It wasn’t long ago that Minnesota teens on a bus ride to a Mid-America Region BBYO convention had plenty of room to stretch out and take up as much space as they wanted.
Last weekend, 45 teens filled a bus to St. Louis for the region’s fall convention, the largest contingent in the region. The large number of teens making the trip south comes as the North Star Council, which represents Minnesota and the Dakotas, has seen massive growth in the past four years.
“I started in 2021 with 107 teen members,” said Alyssa Engelson, the Minnesota JCC’s program director for youth, teens, and camping which includes supervising BBYO’s North Star Council. “At the end of the past school year we ended with 202 members, which is really amazing. We’ve had some really amazing growth, and the teens have worked really hard.”
The growth comes at a fortuitous time, as the BBYO in Minnesota is celebrating its 100th anniversary on Nov. 22. The event will feature havdalah, the premiere of BBYO in Minnesota Centennial Documentary, and a program led by current teen leaders.
The documentary was funded in by a grant written by Tamar Fenton of the Minnesota JCC with the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest to the Minnesota Historical Society.
“It shouldn’t always be incumbent upon us to share our Jewish history,” said Fenton. “The Minnesota community should care about what the Jews have brought to this community. We need these moments of coming together for joy.”
BBYO – the B’nai Brith Youth Organization – was founded in 1923 in Omaha, Neb. It’s comprised of boys’ Aleph Zadik Aleph (AZA) and B’nai B’rith Girls (BBG). Since it’s inception, BBYO counts more than 350,000 alumni, and currently has more than 700 chapters in 50 countries. Unlike other Jewish youth organizations, it’s not synagogue or movement-affiliated.
For the North Star Council, the growth had started before Engelson’s arrival at the Minnesota JCC, when fewer than a dozen girls made up BBG. Now there’s enough for two chapters, and even in the past two years, the growth has been significant.
“When I first joined, it was nowhere near the scale that it is now,” said Ellie Weiss, a junior at Minnetonka High School who is the recruitment chair for the North Star Council. She followed her older brother, Jacob, into BBYO but really attributes her involvement to Ruby Comito, now a college freshman who Ellie knew from Herzl Camp.
“It was camp connections that pushed me to get involved,” she said. “That’s exactly what I do now for all the eighth graders. It’s like the connection between the older and the younger kids.
“I’ve told Ruby this a thousand times, but I would genuinely not be on the board or be in BBYO to the extent I am without her. The hard part is getting people there. But, once they’re there, they’re there.”
While Weiss got involved because of a peer, Lisa Frank, who lives with her husband and kids in Carmel, Ind., was regaled with stories of BBYO a generation before her from her parents, Barb and Dan, who were both heavily involved. Lisa Frank’s experience was what got her younger sister, Robyn Frank, involved. But the Frank sisters had different Jewish experiences when they were teens. Robyn went to and loved her time at Herzl Camp, while Lisa wasn’t a camp kid.
“BBYO was a lot more diverse, and it drew from different schools, different denominations. Some people were affiliated, some people not,” Lisa Frank said. “I felt like there was a lot more opportunities to connect.
“It didn’t have to do with ‘did we go to preschool together?’ Or ‘did we go to camp together?’ Minneapolis is like that.”
Lisa talked fondly about the welcoming community that BBYO created.
“People were on a lot of different kinds of journeys, and it just was like a place where I think a lot of people had tougher journeys in high school,” she said. “It gave a lot of us community and a welcoming, non-threatening feeling to a lot of people.”
Robyn said she didn’t think Lisa liked that she was involved in BBYO.
“I kind of came into her territory,” Robyn said. “But she was going every Wednesday night, and then I just hitched a ride with her. She was a big deal there.”
Both sisters, as participants still do now, learned how to be leaders.
“A lot of things claim to be teen-led,” Weiss said. “We are so teen led, it’s insane. I could tell you where every single dollar we get for every single program is coming from. We have the support we need from Alyssa, but I’ve just gained so many skills.”
Robyn Frank said that the skills she learned have stuck with her.
“When you’re in BBYO, they really give you a lot of credibility as a young person to be able to move throughout the world,” she said, mentioning how they also raised money and planned events. “I remember thinking, ‘They think we’re capable to do this.’ That really stayed with me too, because I think by the time I got into my late teens and early 20s, I [knew] I am capable of doing this because I’ve done this before: I know how to raise money, I know how to plan an event, and I talk to adults. I know how to solve problems.”
As the Franks learned, the lessons from BBYO span generations. Harold Goldfine, whose children and grandchildren were and are involved, said that BBYO was a great way to engage in Jewish content.
“I think that in the home, there are so many things you can do to try to nurture Jewish tradition, but you can’t guarantee that that’s where your children are going to go [in life],” Goldfine said. “It’s another opportunity for them to have a year-round experience with other Jewish kids in both social and traditional cultural activities, because it isn’t just all about parties.”
Goldfine grew up in Duluth, and one of the benefits of being in BBYO was to come to the Twin Cities for conventions.
“You got an opportunity to not only be part of a social peer group, but then you could show how you could play basketball, or how you could compete in in Jewish activities that were part of the convention in a competitive way, with kids that you only saw once a year,” he said. “But then you saw them once a year, and it became, ‘I know this guy from last year.’ And then you saw him at camp, and now we’re camp buddies. It gave you an opportunity to be friends with people, not just in your community, but in the whole of Minnesota.”
Rachel Ganani, who currently works as the chief of staff at the Minnesota Polution Control Agency, said on a recent episode of the Who The Folk?! Podcast, that she traces where her career and life have gone back to getting involved with BBYO.
“Those experiences of being accountable and having to lead together with other peers, planning different activities and philanthropy and giving back … and having programming that they can identify with, it just was a wonderful experience,” she said.
