Summer 2024 Federation Impact

FEDERATION

IMPACT You give our Jewish community a better future

“We can’t pretend that the Germans who did this were not humans.”

—Enno Zschiedrich Berlin native and Cincinnati volunteer

FALL 2023

Lisa MacVittie (left), and Annette Lebowski are clients of Jewish Family Service’s Center for Holocaust Survivors. Enno Zschiedrich is here from Germany to volunteer for a year.

You Bring Understanding into the World —story on p. 2

jewishcincinnati.org

Honoring Connection Despite the Chasm Between Us

Your Gift Helps Holocaust Survivors Live with Dignity and Independence A native of Berlin, 20-year-old Enno came to Cincinnati last September to volunteer with Cincinnati’s Holocaust survivors through a German organization dedicated to reconciliation and peace.

Last month he completed his year with Jewish Family Service (JFS). Your gift to the Jewish Federation supports JFS’s Center for Holocaust Survivors, which helps more than 125 survivors live with dignity and independence.

Enno is the 16th annual volunteer sent by his organization, Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. He worked with the Center’s Friendship Club, assisting with restitution applications, helping with German translations, and visiting clients. “Watching Enno develop real relationships with our Holocaust survivor clients has been amazing,” said Meredith Davis, director of the Center for Holocaust Survivors.

No exposure to history taught him more in his life, said Enno, than being looked in the eye as a Cincinnati Holocaust survivor shared her traumatic

memories of being a child in a train cattle car leaving Stalingrad as it was strafed by bullets from German aircraft. “What has always been necessary to our understanding of this past,” said Enno, “is accepting that we were the ones who did terrible things to others. We were responsible.”

Enno speaks warmly about the survivors he has met.

He described how a connection with one client, Lisa MacVittie, deepened through a common language.

“It took some time,” he said, “but one day, she started to speak to me in German—her native language—the language her mother spoke to her all her life.

“We can’t pretend that the Germans who did this were not humans; that is exactly what they had convinced themselves about the Jews.”

—Enno Zschiedrich “I know that it takes a lot of personal connection to feel comfortable enough with a person to speak German again after you’ve been through so much hardship from people who spoke that language.”

Enno says his time here has changed him forever, and for the better. “We have to keep talking about this,” he said. “It’s our collective responsibility to keep the memory alive and learn from the past.”

You Honor Those Who Came Before Us Federation Funds Site Maintenance and Indigent Burials “The better a cemetery is cared for, the longer the headstones will stay in good shape and the inscriptions can be read,” said Carrie Rhodus, Operations Manager for Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati (JCGC) and an expert in cemetery preservation.

JCGC serves as a national model for cemetery management, and its Preserving Legacies program, funded by the Federation, is a crucial part of that. The organization maintains 25 area cemeteries and their 35,000 graves. Through the Federation, you support the sacred work of funding indigent burials and grave maintenance.

You support the sacred work of maintaining our cemeteries and supporting burials for those whose families do not have the ability to pay.

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To clean the headstones, volunteers use brushes with soft bristles and gentle cleaning solutions. They also use chopsticks to dig out muck from the letters, most of which, especially for the older headstones, are in Hebrew.

Chloe Dickson, 23, of Columbus, volunteered at the Chestnut Street Cemetery.

She worked on the headstone of Simon Symonds, born in England in 1776 and died in Cincinnati in 1848. Dickson said the effort made her feel a connection to Symonds and the Jewish community. “I feel as if I was preserving memories,” she said.

You Grow Jewish Leaders Do college students you love know how to talk with progressive peers about Israel?

This past January, 14 students from Cincinnati Hillel at the University of Cincinnati and Hillel at Miami University learned skills to speak to progressive communities about Israel in a way that is disarming and promotes unity. This special leadership training retreat was funded by you, our donors, through the Federation.

The Hillels chose to work collaboratively, and that itself allowed the students from the two campuses to build powerful connections with each other.

The Shabbaton brought in Rachel Marchese from JVS Careers, an expert who offered excellent professional develoment advice. In addition Project Shema, a national organization that trains the Jewish community and allies to understand and address contemporary antisemitism, taught with compassion about how anti-Jewish ideas can emerge in progressive spaces. They offered context and history, but also techniques such as the “engagement/conversation funnel,” that students found actionable. In fact, students reported that for many of them it was the best Israel training/ program they had ever participated in.

Since the retreat, Hillel’s Bearcats for Israel leaders and Student Board have utilized and shared their

YOUR GIFT

Helps College Students Talk about Israel

Local college students learned how to talk about Israel and antisemitism with progressive peers.

learnings with fellow committee members and students, creating increased confidence in the face of these difficult conversations.

The Jewish Federation supports Cincinnati 2030, our community’s strategic plan based around caring, engagement, the wider world, and communal health and resiliency.

It’s time! Join us on the Cincinnati Community Mission to Israel, July 7-16, 2024. It will be unforgettable and it is subsidized by the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati.

More information at jewishcincinnati.org/mission.

You help a large and diverse group of young Jewish professionals—an offshoot of Blue Ash Chabad—gather regularly to connect. “Our Shabbat dinners were a great hit,” said Rabbi Shaya Itkin.

With your support, young Jewish professionals connect over Shabbat dinners.

Through the Jewish Agency for Israel, you helped 76,261 people make Israel their home in 2022. One was Techelo, an Ethiopian immigrant who waited 25 years to make Aliyah. He had been separated from his father and brothers for 20 years. “We, the Jewish people, always have hope,” he said. With his wife and four children, he arrived in Israel on June 1, 2022.

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Our Greatest Challenges: The Deep Needs that Exist Dear friends, When I lived in Israel in the 1990s, I was given the opportunity to interview some of the greatest leaders of the modern Zionist movement. My single question to them was: “What is the greatest challenge facing the Jewish people today?”

Their answers to this question still resonate with me and drive my thinking about our work at the Jewish Federation. Over the next several months, I want to share some of those answers with you and what I think they mean for our community today.

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The first answer I want to share came from Charlotte Jacobson, a leader of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America and its National President during the period of the Six-Day War. She told me that the success of Hadassah hinged on providing an opportunity for ordinary people to be a part of a truly historic event—the establishment and development of the modern State of Israel—essentially from the comfort of their homes in America. What they contributed mattered, and allowed them to be a part of something much bigger than themselves.

I remember the power in her voice as she said: “And that is exciting!”

How have times changed? Israel is no longer the young and developing nation it was fifty years ago. Similarly, the Jewish community in America is well established and, despite a distressing rise in antisemitism, is generally accepted and integrated wholly in American society.

Remembering Charlotte, our challenge today is: how do we convey the deep needs that still exist to fully help the Jewish community flourish and how to do we engender the same excitement of being a part of something monumental?

I welcome your thoughts on this topic and will report back on what you tell me.

I look forward to a dialogue in this, and other, channels.

Thanks for all you do,

David Harris Chief Development Officer Jewish Federation of Cincinnati