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After agreeing to serve as adviser for Leigh High School’s new Jewish Culture Club, teacher Jonathan Yani expected just a couple dozen students to attend the first meeting in fall 2022. 

The club’s student leaders were actually nervous that no one would show up at all. “There’s nobody here,” vice president Edden Ofri recalls telling club president Marie Levkovich as the meeting was set to begin. 

Then people started filing in. More and more arrived. Before long, the room at the San Jose school was packed. The final headcount for the first meeting was nearly 100 students.

“My jaw fully dropped. I was really shocked,” said Ofri, who is about to start her junior year. 

The club has continued to grow, with around 200 members among the school’s 1,800 students. Non-Jewish students make up more than half of the members. 

That fits with one of the Jewish Culture Club’s goals. Since its inception, it has aimed to foster connections between Jewish students and their non-Jewish peers. Not only does the club celebrate Jewish holidays and talk about Jewish history in an engaging way, members also discuss thorny issues like stereotypes and antisemitism.

Schools across the Bay Area became flashpoints for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre sparked the ongoing war. Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe in their schools where antisemitic activity and harassment have flared. By comparison, Leigh High seems to be somewhat of an anomaly.

Ofri, Levkovich and Itai Shechter Gelles, the club’s founding members, are either Israeli by birth or have Israeli parents. The three consider themselves lucky to attend Leigh High, especially when they talk to friends at other local schools.

“Leigh is a great school. There’s a lot of Jewish people, a lot of Israelis… so there’s a big community,” said Levkovich, who is entering her junior year. “Overall, student life is really great. Genuinely, I think we’ve landed in one of the best schools.”

The Jewish Culture Club has not been immune to hate. Members have witnessed a student do a heil Hitler salute in front of their table at a club fair, spotted graffitied swastikas on campus and read a comment posted on the club’s Instagram page that said, “One day you all will die :).” The comment has since been deleted.

How do club members respond to such hostility? “With a maturity beyond their years,” according to Yani.

“They don’t take the bait,” said Yani, a 40-year-old technical theater and engineering design teacher. “It’s actually been amazing because they do come talk to me about it. But by [then], they’ve already unpacked it and know that this is typically coming from a place of just outright ignorance and stupidity.” 

Shechter Gelles, the club’s secretary, said that Jewish students are learning how to handle the rise in antisemitism.

“It pains me so much to say this, but it’s normal nowadays,” said Shechter Gelles, who is about to start his junior year. “If you push back violently, that’s not going to help, it’s going to get more violent. You’re going to get them suspended? Now they’ll be more antisemitic. The only thing you can try to do is be nice, respectful and educate them.”

Among the club’s goals is to increase Holocaust awareness. In its first year, it was awarded a $2,500 Student Empathy Grant by Campbell Union High School District to install 11,000 colored flags on Leigh High’s lawn. The flags represented 11 million people killed during the Holocaust who were Jewish, Roma, Catholic, LGBTQ, Jehovah’s Witness, political prisoners and people with disabilities.

“The reaction was probably the best I could have hoped for,” Levkovich said of the flag installation. “Nothing was ruined, and people were genuinely very interested. … It was the best thing we’ve ever done.”

This past spring, with help from the pro-Israel teen organization Club Z, the Jewish Culture Club hosted an event with Holocaust survivor and memoirist Susanne DeWitt. Speaking to more than 200 students, DeWitt recounted her family’s escape from Germany and the antisemitism she faced after immigrating to the United States in 1945. 

“As much as it is important to remember the Holocaust, the reason we do that is so that it never happens again,” Levkovich said. With antisemitism spiking all over the world, “I think that has been really jeopardized in the past few months.”

Students also re-created the flag installation from the previous school year.

The club is already planning for the coming school year, which begins Aug. 14. Shechter Gelles is doing some advance work for participation in the Daffodil Project, which commemorates the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust by planting daffodils around the globe.

The club’s outreach to Jewish student groups at other schools, its collaboration with outside organizations and its sophistication in promoting its activities make it an outlier among student clubs in its school district and beyond.

“In our district, we are in close contact with other Jewish clubs. They are definitely not as prominent as ours. There aren’t as many people,” Levkovich said. And those who do show up are almost exclusively Jewish, she said.

The Jewish Culture Club credits its success to the accessibility of its events, where both Jewish and non-Jewish students can benefit regardless of background.

Between holding fashion shows for Purim, building “matzah-bread houses” for Passover and assembling a paper-cutout apple tree for Rosh Hashanah, the meetings are social as well as educational — and there’s always plenty to eat.

“We have this one group that has been loyal to us since literally the first meeting. … And I ask them, they’re not Jewish, why are they so committed? It’s all because we make it fun,” Shechter Gelles said. “The community-building comes first, before education.”