FEATURE
Comprehensive San Diego Jewish Community Study Poses Challenges and Opportunities by Jacqueline Bull
“This is one of the things that I find most interesting about San Diego,” Betzy Lynch said. “Every other place that I have lived across the United States — which I’ve lived in five other communities — there is centricity to Jewish life, meaning the people live in the general area and if they don’t live in that general area, they can easily get to that general area. And the organizations are all pretty much there. There is Jewish life happening in every pocket, every piece of San Diego county,” Betzy said. If you are in the business of building community across all those tiny pockets in the nooks and crannies of the San Diego landscape, knowing everything you possibly can is crucial. The last time a large-scale community study was conducted was 2003. During the summer of 2022, 2,104 Jewish households were surveyed and now “A Blueprint for our Future” a detailed study of the San Diego Jewish community is available. Betzy Lynch, CEO of the LFJCC; Charlene Seidle, Executive Vice
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President of the Leichtag Foundation and Darren Schwartz, Chief Planning & Strategy Officer for Jewish Federation of San Diego County all sat down with me to talk about the findings in the study and what opportunities it presents ahead of their Dec. 3 community study town hall at the JCC. “We were starting to hear that some of our local agencies desperately needed to know what the Jewish community was looking like coming up on 15 years since the last study and it was going to be very difficult to start planning for the future without having that knowledge,” Darren Schwartz said. To get a new study off the ground, they used a collective funding model where both the major Jewish orgs in the area and smaller groups pooled resources. “One thing that I really, really wanted going into this was that this was not be a study that sits on a shelf–that this really creates a jumping off point for a culture of data seeking and data sharing in our community and that there were some clear points of opportunity we could act upon quickly...There is already an
enthusiasm and we haven’t even officially released it to these organizations,” Charlene Seidle said. Betzy expressed that she hoped the study would either reaffirm things we thought about ourselves or challenge norms by showing what changes had occurred in the community. “One of the things that is also really important to me is that you really paid attention to where there were gaps of opportunity, but also to identify the things we were doing well to make sure we knew that and we could do more of it,” Betzy said. The data suggests, in nearly every category, how the community is not a monolith. People from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds and different nationalities make up the tapestry of San Diego Jews. Seventeen percent of Jewish households in San Diego include an individual who was born outside the United States and 23% have members who regularly speak a language other than English at home. “This provides a unique and challenging opportunity from taking