Filling out a questionnaire isn’t generally a life-altering event. But for Marla Kepniss, the survey she completed four years ago while attending High Holy Day services at Stanford’s Hillel proved to be just that.
At the time, she was new in town, newlywed and uncertain about how she and her husband would transplant their still-evolving Jewish identities from the East Coast to their California address. Then along came the Stanford services — and the survey.
The questionnaire was the work of a recently formed Peninsula group called New Bridges, sponsored by the Jewish Community Federation. Its organizers were looking for Jews just like Kepniss and her husband — people searching for ways to connect to one another and to establish themselves in new or existing Jewish communities.
New Bridges, relates Kepniss, “sort of fell into our laps in the best of timing.”
Not only did Kepniss make links through the group, but these days, she’s helping hundreds of others make their own connections. The 28-year-old social worker and mother recently became president of the Los Altos-based organization, which has a mailing list of 1,700 local households.
“It did so much for me personally,” says Kepniss, who lives in San Mateo with her husband, David, and their 14-month-old daughter, Talia. “New Bridges filled a void that was so obvious when we first moved here.
“The idea and goal of New Bridges is to foster more connected Jews,” she says. “That’s a whole lot more than who joins a JCC or who joins a synagogue or who gives to federation. There’s no attempt to measure joining and membership.”
And she traces everything back to that survey form. The questionnaire was seeking Jews interested in participating in a living-room focus group. The idea was to offer a cozy, nonthreatening setting where participants could share what it meant to be Jewish and what kind of experiences they were seeking.
The couple decided to give the session a try. About a month later, they spent four hours in a Mountain View home with a handful of other participants. They shared their feelings about religion, practice and why many of them had shied away from joining a synagogue, Jewish community center or other established Jewish organization.
“It was wonderful because a lot of the barriers were some of those my husband and I had experienced,” said Kepniss. A recently converted Jew, Kepniss along with her husband, who was raised in a Jewish household, had visited a few synagogues after moving to the Bay Area, but felt no instant chemistry at any of them.
In contrast, the living-room gathering had all the right ingredients.
From that very first meeting, Kepniss met people who are now among her closest friends. The couple regularly participates in potluck Shabbat and holiday dinners with other New Bridges families. They have taken group hikes, including a Passover preparation trek in the Palo Alto hills. On it, participants traveled silently to a destination and then shared views about enslavement and liberation on the way back.
Kepniss writes regularly for New Bridges’ bimonthly newsletter and admits, “I never would have thought at 28 I would have been the president of anything.”
But Joanne Donsky, the organization’s past president, disagrees. “Marla was just a clear leader. We just spotted her immediately.”
Kepniss spends about two hours daily on New Bridges’ business, which these days includes preparing for the group’s annual “To Life! A Jewish Cultural Street Festival.” Set for Sunday, Oct. 6, the daylong event in Palo Alto is expected to draw 17,000 to 20,000 participants.
Another focus is a pilot project in which New Bridges will work with representatives from Hadassah and Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City to help improve outreach to the Jewish community.
Raised in a Catholic family, Kepniss says she discovered an affinity for Judaism during a medical bioethics class she took as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. “I discovered in short order I was absolutely in the wrong religion.” She said she was drawn by Judaism’s focus on community, family and commonality — rather than exclusivity.
Since their first failed synagogue search, the Kepniss family joined Peninsula Sinai Congregation in Foster City about two years ago. They plan to send their daughter to a Jewish preschool next fall.
“That’s come out of connections, individual personal connections, we’ve made with other Jews and that’s all happened because of New Bridges,” she says.
She describes the organization’s mission as a “smashing success” in her life. “We went from feeling like there was no Jewish community to feeling very connected with a Jewish community.”