The Talk to Me About HIV toolkit was designed for clergy and community leaders at Jewish congregations, schools, and community centers throughout New York City. This toolkit is designed to help you engage actively around HIV/AIDS issues with your congregations and communities—to break stigmas, to build care and trust, and to facilitate necessary dialogue around HIV testing, prevention, treatment, living with HIV, and HIV stigma.
If you’d like to read the Toolkit and learn more about Talk to Me About HIV, get in touch with us and be on the lookout for an eBook version of the toolkit, coming soon!
What is this toolkit?
You hold in your hands the Talk to Me About HIV toolkit for clergy and community leaders at Jewish congregations, schools, and community centers throughout New York City. This toolkit is designed to help you engage actively around HIV/AIDS issues with your congregations and communities – to break stigmas, to build care and trust, and to facilitate necessary dialogue around HIV testing, prevention, treatment, and living with HIV, and HIV stigma.
Who is bringing you this toolkit, and why?
This toolkit is brought to you by Talk to Me About HIV, a project of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), funded by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene through a contract with Public Health Solutions.
In 2017 more than 114,000 New Yorkers are living with HIV. Of those, 20% do not know they are infected. To date, over 100,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS-related causes. HIV is the third leading cause of death for New Yorkers 35 to 54 years old.
In recent years, mention of HIV has often become reduced to an emphasis on condoms and the two words “safer sex.” In this over-simplification, real lives and three-dimensional identities are marginalized. HIV’s impact on any Jewish community can easily encompass personal and unheard stories.
Initiating and sustaining this conversation within Jewish community around HIV is challenging because when we talk about HIV, we talk about so much, all of which can be personally sensitive, politically volatile issues. These discussions are relevant, though, in every Jewish community, even if we are more comfortable thinking they are not. The truth is that HIV can have an impact on anyone’s life.
How can you use the toolkit?
You can use the toolkit to explore a Jewish perspective on HIV and on the many ways it can have an impact in your community – living with HIV, living with HIV risk, being the spouse, partner, family member, or friend of a person living with HIV or at risk of infection.
This information and these insights can help you to be responsive in the moment when a community member comes to you with an HIV-related question or concern. You can also use these tools to initiate discussion with your community—whether from the bimah, during an oneg, at a schmooze, or at a board meeting or members meeting.
Rabbis have the opportunity to engage, empower, communicate respect to, and provide spiritual encouragement to people of many generations, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, and – increasingly – religious affiliations.
We want leaders to be ready to respond when someone approaches them with any concern related to HIV. We also want leaders to communicate that they are approachable. We created this toolkit so that more leaders can say to their communities, “Yes, I am informed, I don’t judge, and you can talk to me about HIV.”
We hope you will be among them.