Bassie Taubes, a registered nurse and the director of community outreach for Ematai, will be the featured speaker on Monday evening, September 16, at 8 p.m. at the Young Israel of Stamford, 69 Oaklawn Avenue in Stamford. Her topic is “Beginning the Discussion: A Workshop on How to Complete a Halachic Living Will … and Why It’s Important.”

The program is being sponsored by the Stamford Chevra Kadisha and is open to all community members free of charge.

The program will guide participants on how to start a conversation about this subject with their family, how to designate a health care proxy and a rabbinic consultant, as well as how to communicate personal health care preferences and Jewish values.

Ematai was founded in 2001 as the Halachic Organ Donor Society (HODS) to educate the Jewish community about organ donation. In 2023, the organization was relaunched as Ematai with a rededicated mission: to enable Jewish families to navigate an increasingly complex healthcare journey, particularly with regard to the dilemmas of aging and end-of-life treatment.

Its website (ematai.org) contains educational resources, such as informative and thought-provoking essays, articles, videos, webinars and lectures.

The organization also offers real-time counseling, which includes a hotline for patients, rabbis, and healthcare professionals.

Finally, you can find advanced planning tools on the website, including a living will and conversation primer.

No registration is required.

Michael Feldstein, who lives in Stamford, is the author of “Meet Me in the Middle” (meet-me-in-the-middle-book.com), a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish life. He can be reached at [email protected].