The Peaceful Grandparent Project:

with Orot, Center for New Jewish Learning

Practice with Dr. Jane Sherwin Shapiro

January 15 – February 26, 2026

Live Sessions: Thursdays, 2:00-3:15pm ET

January 15, 22, 29, February 5, 19, 26 (no class on February 12)

Program Limited to 25 Participants

Click Here to Register

Discover a Practice and Community to Help You Connect More Meaningfully with Your Grandchildren

The Peaceful Grandparent Project is offered in partnership with our colleagues at Orot. This transformative cohort offers grandparents the tools to deepen connections with their adult children and grandchildren and infuse family moments with sacredness and tranquility.

This accessible six-week course interweaves Jewish wisdom with mindfulness practices and teachings to help grandparents cultivate greater empathy, understanding, and connection in their families.

As A Grandparent, Do You:

  • Wonder about the new role you play within your family?
  • Strive to have the strongest relationship possible with your grandchildren?
  • Try to impart your Jewish values and Jewish pride to your grandchildren?
  • Want to connect more openly and lovingly with your adult children and in-law children?

Joining our Peaceful Grandparent Cohort Will Support Your Journey Towards:

  • Shema – Listening with attunement, without judgment
  • Re-iyah – Seeing and accepting our grandchildren and adult children as they are
  • Shavat va’yinafash – Finding self-care moments of rest and renewal
  • Ahava – Opening the rich complexity of grandparent love
  • Hitchadshut – Seeing the everyday through the lens of holiness
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Testimonials

“Each session gives me the space to explore my grandparenting challenges and beliefs in the context of Jewish sources and other parents’ experiences. Through the close examination of targeted Jewish texts, our small cohort shared, laughed and cried together. And more importantly, we reflected on our relationships with our children and grandchildren.”

- Peaceful Grandparent Project Participant

“I found Peaceful Grandparent to be thought-provoking, stimulating and very interesting. It was rewarding to be with such a knowledgeable facilitator and deep thinking group of grandparents. Peaceful Grandparent enables grandparents to engage with one another on a deep level while studying Jewish texts and readings from other sources, to learn how to deepen their relationships with their grandchildren and to think about the role grandparents play in their grandchildren’s lives and what they want to leave with their grandchildren. Peaceful Grandparent stimulates you to think differently and opens your ears and eyes and heart to new ways of understanding and practice.”

- Peaceful Grandparent Project Participant

Register Today for The Peaceful Grandparent Project

IJS is pleased to offer this course at three tuition levels.
We encourage you to pay at the highest level you can, which will enable more students to participate.

To provide the best experience, this program is limited to 25 participants. In the form below, please select your tuition level, fill in your information, and hit submit to be sent to the registration page.

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Meet Your Instructor

Dr. Jane Sherwin Shapiro

Jane Shapiro is passionate about all aspects of Jewish teaching and learning. She has been a teacher to many over the last thirty five years, in classes ranging from weekly Torah study to Jewish thought, history, and literature and has worked with organizations which include the Florence Melton School, Camp Ramah, Spertus Institute for Learning and Leadership, and Orot. She likes to explore new ways to assist learners in bringing Jewish wisdom into conversation with their lives. Currently she is thinking and teaching about the spiritual practices of being a grandparent. She is a graduate of Princeton University, and received her doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 2017, Jane received an Educators Award from the Covenant Foundation. In 2018 she was featured in an Eli talk on “The Torah of Bubbiehood.” She lives in Skokie, Illinois with her husband David and is also mother to four sons, mother-in-law to three daughters, and grandmother to six.
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Since 1999, IJS has been a leader in teaching traditional and contemporary Jewish spiritual practices that cultivate mindfulness so that each of us might act with enriched wisdom, clarity, and compassion. These practices, grounded in Jewish values and thought, enable participants to develop important skills while strengthening leadership capacities, deepening their inner lives, and connecting more meaningfully with others, Judaism, and the sacred.

Founded in 2014, Orot was started by a group of passionate Jewish educators committed to redesigning the paradigm of Jewish learning and opening up the well of Jewish wisdom to all. Orot creates programs which foster the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities. Orot’s programs provide opportunities and offer tools for meaning-making, nourishment, and refuge using personally resonant and accessible Jewish teachings, practices, and experiences.