Disappointed with the “negative messages” sent by many Jewish institutions in America, philanthropist Tad Taube has vowed to create a center in San Francisco that celebrates the Jewish spirit.
In collaboration with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, his family foundation has given a $1 million grant to open the Taube Center for Jewish Life, an academic and cultural Jewish resource to serve the entire Bay Area through the JCC.
The center is expected to challenge the fabric of negative messages, enabling young Jews of today to feel “proud,” Taube said, rather than persecuted.
Like its year-old counterpart at Stanford University, where the program ultimately took over a 95-year-old building, the Taube Center will provide an infusion of classes, workshops and seminars expanding on the JCC’s current offerings — which already attract 3,000 adults a year
It will also offer lecture series, exhibits of Jewish art and culture and a Jewish book festival.
While the Taube Center will still require hundreds of thousands of dollars from other donors to operate each year, the grant provides “a great jumpstart” for the JCC “to construct a world-class program,” said Nate Levine, JCC executive director.
Taube Center programs might include a Jewish political leader explaining the nuances of the American Jewish relationship to Israel, or a renowned Jewish composer talking about Jewish contributions to music, according to Taube, a Woodside resident.
The programs would be offered every few weeks at no charge to the public.
“We are going to be bringing in people from various areas of Jewish life to discuss Jewish contributions in industry, art, music and academe,” said Taube, who serves as board president of the Koret Foundation.
“These will be high-quality offerings to the public that enhance Jewish life by glorifying it and by stressing the endless opportunities available to us because of our great ability to live in this country.”
The center, which will not be a tangible building but a series of ongoing programs, is expected to launch in 2003, when the JCC opens its new state-of-the-art facility.
Eventually the center will create a network between the JCC of S.F. and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford, as well as the Judaica Foundation in Krakow, Poland — his birthplace — and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
Taube chose these four locations because of their similar missions to promote Jewish life. The JCC, for instance, “is one of the more successful Jewish enterprises…that attracts people for positive reasons,” Taube said.
“The synergy between these entities will be extraordinarily important.”
The Taube Center at the JCC of S.F. is expected to provide a wide array of programming, but its focus will be on the accomplishments of American Jews rather than the tragedies they have endured in the past.
That is because Taube believes too many American Jewish institutions are concentrating solely on the negative, making Jews out to be victims in an era when they are not.
“The impact that Jews have had on America is very significant and very positive,” he said. “Jews shouldn’t have to feel like they’re victims anymore.”
Yet, “the message being delivered by many institutions, in terms of their various efforts to cultivate Jewish support, almost invariably contain a negative connotation,” he explained, adding, “almost all Jewish fund-raising is crisis-driven.”
As a result, American Jews “seem to be moving further and further away from our Jewish roots.” Despite having “complete Jewish freedom,” he said, “Jewish family life and spirituality is declining at an alarming rate.”
Taube said the number of Americans “who accept themselves as being Jewish” has fallen from 3 percent in the 1950s to about 1.5 percent, even with the influx of Jewish immigrants.
Taube emigrated from Poland at the age of 7 and lost three-quarters of his family in the Holocaust. Having seen the vibrant Jewish community of Poland almost entirely obliterated in the war, he takes a personal interest in Jewish continuity.
Levine said the center “will help us to provide a higher quality of education and dramatically expand our resources. The name itself will come to represent first-rate Jewish education in California.”