Comings & goings
Several changes are coming to Maccabi Sports Camp. Founding director Josh Steinharter is passing the baton to Joel Swedlove, who will begin as camp director on June 1. Steinharter helped create the overnight camp and served as director for 12 years, with Swedlove as associate director for the past four years. At the end of the summer, Steinharter will join JCC East Bay as chief operating officer. Also this summer, the camp will be hosted for the first time at Cal State University East Bay in Hayward. Participants will use the school’s state-of-the-art sports facilities, stay in the on-campus dorms and eat in the dining hall.
Rabbi Chayva Lehrman was installed as rabbi of Congregation Am Tikvah in San Francisco May 10 by her mentor, Rabbi Evon Yakar of Temple Bat Yam and North Tahoe Hebrew Congregation. A Kabbalat Shabbat service was followed by a festive community dinner. Lehrman joined Am Tikvah in summer 2023 and is the first rabbi to lead the Conservative-Reform synagogue since the merger of congregations B’nai Emunah and Beth Israel Judea in 2020. Lehrman studied linguistics and Middle Eastern studies at Wellesley College and spent several years working in the House of Representatives and for USAID. She was ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in L.A., where she also received a master’s in Jewish nonprofit management from the Zelikow School.
Madeline Vidibor will begin as chief operations officer for Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco May 31. Vidibor previously served as philanthropic education coordinator for the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco before pivoting to the food service industry. Most recently, she was director of operations at Just Date, a consumer packaged-goods startup.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has elected Moses Libitzky of Piedmont as president of its board of directors. Libitzky is a longtime trustee of the institute and has served as development chair and senior vice president of its board of directors. He is the son of Polish-born Holocaust survivors of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp. He began his career in the computer industry before opening his own real estate development, investment and management company in 1976. He is chairman and principal shareholder of Libitzky Property Companies, as well as the president of the Libitzky Family Foundation, focusing on the future of Jewish life. (He and his wife, J. board member Susan Libitzky, are major donors to J.)
Happenings
The Israel Consulate in San Francisco hosted a Yom HaAtzmaut celebration May 13 on the top floor of the Transamerica Pyramid, owned since 2020 by Israeli-born developer Michael Shvo. More than 100 people attended, including state Sen. Scott Wiener and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, both of whom spoke of their love and support of the Jewish state. Kounalakis noted her many visits to Israel, where her aunt spent 30 years as a Greek Orthodox nun in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. She told the crowd that “despite what you might see on TV or in social media … the bonds between California and the State of Israel remain strong, and many of us in the leadership of our state will work relentlessly to ensure that they always do.”
The speech by Consul General Marco Sermoneta was heartfelt as well as analytical. “This year, what would normally be a festive occasion is clouded by great pain,” he said, noting the murders of Oct. 7, the ensuing war and the suffering of the hostages remaining in Gaza. And yet, he continued, “Israel is what generations of Jews have dreamed of: We will not cancel our celebration.” After describing the wave of antisemitism, cloaked as anti-Zionism, that has exploded this past year, he concluded saying, “Our great country was built on many values and principles, but the single value that shines through the history of our people is our collective hope as a nation that one day we will be able to live in peace with our neighbors. And that, we will never relinquish.”
The eighth-grade class of Yavneh Day School in Los Gatos created a semester-long art project based on their personal identities and responses to Oct 7. Titled “A Seat at the Table: A Feast of Jewish Identity,” the project was inspired by artist Judy Chicago’s work “The Dinner Party.” Chicago’s piece features a massive ceremonial banquet table with 39 place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history, that is decorated with embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils and painted porcelain plates. The Yavneh students each created a chair and place setting that represented their lives, interests, hobbies, dreams and identities as Jews. The artists are Ben Balteriski, Colin Bauman, Cooper Bendzick, Lena Geshuri, Ethan Gur, Delilah Hahn Tapper, Sophia Hotimsky, Ethan Mutchnik, Dan Pozniansky, Ron Pozniansky, Silver Rothstein, Amitai Socolovsky and Sage Zeltser, led by senior art teacher Judy Murphy and associate art teacher Julie Krigel with additional help from volunteer teacher Elise Wolf, alumni Ya’ara Bar, Hannah Null and Naomi Sabes and shinim Rony Rimon.
Congregation Shir Shalom in Sonoma hosted its inaugural community interfaith Passover seder on April 26. Community members and students from diverse faith backgrounds participated in reading from the haggadah and experienced a traditional seder led by Rabbi Steve Finley.
Congregation Rodef Sholom formally dedicated its new building on May 5, exactly 62 years after the dedication of its original building. In recognition of the milestone, the congregation hosted a weekend of programs and activities, kicking off a year of programs and community outreach. Planned highlights include the REAL Mental Health Initiative’s 10-year celebration, a summer outdoor Shabbat series, an expanded calendar of adult and family programs, tikkun olam opportunities and an artist-in-residence series beginning with visiting musician Noah Aronson June 7.
BBYO celebrated its 100th anniversary in the Bay Area with an alumni reunion May 4-5. Some 200 alumni and family members celebrated with two days of events including a Havdalah bash at Oshman Family JCC and a family festival at Saratoga Springs.
Honors
Tom Levy and Judy Silber won several awards in the Religion News Association’s 75th annual Excellence in Religion News Awards for their work in The Spiritual Edge, a religion news project of KALW Public Radio. The awards are for “A Prayer for Salmon,” a five-year reporting project that led to an 11-episode podcast series on the Winnemem Wintu, a Native tribe in Shasta County. The series is about the tribe’s struggles to maintain sacred sites amid ongoing conflicts with governmental authorities over water, land, salmon and Shasta Dam. Levy won first place for excellence in religion photography: gallery. Silber, Spiritual Edge founder, and the rest of the Spiritual Edge/KALW team, won second place in the broadcast category and third place in the podcast category. “A Prayer for Salmon” also won top honors from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for long-form radio storytelling and was named third best podcast of 2023 by The Atlantic magazine.
The California Legislative Jewish Caucus handed out honors on April 29, ahead of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to recognize exceptional work in Holocaust education. This year’s honorees were Tony Thurmond, state superintendent for public instruction; Rabbi Peter Levi, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Orange County/Long Beach; Anita Friedman, co-chair of the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education; Morgan Blum Schneider, director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco; Steve Zimmer, former president of Los Angeles Unified School District; Leah Fenster Williams-Wells, a Holocaust survivor and Palo Alto resident; the Mitzvah Project, based in the Bay Area; Gitta Ryle, a Holocaust survivor, educator and Santa Cruz resident; Mike and Manya Wallenfels, Holocaust survivors and leaders of the New Life Club; Jennifer Rofé, a descendant of survivors and a literary agent; Carolyn Siegel, founder and executive director of If You Heard What I Heard; Mary Bauer, a Holocaust survivor; Lili Bosse, a descendant of survivors and former mayor of Beverly Hills; and Kate Daniels, a descendant of a survivor, an educator and a member of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors.