In early 1983, about 15 San Francisco Jews in their 20s and 30s gathered in Rabbi John Rosove’s living room in the Richmond District. Most of them had seen each other before, at the Shabbat services Rosove had been leading at Congregation Sherith Israel, but they didn’t know one another well.
Carol Gorenberg, then 30, was one of those young people. A transplant from Los Angeles, she was mourning the recent loss of her sister, feeling she had no support network in the Bay Area.
She didn’t know it at the time, but Gorenberg was sitting among the men and women who would become her best friends.
SIMCHA began as a small Jewish singles group, but grew quickly into a young adult network with a mailing list of nearly 300. This week, the group marked the 30th anniversary of its first organized event — a 1983 Passover seder.
While SIMCHA is no longer active, aside from an annual gathering on New Year’s Day, its founding members say their network is notable for the friendships and relationships it spawned.
“We decided very early on that our goals, our identity, should be ‘community and continuity,’ ” says Gorenberg, who was the group’s first president. “And it became clear so quickly that this was really something young people needed.”
Gorenberg had been to Jewish singles events, but she was left feeling cold — especially because once people paired up, they tended to not come back. Members of SIMCHA (Sherith Israel Modern Community of Adults) decided early on that members who coupled up, married or had kids were welcome to stay on.
The result was a community in which people helped each other through thick and thin, showing up for dinners, holiday celebrations and more.
To get started in 1983, SIMCHA advertised a “young adult” seder in the Jewish Bulletin not knowing what to expect, and wound up having to turn people away after maxing out their seating for 100.
“You have to realize that this was a time when there
wasn’t really a concept of single people joining a temple,” she says. “Temple membership was still mostly structured around, ‘You get married, you start a young family, you join a temple.’ ”
SIMCHA provided an alternative, paving the way for many of the Jewish young adult groups that currently call the Bay Area home. As the group held Shabbats, informal dinners and annual retreats, Susan Shavin found just what she was looking for.
“I was in the process of going through a divorce, and I had a small child, and I tried attending several other congregations and wound up feeling somewhat excluded as a single woman among the other Sunday school parents,” recalls Shavin, who joined SIMCHA at age 35. “Very quickly, it became the core of my Jewish community.”
The group disintegrated around 13 or 14 years ago as members began moving to different parts of the Bay Area. Currently there is no young adult group at Sherith Israel, in part because of a loss of the funding that supported SIMCHA and, in part, according to some, because there are so many options for Jewish young adults in the Bay Area these days.
But while they may not see each other very often, SIMCHA members say they still stay in touch and gather every Jan. 1 for a drop-in party. And a few years ago, when one member who had no family nearby had to be hospitalized for a few weeks, the SIMCHA email list sprang into action.
“We arranged for different people to go be with her every day, bring food, help with babysitting, and someone set up a website where people could leave messages of support,” Gorenberg says. “It’s times like that where you understand the true importance of community.”