Honors
The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum has added 2024 Olympic gold medalist Amit Elor to its lineup. This summer, the Walnut Creek resident became the youngest U.S. wrestler — male or female — to win an Olympic gold medal. Elor’s bobblehead is available for preorder.
Bill Black of San Francisco has been inducted into the San Francisco Prep Hall of Fame following his 35-year career as a basketball referee. Among the hundreds of people inducted over the years, he is one of a handful of referees so honored. Black is a member of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, where he serves on the Ukrainian resettlement committee. He also serves on the finance committee of the Presidio Concordia Club and the Cal Grid Club and on the boards of the Northern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and the California Basketball Officials Association board. He regularly trains and adjudicates refs. He previously served on the boards of the JCC San Francisco and Camp Tawonga and was co-commissioner of the now-defunct Jewish Youth Athletic League.
The Northern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame has announced its 2024 inductees: Brad Gilbert, Renel Brooks-Moon, Mark Grabow, Jack Anderson and Dr. Dana Weintraub.
Gilbert is a former professional tennis player, tennis coach and tennis commentator and analyst for ESPN.
Bay Area radio legend Brooks-Moon was the S.F. Giants public address announcer from 2000 to 2024 and the first Black woman to be the public address announcer in a World Series and Major League Baseball All-Star game. She is the Mensch Award winner.
Grabow was the longtime director of athletic development for the Golden State Warriors and played college and pro soccer.
Anderson is the founder of the Northern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and served as president until 2023.
Weintraub is co-CEO of the Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative.
She also is a clinical associate professor in general pediatrics at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health and a leader in community-based evaluations of team sports to improve the health of children from under-resourced neighborhoods.
The Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco will present the 2024 Tikkun Olam Awards to Manny Yekutiel, owner of Manny’s, and Hannah Beth Schlacter, a UC Berkeley MBA who testified before Congress earlier this year about antisemitism on college campuses.
Frances Dinkelspiel of Berkeley has earned a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism 2025 Alumni Award. The awards go to alumni for “exceptional journalism careers, single achievements, and contributions to education or related fields.” Dinkelspiel is an award-winning journalist and author who co-founded Cityside, the nonprofit news organization behind three Bay Area news sites: Berkeleyside, Oaklandside and Richmondside. She has also written two bestselling books: “Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California” and “Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California,” which the Wall Street Journal and Food and Wine magazine named as one of the best wine books of 2015.
Club Z, a Bay Area Zionist organization for high schoolers, has received a grant from the Jewish National Fund-USA to increase the scope of its work. Additionally, Club Z will collaborate with JNF to provide education on Zionism, Jewish identity and leadership to teens involved in JNF.
Robin Mencher of Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay and Dana Sheanin of Jewish LearningWorks are among 11 Jewish professionals selected for the inaugural group of Leading Edge’s new program, Leadership Lab: Collaborating With Your Board. The group will learn about partnering with boards and analyzing governance practices.
Comings & goings
Anthony Witte of San Francisco has joined the board of directors of 18Doors, a national organization dedicated to inclusion of interfaith families in Jewish communities across North America. Witte is the founder of Witte’s End Consulting, which focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
Happenings
Congregation Beth Am of Los Altos Hills is one of the founding organizations of Silicon Valley Allied for the Common Good, a broad-based community organization that aims to create a more equitable future for the area’s residents.
Brothers For Life, an organization started and run solely by injured Israel Defense Forces soldiers, brought 12 recently injured soldiers to the Bay Area to heal and connect with the Jewish community. On Nov. 7, the soldiers spoke in San Francisco about their military service and their injuries. Brothers for Life is designed to provide emotional, psychological, physical and financial support to injured IDF soldiers beyond what the Israeli government is able to provide.
Roxanne Cohen, chief development officer of the Peninsula JCC in Foster City, has become the fourth generation in her family to donate an ambulance to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical, disaster, ambulance and blood bank service. The vehicle was dedicated at PJCC on Nov. 26 before its shipment to Israel. In 1975, Sadie Auerbach Heller, Cohen’s great-grandmother, sponsored an ambulance for MDA in memory of her brother Meir Auerbach, who was murdered in the Holocaust. Cohen’s grandparents and her parents, Claire and Mike Meadow, sponsored another ambulance. Now Roxanne, her husband and their family are sponsoring one in memory of her parents and brother.
Opportunities
The Bronfman Fellowship is accepting applications for its 2025 program. Open to 26 high school students, the fellowship begins with a seminar in Israel between the fellows’ junior and senior years of high school, followed by monthly virtual meetings and two seminars in the U.S. The program is open to American and Canadian 11th-graders who self-identify as Jewish; no prior Jewish education is required. The application deadline is Dec. 2. For more information, visit bronfman.org.