L’Hitraot

L’Hitraot

Zach Benjamin | Chief Executive Officer, Jewish Long Beach

Four years ago, my family and I joined a Long Beach-area Jewish community embarking on a journey of generational evolution. I assumed my role as CEO of Jewish Long Beach on the day that the merger between the Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Foundation of Long Beach and West Orange County was legally complete. I inherited a dynamic new organizational structure designed to serve as the engine driving sustainable Jewish life in and around Long Beach, guided by creativity, bold thinking, and Jewish values, for generations to come.

My daughter, Zoe, took her first steps in the foyer of our house near Heartwell Park. Eight months later, two days prior to her second birthday, we learned that the projected two-week closure of the Weinberg Jewish Long Beach Campus, in an attempt to help stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus, would necessarily delay her enrollment in the Alpert JCC’s Early Childhood Education Program (ECE). It would be over a year before the ECE would resume full-time operation.

Today, over three years after the onset of the pandemic, Zoe, now five years old, will soon graduate from the ECE’s pre-kindergarten program. Meanwhile, Jewish Long Beach and the AJCC have joined forces to create a dynamic, nimble, vibrant Jewish communal institution that is poised to raise the tide for our entire Jewish community, as well as to serve in perpetuity as the vessel through which we fulfill our Jewish imperative to be a light unto our neighbors.

As my time as CEO of Jewish Long Beach and the AJCC draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on both the challenges and triumphs of the past four years, and especially on the remarkable accomplishments that our agency managed to achieve under the most trying of circumstances. The day humanity folded in on itself for what ultimately became a nearly 30-month disruption of life and commerce, Jewish Long Beach became a lifeline for our Jewish community and institutions.

Over the course of the next two years, Jewish Long Beach awarded roughly $1 million in COVID-19 emergency relief grants to congregations and Jewish organizations throughout our 15-municipality catchment area and beyond. These efforts funded infrastructure and services ranging from distance learning technologies for religious schools and the Hebrew Academy and access to mental health services for children and seniors, to food, medication, and basic supplies for those finding themselves isolated and in financial hardship. We leveraged the partnership between our volunteers and staff to deliver thousands of meals to seniors in need, as well as to fund equipment allowing congregations and Jewish agencies alike to provide meaningful social and spiritual engagement in a time of crippling uncertainty and, for many, emotional anguish.

As Jewish Long Beach and the AJCC fulfilled their responsibilities to help buoy Jewish life during the pandemic, our lay leadership and staff undertook the two-year labor of love that resulted in the full integration of the two agencies. Together, our volunteer stakeholders and professionals re-imagined and recreated our governance and staffing structures, revised our mission statement, oversaw completion of the first comprehensive Long Beach-area Jewish community study in seven decades, and will soon deliver a bold strategic plan and vision for our future. By every measure, Jewish Long Beach is an agency poised to revolutionize how Jewish values guide our thought, behavior, and service to others, ensuring that we and generations not yet born will benefit from vibrant, sustainable Jewish institutions fueled by creativity, tzedakah, and joy.

Challenge and struggle are the soil that nurtures opportunity and fulfillment. The unprecedented headwinds of the early 2020s have yielded opportunities limited only by the bounds of our imagination. However, in order for Jewish Long Beach and our community to fully realize their potential for radical impact, we must refocus on our foundational purpose and principles.

Jewish federations began well over a century ago as local agencies through which communities raised funds to aid Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Europe. Jewish community centers initially served as temporary housing for Jewish immigrants to North America, providing families with shelter and basic needs as they established themselves in new American and Canadian diaspora communities.

Too often, it is suggested that the mission of Jewish Long Beach is to raise and steward community assets, to offer best-in-class aquatics, fitness, and early childhood education programs, or to maintain an attractive, sustainable Jewish community campus infrastructure. These functions are critically important to our work. However, rather than defining the mission, they are instead the tools with which we address it. The mission of Jewish Long Beach is two-fold: to ensure that the Long Beach area is a place where Jewish life and peoplehood can thrive for generations to come, as well as to best equip our Jewish community to operate in service to others. Thus, it is imperative that we tie every program and initiative of Jewish Long Beach to specific Jewish values, and that our stakeholders and staff alike understand how each function of the agency ultimately advances our core purpose.

The Jewish people’s greatest vulnerability is not to antisemitism or prejudice from others, but rather to apathy within our own ranks. We take Jewish continuity and community for granted at our own significant peril. Thus, it is deeply important that we maintain our focus on the conditions and challenges that necessitated the creation of our Jewish communal institutions, and which render them utterly indispensable in ensuring that we may imbue our children and their progeny with a sense of pride in and commitment to Jewish peoplehood.

Next month, my family and I will leave Long Beach and will settle in another community, where I have taken on a new professional role outside the Jewish world. We will, however, take with us innumerable friendships and fond memories of helping this Jewish community successfully navigate one of the most significant times of challenge in recent human history. While I owe a debt of gratitude to each of the exceptional volunteers with whom I worked at Jewish Long Beach, I wish to extend special thanks to board president Dr. Richard Marcus and immediate past co-president Edie Brodsky, whose leadership and compassion contributed significantly to my professional and personal growth these past four years. I am especially grateful to my extraordinary colleagues on the Jewish Long Beach professional team, whom I admire and through whose partnership I have become a stronger executive.

Thank you to the remarkable Long Beach-area Jewish community for the honor of allowing me to serve you. L’hitraot—farewell for now— and I look forward to watching from afar as our leaders and professionals continue to bring this community and its institutions from strength to strength.