis for a few months when she and a friend decided to go to a Jewish event for young professionals. On the one hand, they wanted to go. On the other hand, they were having doubts.

“We went together and we were kind of worried,” said Tilson, who grew up in St. Louis but left to attend college at Indiana University and University of Missouri. “We thought, ‘We’re not going to know anybody.'”

In the end, their fears gave way to relief.

“I walked in and felt like I knew a great group of people from school, Hebrew camp I attended, college, the Israel trip that I went on,” said Tilson, now 23 and living in Chesterfield. “It made me feel really comfortable that even though some have moved away, I still knew so many people and it made me want to continue to be involved.”

Tilson’s story seems indicative of both the positives and the challenges that face young adults trying to connect to other Jews in the community. In many ways, it seems to reflect the larger St. Louis scene, friendly and welcoming even to those who have been away while sometimes insular and cliquish to those who don’t have a history in town.

“For me, I think it’s been very accessible,” said Tilson. “I grew up in St. Louis and my family belongs to B’nai Amoona. I’ve always been connected to the Jewish community.”

The challenge

Tilson’s vignette is typical of those recounted by young adults who return to town after graduation or even after launching a career. Generally, most don’t find it difficult to reintegrate with their roots, especially with the help of various organizations in the area that work to connect younger adults to each other and the resources they need to live “Jewishly.”

Moishe House is one of those organizations. Created in 2006 in Oakland, Calif., the group now has 33 chapters in 13 countries. St. Louis is one of 21 locations in the United States where the effort has gained a foothold.

Backed by a local philanthropist, the group was co-founded by David Cygielman in a Bay Area house several friends were renting. It didn’t take long to realize the potential market for the group. The first event was a Shabbat dinner – to which a staggering 73 people turned out.

“It was really eye opening. From that, we got an email from people in San Francisco saying, ‘Hey, can we do this out here?'” recalled Cygielman, now the initiative’s 29-year-old CEO, who recently visited St. Louis.

Cygielman said Moishe House helps fill the gap for individuals aged 22-30, people who are too old to be involved with high school or college organizations but still too young to feel connected to established groups in the Jewish community which are often focused on members who have been involved for decades.

Cygielman said that Moishe House attracted more than 50,000 people to events worldwide in 2010. The most popular program it puts on remains Shabbat dinners, something he said illustrates a demand for basic rather than exotic connections to Judaism.

The need, he said, is growing as young Jews wait longer and longer to settle down, get married and have children.

“I think it’s getting better but it depends on what perspective you are coming from,” he said. “If you are sitting in a long-standing institution like a Federation or synagogue, it can still be a serious challenge. The question still is, ‘Where is the place for people who don’t have their roots yet in that community?'”

Nor is it just one community that’s at issue. The average young Jewish professional coming out of college is a part of the most mobile generation in history and is likely to have seven different jobs over the course of his or her life, Cygielman said. That means networking – on a national scale – is becoming vital.

“You might live in D.C. one day but you could be living in St. Louis or San Francisco the next,” he said. “That’s not a scary thing. That’s OK.”

Finding the ‘password’

One need not look further than the local Moishe House to find evidence that some have no trouble finding their niche in the Gateway City.

“I came here knowing no one my own age,” said Jordan Mandel, 25, a resident of Moishe House. “I had a lot of family members but when I joined Moishe House, suddenly everyone knows all my family and all my cousins here.”

Mandel said he felt plugged in more quickly than he had elsewhere.

“My personal experience having lived in Chicago and then trying to become involved in St. Louis, it’s much easier,” he said. “It’s better connected, partly because it’s a smaller city, I feel. It seems like every Jewish person involved in one thing is involved in other ways.”

Still, the intimate connectedness of St. Louis Jewish life can be a double-edged sword, keeping people out if they can’t locate the door to get in.

“Sometimes my roommates and I joke around that it’s kind of like a secret club and you have to have to have the password,” he said, noting that his group is trying to address that concern. “We want to get away from that and be more recognizable.”

Others around the community tell a similar story. Seth Williams, a 23-year-old B’nai Amoona congregant living in University City, said he felt there were many outlets for Jewish life in St. Louis.

“You get out of it what you put into it,” he said.

Still, the “password” phenomenon persists. Once you are in it’s easy to meet and mingle but getting there can be tougher since the involved component of Jewish St. Louis tends to feature the same names working in multiple organizations. The tight bonds that make it so easy to stay connected can also make it more difficult to get connected in the first place.

“So how do you reach out to them? How do you find them? How do you know who they are?” Williams asked. “That’s something I can’t answer and I’ve been trying to find the answer. That’s the biggest challenge.”

Rabbi Hershey Novack believes the question could be both geographical and spiritual.

“Young people are looking for a sense of community, however, it is not at all clear that what the American Jewish community has invested in over the past 50 years is what they seek,” he said.

Novack, director at Chabad on Campus Rohr Center for Jewish Life, believes the community has invested heavily in infrastructure in suburbia when that’s not necessarily where the lives of young adults are focused. He also believes topics addressed should be deep and meaningful.

“Our college students are as ambitious, smart, driven and capable as any and so they aren’t looking for superficial things,” he said. “They’re intellectual, motivated and highly accomplished and their sense of Jewish involvement ought to reflect that.”

The house Next Dor

Yoni Sarason believes the question is a broad one.

“The issues that are happening in the Jewish community aren’t specifically Jewish community issues,” he said. “The demographic crisis of young adults in St. Louis is across all denominations.”

Sarason runs Next Dor, an organization run out of a refurbished house next to Central Reform Congregation in the Central West End. Similar in many ways to Moishe House, the initiative is centered on providing a venue for events aimed at young Jewish adults as well as a place they can meet and mingle.

Sarason said that the Gateway City often has trouble retaining young adults. Part of the problem is a troubling job picture for college graduates but just as important is the underlying perception of the city. People think of St. Louis as a nice place to raise kids, said Sarason, but for unmarried twenty-somethings who haven’t reached the stage of life where children and family replace parties and friends, there is little compelling reason to be here.

It’s something that’s woven deeply into what Sarason calls the “social fabric” of the city, an ethos so familiar that for most St. Louisans it has become an inside joke in itself.

“People know the people they went to high school with,” he said. “When they move back here, that’s what they connect to. For transplants and people who want to move beyond that and explore more, this is a very hard city to be in.”

Sarason said that during its time in operation, Next Dor has learned to be open to any number of different ideas for events. Some he thought were compelling turned out to attract few while he was surprised by successful events he initially suspected would fall flat.

“We have to be attached to the individuals and not our egos and what we think that they want,” he said.

As Sarason is interviewed at Next Dor’s dining room table, guests are gathering for the evening’s event behind him, a Kaballah poetry reading that’s attracted nearly 20 people despite the frosty conditions outside.

Sarason said the get-together, while it retains a Judaic focus, is an example of breaking down social barriers and an acknowledgement that Jews have connections in the general community as well.

“A lot of the people here aren’t even Jewish,” he said. “Who cares? We’re doing something bigger.”

Federation efforts

Sarason’s role with Next Dor isn’t the only one he plays. He also has part-time work at the Jewish Federation in a “concierge” capacity for young people who have just come back from Birthright Israel visits, something increasingly common among today’s twenty-somethings.

“It’s becoming even more ubiquitous in many cases than a bar mitzvah,” he said, “but the work of what comes afterwards hasn’t really been answered.”

Helping to build Jewish identity post-Birthright is Sarason’s focus and represents a larger effort the Federation is making to connect the next generation to Jewish communal life. Of the six priorities identified in the agency’s recently completed strategic planning process, the first two are to ensure the Jewish identity and engagement of future generations and to create a Jewish community that will attract and retain young adults and families with young children.

The second of those means a lot to Jayne Langsam. She’s the Federation’s concierge for families with young children. Though many of those she works with are in their 30s or even 40s, she does find younger families as well.

“They all have the same concerns,” she said. “What I am finding is that the younger parents are having a harder time connecting with people their own age because when it comes to families with young children, the parents tend to be older than their 20s.”

Still, that difficulty sometimes plays second fiddle to certain commonalities.

“What they really want to find, particularly those who are new to St. Louis, is people who have kids the same age or come from the same place so they have something in common to talk about,” she said.

Professional development is another area of focus for Federation – not to mention another of its six priorities. Lee’at Bachar, herself a former Moishe House resident, is a development associate at the Federation who deals with the Young Professionals Division.

“Moishe House and Next Dor are more social in a lot of ways so the defining factor [for us] is that it’s more of a leadership growth division through the community,” she said of Federation’s Young Professional Division (YPD). “It shows people that St. Louis is a great place to be a graduate student, a great place to stay here, be Jewish and raise a Jewish family and that we offer a lot of cultural and educational opportunities as well as ways to give back to the community through service and philanthropy.”

Bachar, who moved here from Milwaukee a year-and-a-half ago, said she found it easy to connect in St. Louis.

“I think I was lucky,” she said. “I came here at a time when Moishe House, Next Dor and YPD had already kicked off, were growing and they are still growing. I found a great community here.”

Today, she said the biggest challenge for YPD is to find events that appeal to its diverse membership. The group represents a broader array of individuals than other institutions that cater to emerging adults. YPD attempts to serve members up to age 40.

“What a 22- or 30-year-old might be interested in is probably not what a 35- or 40-year-old is interested in,” she said. “The challenge is to create meaningful leadership and professional development opportunities that appeal to different demographics within the YPD pool.”

Having an impact

With the Next Dor poetry reading complete, the evening’s 27-year-old organizer, Nicole Rainey, seems satisfied with the results as she scans a room full of twenty-somethings in animated conversations. Rainey, who lives in Dogtown, is reflective when asked about how young adults key into the community.

“That’s a really big question to answer because Jewish identity means different things and affects us in different parts of our lives,” she said.

For Rainey, part of the answer lies in lifecycle events, which she said often connect her to Jewish life. Though she’s not a member of any congregation, she interacts frequently with events and people at Shaare Zedek Synagogue where she grew up and her parents attend.

“It’s still a part of my life,” she said.

On a nearby couch, one of the evening’s readers, Sarah Barasch, said her interaction with Judaism as a young adult is complex.

“I’m probably not a very good representative of the community of twenty-somethings because I’ve always had friends older than me,” she said, noting that she often felt as comfortable around her parents’ friends as those her own age. “I feel like I’m drawn to groups regardless of whether there are other twenty-somethings in them as long as we have common interests. That’s what matters.”

Also complicating the picture is the fact that Barasch is bisexual. Many events geared toward her age group center around heterosexual dating, which can be alienating.

She said she and her friends do partake in Jewish practices from Shabbat dinners to candlelighting. She attends at CRC and Shir Hadash, the latter of which counts her as a member.

The 23-year-old, who works as an organizer at a local interfaith social justice group, said she’d like to see a stronger focus on social justice in regards to events in the community.

In a broader sense, she seems to express what many young adults around the community are looking for.

“That’s what’s most important in my life, regardless of what I’m doing,” she said. “It’s that connection to people who really care, are really serious about impacting the world,” she said.