A North Bay JCC has opened a southern hub.
The Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael now has a satellite campus in southern Marin, located about 10 miles from its primary home.
Dubbed “JCC South,” the expansion site is located at 36 Tiburon Blvd. in Mill Valley. It’s meant to be “especially convenient for residents of Mill Valley, Tiburon, Belvedere, Strawberry, Sausalito and Marin City,” according to the Osher Marin JCC website.
The 6,000-square-foot center, which formerly held offices, has two connected buildings with two food-prep areas. JCC South officially opened to the public in April but part of it had already been functioning as a preschool since Oct. 2.
Half of the space is dedicated to the preschool, which serves children ages 2-5, and JBaby programming for infants through age 2, which is expected to begin this summer.
The other half is geared toward community programming for all age groups.
“When we first embarked on this project, this initiative to create JCC South, it was in the middle of pandemic, which is why I think of it as a pandemic success story,” Marin JCC CEO Judy Wolff-Bolton told J. “We were focused on using this opportunity, and we were in a rebuilding mode anyway because of the pandemic. We thought, ‘Let’s have a vibrant, robust satellite site, where we can do a variety of programs for all ages.’”
JCC South’s community events for members and nonmembers include adult learning, holiday celebrations, concerts, cultural events and wellness activities, from yoga to senior workout classes. Community events are rolling out now and will ramp up in the fall.
The expansion represents a milestone in the Marin JCC’s history, which began in 1948 when a small number of families decided to form a community center. Since 1991, the Marin JCC has shared a campus in San Rafael with two other organizations: Congregation Rodef Sholom, a Reform synagogue, and Brandeis Marin, a nondenominational K-8 day school.
“One of the things that’s lovely about our campus [is that it offers] a continuation of Jewish life,” said Wolff-Bolton, who has been with the JCC for 22 years. “It’s quite an interesting experiment. It creates a vibrant Jewish community. We’re a hub, and we wanted JCC South to be an extension of that hub.”
Having a presence in southern Marin isn’t new to the JCC. For 15 years, the Marin JCC operated a preschool out of Congregation Kol Shofar, a Conservative synagogue in Tiburon. During the pandemic, however, the synagogue decided to open its own preschool. The JCC saw the shift as a chance to develop a more permanent presence in the area that went beyond a preschool.
“It was a great partnership with Kol Shofar and our JCC, but we were limited to just a preschool,” Wolff-Bolton said. “And one of the things that came up, as we were there all the time, was ‘Why don’t you have a space where you can have other programs?’”
Renovation work on the new site occurred over the past 10 months, including while the preschool has been operating. The renovations included creating a playground, light, airy classrooms and a warm, family-friendly environment.
JCC South opened to the wider community in April. From April 3 to 7, a welcome week at the satellite site included a cellist concert and a “Shabbat Schmooze.”
Not lost on Marin JCC leaders is the significance of the satellite site’s preschool opening merely five days before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the ongoing war and a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents worldwide. If anything, recent tragic events have underlined the urgency for more Jewish spaces, Wolff-Bolton said.
“Since we opened in October, it has felt more and more that it’s a pivotal moment to have a JCC satellite that emphasizes community gathering and is a place for young families, children, adults and seniors, both Jewish and non-Jewish,” she said. “We want to be a safe place — a safe gathering space to celebrate Jewish culture.”