They say youth is wasted on the young. That old adage didn’t apply to Brian Lurie.
When the rabbi became executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation in 1974, he was only 31. As the record shows, he didn’t waste a minute of his 17 years on the job.
“It was a place to play out all the reasons I became a rabbi,” says Lurie of the federation, “to strengthen the Jewish people.”
Lurie’s tenure, which ended in 1991, was a time of dramatic growth, both in terms of the federation’s finances and vision. Among the most significant achievements was the establishment of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Under the stewardship of Norman Rosenblatt and, later, Phyllis Cook, the endowment eventually grew to nearly $3 billion in assets.
Lurie’s passion for Israel led him to open a federation office in Israel and help create the Amutah, the federation’s Israel-based committee, which ever since has determined Israeli grantees funded by the federation. “With the Amutah, we gave money directly to Israel,” he says. “It’s common today, but then it was radical.”
In addition to a well-established emphasis on social services, Lurie also pushed the federation to focus more on revitalizing Jewish life in the Bay Area.
“I was so young,” he recalls of those days. “All my dreams and aspirations did not have to go through a long process of being hammered down or neutralized because of waiting in line and working my way up the system.”
The Cleveland native came to the federation after having worked as an associate rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
He remembers the organization as “fairly closed” when he arrived in 1974. Fewer grants were divvied out, and the sole office was located in San Francisco. No North Bay or Peninsula satellites yet.
“I came to a small federation with a lot of potential,” he says. “I brought in a staff of young, dynamic people who took this federation and ran with it. It was not a one-man show.”
To further his goal of accentuating the Jewish nature of the federation, Lurie established more retreats for staff, volunteers and donors, bringing in scholars-in-residence and increasing support of Jewish education.
“The federation, perceived as just a social welfare organization, became profoundly Jewish,” he says. ”The whole organization took on the hue of massive Jewish enterprise. I’m not saying people didn’t see themselves as Jewishly involved before, but it had been a secondary issue.”
Lurie moved to New York for a few years in the early 1990s, when he became head of the now-extinct United Jewish Appeal, but returned to San Francisco in 1996 to take the helm at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
His Jewish community activism today is primarily in the realm of Israel-related advocacy and programming.
Looking back, he believes the federation, as well as most Bay Area Jewish agencies and institutions, are stronger than when he started at the organization. But he says there remains important work to do.
“I’d like to see the federation take on the biggest job of all,” he says. “That is meaningful and in-depth outreach to the 80 percent of the Jewish community that’s not involved with Jewish life.”
Lurie not only believes the issue deserves attention, but he also thinks the federation would be the perfect organization to tackle it. “What I always said about the Bay Area Jewish community [was that] it was really up for innovation and taking a risk.”