By Diana Brement , JTNews Correspondent
Name: Esther Bogomilsky
City: Seattle
Age: 34
Occupation: Director of Friendship Circle — “that’s one of them”
What’s on her mind these days: “Making sure I can run everything efficiently.”
Nominated for her role as director of the Friendship Circle, Esther Bogomilsky describes herself in three ways: “I give classes for women, I hold women’s events, and I’m a mom.”
A student and Friendship Circle supporter, Fibi Duke, observes that for Esther, “nothing is too much trouble,” she says. “As a leader, teacher, mother, and friend, she is always willing to get involved and make things happen.”
The Seattle native didn’t start the organization, which she calls “revolutionary,” but brought it to the Seattle area and runs it with her husband, Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky, who serves as executive director. “Colleagues of mine started the Friendship Circle in Michigan,” Esther says, and she felt it exemplified “the foundation of Judaism: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Friendship Circle gives special needs kids something most lack: A friend and a social life. Carefully trained teen volunteers are matched with a participant, spend two hours a week in that child’s home, and participate in group activities two Sundays a month, usually at the Mercer View Community Center on Mercer Island.
Families come from the whole Seattle area, Esther says, from both Jewish and non-Jewish homes. Even though Friendship Circle is affiliated with Chabad-Lubavitch, it is a separate charitable organization and “very few families that are involved are Orthodox,” she notes.
Jewish families are usually given priority, however, if there is an opening. Esther regrets that “I can’t afford to service everyone and everybody…but my plan is, in the future, that any family in King County that needs our help would be able to get it.”
None of the Jewish schools in the area have programs to serve special needs students, so Friendship Circle fills a gap with Jewish themed programs, prayers, songs and holiday fun, “almost like a Jewish school.”
Careful screening and matching of volunteers and clients is a big part of Esther’s job. Volunteers stay with their special friend for the duration of high school and homes must be safe for them. The teens come from a variety of public and private schools in the area and now number almost 100, up from nine kids just seven years ago.
The Bogomilskys also rely on volunteer coordinators and a slew of “behavioral, music, art, movement therapists and [a] Kung Fu Master” for their Sunday programs.
“The amazing drive behind the Friendship Circle,” Esther wrote in an e-mail, “is not only helping these families and their children …, [but] creating a generation of future leaders that learn the most important act of kindness there is today ‘how to give of oneself to others.’”
Even before she took on Friendship Circle, Esther had started the Women’s Learning Circle.
“I’ve always been inspired to teach other women Judaism,” she says.
An upcoming Rosh Chodesh (new moon) series called Lunachicks, focuses on female prophets, and Bogomilsky also organizes a “pretty cool” Shabbat retreat for women every other year.
With the Friendship Circle, the women’s programming, and being a mother herself, “she’s able to juggle it,” says Esther’s own mother, Devorah Kornfeld, a community leader and teacher in her own right. “She’s really an inspiration to me with everything she’s done so successfully and with all the hard work.”
Esther’s passion is “to inspire people towards Judaism,” she says, as well as to speak out about “how women are perceived in Judaism contrary to popular myth.”
Meanwhile, she dreams of a time when Friendship Circle has its own space, including a therapy center where clients could come any time. “I would call us a ‘homeless organization,’” Esther says. “It’s one of the hardest organizations to run because of this.”
Information on both circles can be found at www.seattlejewishwomen.org or www.friendshipcirclewa.org.