News

On Friday, November 15, the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco brought over 200 people together in community to enjoy meaningful rituals, live music, and a tasty buffet dinner from Wise Sons.

On November 17, 1,800 thinkers, leaders, scholars, and educators gathered in Palo Alto at the Oshman Family JCC for the 10th annual Z3 Conference.

This November, the new film “Among Neighbors” premiered at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. The film was executive produced by Koret Board Co-President Dr. Anita Friedman.

Last year, many K-12 schools faced unprecedented challenges in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and the ensuing war. As a result of rising antisemitism, many families pulled their children out of public school systems, feeling like they didn’t belong. In an op-ed for theChronicle, JCRC’s Tye Gregory lays out a roadmap for teachers, administrators, and other school officials to ensure that every child feels safe and supported in the classroom.

ANU Museum of the Jewish People has become a nexus for helping people—in Israel and around the globe—to explore their feelings, process their grief, grow their resilience—and take the long view of Jewish history in the wake of the October 7th attacks. This summer, we had an opportunity to talk with Naama Klar, the director of ANU’s Koret International School for Jewish Peoplehood, and Tal Gottstein, the executive director of the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization (a partnership between ANU and Tel Aviv University), about three new major projects: an immersive, emotional art exhibition; an educational workshop—and training program—on building resilience; and a broad-based catalog and archive of social media and other documentation from October 7th to preserve for scholars in the future.

Humans have many ways to mourn. Channeling grief into creativity, making something that can be seen, or heard, or read can be comforting and healing. And for the viewer, the listener, the reader, these expressions can be equally moving. The ANU Museum’s exhibition titled October 7: A Space of Anguish, Loss, Anger, Memory and Sorrow, presents the work of 25 Israeli artists. Some pieces are reactions to the attacks, several are earlier works by artists who were killed on October 7 or died subsequently, all of them memorialize what has been lost.

The word resilience is very front-and-center, even a bit buzzy, in our times. In the protracted post-October 7 uncertainty, Israelis and Jewish people everywhere aspire to strengthen their resilience coefficient, to take the long view of Jewish and world history in a particularly fraught period. In the summer of 2024, we had a chance to chat at length with three leaders at ANU about three new major projects begun in the aftermath of October 7. One of them, the Jewish Resilience Project (JRP), is a workshop—and training program—designed to promote healing by increasing individual and collective resilience.

A foursome of PhD candidates in history at Tel Aviv University is building a database for the future. “The Civil Archive of the October 7th War” will document, by gathering and cross-indexing social media posts from various public platforms and forums, how civilians—not the government, not the military—are feeling about the October 7 attacks and the ensuing war. If you think of social media threads as spontaneous testimony, the database will provide an archive of aggregated, integrated social commentary from diverse viewpoints, giving the broadest possible context for future research.

As Bay Area JCCs continue to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, they are now in a position to reimagine themselves. By prioritizing innovation, data, and above all listening to their community, JCCs are constantly adapting in order to meet people where they are.

Urban Adamah, one of just a handful of Jewish urban farms in the United States, is celebrating 13 years in Berkeley. The “Urban Adamitzvah” celebration will feature live music, dancing, hands-on farm activities and treats made with organic produce grown on the land.

Jewish Story Partners has unveiled its latest list of grantees, with $500,000 to be distributed to 21 in-the-works feature documentary projects. The latest grants by the organization means JSP has now awarded 101 films a total of $3 million since its founding in 2021.

On Tuesday, June 18, JCCSF will host its first Juneteenth event, hosted by three prominent Black Jewish leaders: Ilana Kaufman, CEO of the Berkeley-based Jews of Color Initiative; Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, a Yiddish vocalist and composer; and award-winning writer and chef Michael Twitty.