Eva-Lynne Leibman and Hiroko Nogami-Rosen look forward to the day when they can pick up the phone and say, “Dayenu!”
That day should be sometime in January, when the new $80 million headquarters of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco is expected to open.
And “dayenu” will not only mean that the massive construction project is completed — an earlier target date of December recently was extended — but that Leibman and Nogami-Rosen’s Judaica store by that name is open for business.
Dayenu will sit just off the lobby of the JCC at 3200 California St. and will mark the reappearance in San Francisco of a commercial Jewish gift shop.
“Everybody we talk to was very, very supportive of our idea,” said Nogami-Rosen, who met Leibman when both had children attending Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco. “Nobody said, ‘Oh we don’t need it.'”
In fact, Nogami-Rosen said she got the idea for the Judaica store after getting tired of scouring around for b’nai mitzvah gifts during the bat mitzvah year of her now-15-year-old daughter, Ava.
Apart from shops at synagogues and a couple of businesses that sell by appointment, there are no full-scale Judaica stores in town, they said.
Nogami-Rosen and Leibman teamed up through mutual friends and the two, who share a background in retailing, recently sealed an agreement to rent the 1,000-square-foot spot from the JCC.
Along with plans to carry shofars, dreidels, seder plates, candlesticks and other ritual objects, the partners will sell Jewish books, jewelry, ceramics and other original work by local and Israeli artists.
“Anything with any kind of Jewish bent to it at all,” said Leibman.
While Leibman and Nogami-Rosen concentrate in coming weeks on design plans and buying trips, the three-level JCC is taking shape at the corner of California Street and Presidio Avenue.
Behind protective netting, workers are laying gold-colored bricks, welding steel beams and hanging plasterboard.
When completed, the 42,158-square-foot building will house a fitness center, two swimming pools, a 430-seat theater, a restaurant, preschool and multiple classrooms and lecture halls — plus a 181-space underground parking garage.
Anticipating at least 2,000 JCC members upon its January opening, JCC officials expect “to have 4,000 to 5,000 people coming through the doors a day,” according to spokesman Aaron Rosenthal.
Leibman and Nogami-Rosen hope many of those visitors stop by their store. They envision JCC members shopping for a gift after a gym workout or after dropping their youngsters off at the preschool along with customers who make a special trip to their store.
“Dayenu” — the Passover song that proclaims that just one act of God’s goodness would have been enough — seemed like an appropriate name for a store specializing in Jewish merchandise.
“The name really just came right out of the blue,” said Leibman. Deeming that they were filling a need, the two women kept the title, confident that Jews would instantly recognize the name as Jewish and associate it with a feeling of “joy and perseverance.”
“Because we are both artists, the store will have an elegant and artistic feel,” said Leibman, who has done printmaking and greeting cards while Nogami-Rosen works in ceramics and fabrics.
The San Francisco project isn’t the only new JCC under construction locally.
In Foster City, a new Peninsula JCC is going up as part of a 12-acre North Peninsula Jewish Campus that also will house the Jewish Day School of the North Peninsula along with offices for the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services and the Jewish Community Federation. Under a partnership with the city of Foster City, the groups are leasing the city-owned land for 55 years.
This 47,000-square-foot JCC will feature a fitness center, gym, indoor and outdoor swimming pools and classrooms. Officials hope to open the center sometime next spring.
It will replace a 3,000-square-foot facility that had been located in Belmont and became woefully small, according to Rachel Modena Barasch, a consultant working on the project.
“The pools are dug out and the plumbing is going in,” she said. “The metal framing is all up, and it’s almost complete. Things are progressing very nicely.”
To the south, the Albert L. Schultz JCC in Palo Alto moved last summer to a temporary home while it makes plans to build permanent quarters on the former campus of Sun Microsystems. The JCC was forced to leave its longtime home on Arastradero Road to make way for a Palo Alto middle school.