last word
Abby Stamelman Hocky
CELEBRATES RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES
SA SHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
Courtesy of Abby Stamelman Hocky
P ennsylvania founder and name-
sake William Penn established
the colony — before it became
the City of Brotherly Love — in the
name of religious freedom.

Yet by the 21st century, New York,
Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles
had all established interfaith centers,
but Philadelphia had not.

In the early aughts, Abby Stamelman
Hocky, associate executive director
of the Jewish Community Relations
Council of Philadelphia at the time,
traveled to New York to visit James
Morton, founder of the Interfaith
Movement of New York, alongside
Rev. Richard Fernandez, who was
then the leader of the more localized
Neighborhood Interfaith Movement in
Northwest Philadelphia. It was in New
York that she made that realization.

“It all of a sudden opened our eyes
to the fact that there were these inter-
faith centers in major cities around
the country and around the globe,”
Stamelman Hocky said. “And why
here, in the birthplace of America and
religious freedom, wasn’t there some-
thing like that?”
Stamelman Hocky sought to change
that. In January 2004, she helped
found the Interfaith Center of Greater
Philadelphia, which later became
Interfaith Philadelphia.

Today, Interfaith Philadelphia con-
tinues its mission to “promote social
harmony and inter-religious under-
standing” through a series of partner-
ships offering certificates on faith and
social impact and interfaith leadership
with the University of Pennsylvania’s
Center for Social Impact Strategy and
Interfaith America, respectively.

The organization has worked with
seminaries and religious organiza-
tions to build relationships and pro-
mote interreligious education and
dialogue. Since its inception, Interfaith
Philadelphia has offered a youth pro-
gram to build leadership skills with
middle schools, high schools and col-
leges. The program has worked with
1,000 youth over 19 years.

“It’s really shaped the career paths,
the college experience and confidence
that young people have in going into
this time, with knowing how to really
respect and appreciate people across
all kinds of differences,” Stamelman
Hocky said.

Stamelman Hocky, 66, like the youth
Interfaith Philadelphia works with, ben-
efited from an early introduction into
community organizing. After receiving
her bachelor’s degree in sociology from
Lafayette College, Stamelman Hocky
attended Wurzweiler School of Social
Work at Yeshiva University in New
York for her Master of Social Work
degree. She’s also involved in the local
Jewish community as a member of
both Congregation Beth Am Israel and
Or Zarua.

When she arrived at the JCRC in
1980, she felt well-prepared to work for
the organization.

“It was really a proud way to serve
the community from my Jewish iden-
tity and my Jewish professionalism,
to work with the broader commu-
nity,” Stamelman Hocky said. “And
that’s only prepared me for the kind of
change and vision that I saw was possi-
ble in Philadelphia.”
In the two decades with JCRC,
Stamelman Hocky had always had an
interest in interreligious relations. In
working with so many faith organi-
zations in the Philadelphia area, she
became well acquainted with the power
of religion in conversations around
social values and social justice.

“There’s something very, very pow-
erful in people inspired by the deep
wells of their faith, however they define
spirituality in their lives or however
they orient around religion,” she said.

Stamelman Hocky
founded Interfaith Philadelphia at a time when
magnifying the power of religious val-
ues and forging deep interreligious
connections was more tenuous.

Still, soon after 9/11, 2004 was marked
by continued religious prejudice, espe-
cially toward the Muslim community.

In Interfaith Philadelphia’s early days,
the organization was focused on “prej-
udice reduction.”
People of other faith groups were not
familiar with Muslim practices or didn’t
know about how the Holocaust contin-
ued to impact the Jewish community.

Step one of Interfaith Philadelphia’s
work was getting people to understand
their differences and not see them as
threats or detriments.

“The kind of classic dialogue work
that goes into meeting your neighbors
and such was a lot of the fabric of
the context in which we were living,”
Stamelman Hocky said.

Today, Interfaith Philadelphia is
working on building “civil conversa-
tion,” a dialogue among faith groups
that aims to go beyond religious toler-
ance to celebrate religious differences
and understand how religious diversity
can enhance one’s faith identity and
connection to a wider community.

“The world has become so much
more aware that multiculturalism and
multiracial relations and interfaith
relations are all part of a spectrum of
diversity, that we like to feel is kind of
the new pluralism that our founders
here really envisioned but could never
have imagined,” Stamelman Hocky
said. Stamelman Hocky knows that the
work of building meaningful inter-
faith connections extends beyond her-
self and Interfaith Philadelphia. As she
thinks about the future of interreli-
gious relations in Philadelphia, there’s
a core question she asks: “What does it
look like to create a rich and multicul-
tural society?” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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