It’s never easy to replace a living legend — and in Foster City, Judy Edelson qualifies as that.
Finding the successor for the director of the Peninsula Jewish Community Center since the early 1980s will be “like replacing John Wooden,” says PJCC board president Scott Hartley, likening Edelson to the former UCLA basketball coach who racked up 10 national championships.
But after an exhaustive search, the PJCC has hired its new “coach” — Deborah Pinsky, who starts early in 2008.
“She stood out in a lot of different ways to me,” said Bruce Pasternack, a former board president and search committee member.
“She had a breadth of experience with all different types of centers … and the world of JCCs and other jobs in the Jewish community. She has a great knowledge of what it takes to lead a center and struck me as someone who would be a terrific leader and replace an almost irreplaceable person in Judy Edelson.”
Pinsky, 54, currently is executive director of B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an egalitarian, unaffiliated congregation of 4,000-plus member families. Prior to that, she was executive director of JCCs in Los Angeles, her native Montreal and Toronto, where she brought the center back from near bankruptcy.
The PJCC has grown exponentially in the past few years. Since moving from Belmont to Foster City a couple of years ago its budget has grown from around $2 million to $15 million yearly and membership has jumped from 1,000 to 10,500.
That’s not to say all the challenges are over. The center is still hoping to raise funds to build a theater (and is contractually obligated with Foster City to do so) and has plans for a senior center as well.
“It would be great if I could build that theater and cultural arts center and raise a lot of money in the next couple of years,” said a chuckling Pinsky, whose lightning-fast diction reveals the odd trace of her Montreal origin.
Her other great challenge will be “to take the magnificent facility and add a texture and a tone and soul to it. The building is there — but what kind of identity do we want to have?”
Pinsky, who plans on living in San Francisco and commuting, said she won’t be a clone of Edelson — “though we’re very much alike; we both have so much energy. When the two of us are talking no one else gets a word in edgewise.
“I’m not taking over for someone who was fired or did a bad job but a living legend and one who lets go of the reins very willingly. And you don’t get that all the time.”