The Seivah-trained volunteer companion provides a comforting, listening, non-judgmental presence for a person with dementia and his or her loved ones.

Dementia isolates not only the person who directly experiences it, but also his or her caregivers. Seivah supports both people with dementia and their loved ones and helps them to stay engaged with one another.

Our goal is to create a society, starting with the organized Jewish community, in which dementia is demystified and destigmatized and where people feel welcomed and supported after their diagnosis.

According to the Alzheimers Association, a person is diagnosed with dementia every 35 seconds. A cure for Alzheimers and other forms of dementia is years, if not decades, away. So we have to learn to live with it, despite our fear of it. As Ann Davis Basting writes in Forget Memory, “Living in the time of dementia means that we must ‘burrow into that fear, to directly confront it, and thereby come to understand it more fully so that it won’t interfere with living a full life.”

To live with people with dementia and to take their needs seriously means, first and foremost, to recognize their humanness, despite their cognitive impairment. All too often we describe people with advanced dementia as being “hollow inside,” or as “empty shells.” A more apt metaphor would be to compare them to geodes, hard to crack, but with riches inside. The recent film, “Alive Inside,” documents the way that music can reach people who seem to be unreachable.

People with dementia benefit enormously when they continue to lead active spiritual lives in community with others. Ironically, dementia isolates people, just when they need to feel even more connected and spiritually alive. Seivah works with individuals with dementia to help them maintain all these life-essential connections. What’s more, among all the gerontologists, health aides and other professionals involved in dementia care, there is often no one dedicated to help rabbis and laypeople address these spiritual needs. Seivah is working to fill this void.

Seivah has created Care Buddies, a volunteer companionship program for people with dementia. Our Care Buddies are trained based on a Seivah-created curriculum. Our unique program is based on an active dialogue  between Seivah, our volunteers, people with dementia and their caregivers. The Care Buddy Program has been successfully piloted throughout the New York area and continues to thrive.

Seivah is proud to provide curriculum and staff support for a Memory Cafe, run by the Alzheimer’s Association, Hudson valley Chapter, in collaboration with Westchester Jewish Community Services. The Memory Cafe is a dementia-friendly social experience – a “day on the town” for people with dementia and their caregivers. The Memory Café helps to reinforce much needed social connections and provides a supportive environment for people with dementia and their care companions. To attend or to learn more: pgaston@alz.org

Building off the successful implementation of our Care Buddies Program, Seivah is currently expanding the Care Buddies program to three synagogues across North America.

Based on the success of the Memory Café, Seivah has created the world’s first dementia-friendly Shabbat prayer and Shabbat meal experience in a synagogue. Caregivers can invite old friends to worship and share a meal in a space they have shared for years.

You, or someone whom you care about, just got diagnosed with Alzheimers or another form of dementia. The first thing you need—right now, before anything else—is information. Seek out the facts, support groups, and other practical information you need through the Alzheimers Association.

The other first thing you need—right now, before anything else—is to start thinking about what this all means. Deep forgetting challenges identity to its core. Who am I, if I am not what I do, or used to do, professionally? Who am I when my own mother now calls me by the name of a long-deceased aunt? Seivah can help reframe these existential questions and help answer them.

A new diagnosis makes our to-do lists grow, and that fact tempts us to put off the existential questions. Don’t do it! Spend some time, if only a few minutes a week, actively engaged with the questions of how to remain spiritually alive through this experience, of how to create new meaning even as old meaning is being eroded.

That’s what Seivah’s Ideas blog is for. Our job is to research and present new and imaginative thinking about how to stay spiritually connected when dementia threatens to make us otherwise. Some of what we bring comes from a Jewish place, from the traditional wisdom of our sacred literature and our vital folkways. But just as the questions of meaning that dementia evokes are universal, Seivah is committed to making wisdom available in whatever form it can be expressed.

Seivah works collaboratively and relies on Metro NY synagogues, as well as the following organizations:

• Westchester Jewish Community Services
• Engage Westchester
• The Alzheimers Association of the Hudson Valley
• The Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary

Seivah also receives mentorship from the Doula Program to Accompany and Comfort

Seivah’s seeds are being planted with the generous support of many individual donors. To support Seivah or contact us to discuss forming an organizational collaboration, please contact us.

SPIRITUAL COMPANIONS PROGRAM
Seivah’s sensitive, dedicated volunteers visit weekly with individuals with dementia and their families. These visits are not mere “cheer-up” calls to a person in need; they are the basis for friendship. The Seivah volunteer helps to create a “spiritual traveling kit”—a collection of music, pictures and objects associated with good memories —to help the person with dementia feel connected and alive even after verbal communication becomes difficult.

HAVE A SKILL?
Seivah is always in need of great people with technical, organizational, and administrative skills. If you have gifts to give to a lean, startup nonprofit doing critically needed and innovative work, please contact us at jlbeyondmemory@gmail.com.