Good Friday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we cover an Israeli organization creating safe spaces for Ukrainian refugee children, and feature an op-ed on how synagogues can return to their roots. In this newsletter, Sarah Wilner, Rabbi Jonathan Leener, Seneca, Suzanne Patt Benvenisti, Audrey Shimron, Maiya Edelson, Jordan Daniels, Rula Daood, Alon-Lee Green, Linda and Sandy Gallanter, Mindy and Jon Gray and Audrey Steele Burnand. We’ll start with a look at local reactions to the sale of an American Jewish University campus.

After Tuesday’s announcement that American Jewish University had agreed to sell its Bel Air campus to EF Education First for an undisclosed sum, some members of the L.A. Jewish community told eJewishPhilanthropy that the loss of the campus was a missed opportunity for AJU and the community at large.

The 35-acre Bel Air campus has served as the home of many Jewish academic programs, including the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, a Conservative seminary. AJU administrative offices will remain on the campus until approximately September 2028, and the institution’s second campus, in Simi Valley, will not be affected by the sale.

In a letter to students on Wednesday that was obtained by eJewishPhilanthropy, the leadership of the Ziegler School confirmed that classes this academic year will continue to be held on the Bel Air campus. The letter said the location of classes after the summer of 2024, when EF is slated to move in, “will be determined at a later date.”

“AJU remains committed to the future of the Ziegler School as a center for in-person Torah learning and Jewish leadership,” the letter said. “This decision was made after careful consideration and will enable AJU to devote significantly greater resources and focus to our core mission – and to meet the evolving needs of the Jewish community in Los Angeles and beyond, now and in future generations.”

But local Jewish community members told eJP they were frustrated that such a large Jewish population center would be losing an expansive campus it once called home.

“While other Jewish communities around the country are working together to create great shared spaces that make all kinds of creative programs and cost savings possible, our community seems to be unable to act collectively for the greater good,” a communal leader said. A longtime Jewish professional said it was “strange how little they are saying about their future. The idea that AJU can’t be sustained in the second largest Jewish community in the United States is heartbreaking.”

The working committee overseeing AJU’s transition out of its Bel Air campus includes members of the senior staff and “will provide regular updates to the community,” a spokesperson for AJU told eJP, though they did not say when.

The spokesperson added that the institution plans to create a mikvah to replace the one currently on the Bel Air campus. The school will also need to address the future of its library, which represents a consolidation of books from other L.A. Jewish libraries that have since closed.

Despite the unresolved questions, the community member said the sale, which was first announced in February, was no surprise. “Even before the pandemic the building felt empty, populated below capacity,” the leader said, likening it to “studying in a hotel closed down for the season.”

SAFE SPACES

This Israeli nonprofit is trying to create spaces where Ukrainian refugee children can be themselves

Yuval Cohen Harounoff

When she thinks about her time working in refugee aid this year, Yulie Khromchenco recalls the story an Israeli volunteer in a childcare center in Moldova shared with her last week. As he walked outside with a quiet 6-year-old girl, preparing to play ball, she told him he resembled her father back in Ukraine whom she hadn’t seen for several months, reports Daniela Cohen for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Caring for displaced children: “I think it’s a moment where we know that an important connection was formed,” Khromchenco, Eastern Europe program manager of an organization called Early Starters International, told eJP. Such moments of safety and comfort are the raison d’etre of Early Starters, an Israeli-founded nonprofit that, working with IsraAid, has set up six early childhood education and care centers in Moldova, along with another seven in Israel, to serve displaced Ukrainian children and maintain their access to education. In total, the group serves 3,500 Ukrainian children.

Making an impact: Research shows that “[this] is when we have the most impact for children, not only when it comes to development and learning but also on social-emotional levels and the well-being of people when they get older,” said Early Starters co-founder Sarah Wilner, a Canadian-Israeli special education teacher and trainer.

Read the full story here.

RECLAIMING ORIGINS

Synagogue teshuva

Courtesy Mordechai Rosenstein / Emes Editions

“For many American Jews, the synagogue is totally irrelevant. As an institution, the synagogue is often viewed as being sterile and unwelcoming. Authenticity and inclusivity are not often associated with synagogue life. Membership decline and building closures are now commonplace. We could use COVID-19 as a new scapegoat, but the synagogue’s foundation has been eroding for decades. The synagogue needs more than a rebranding, it needs to do teshuva,” writes Rabbi Jonathan Leener, spiritual leader of the Prospect Heights Shul in Brooklyn, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

A Beit Knesset: “To be clear, I’m not referring to teshuva as the process of repentance or confessing any wrongdoing, but teshuva as an existential return to a former self. In short, synagogues need to reclaim its origins as a place of radical hospitality and openness. Its Hebrew name, Beit Knesset, a house of gathering, reinforces its central task.”

The messiness of life: “I’ve always found it incredibly powerful that the homeless often sit outside churches. In fact, I have even become jealous because people associate the church as a place of healing, a place of compassion, a place that can hold suffering. This is the type of connection I dream for the synagogue. Synagogues need to embrace the messiness of life.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Connecting with Clinton: The Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting is returning to New York next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Alex Daniels reports in The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The New York meetings not only help grant makers keep tabs on the latest ways they can make a difference around the world, but for many, they are also the ultimate philanthropy networking event. The annual meetings helped Rachel Flynn land her current job as Skoll’s director of funder alliances three years ago. Skoll’s Silicon Valley headquarters is about five miles from her former employer, the Omidyar Network, but she had never stepped foot in Skoll’s offices. Meeting Skoll leaders across the country in New York introduced her to the foundation’s work and eventually led her to joining the organization. Flynn says during the peak of the pandemic, the foundation was largely unable to meet its international philanthropic partners in person and conduct its regular due diligence on projects supported by grant makers in other parts of the world. As a result, Skoll and other grant makers have placed a higher importance on ‘trust-based philanthropy,’ an outlook that includes having organizations close to problems take the lead in determining what approaches should be used.” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]

Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca’s essay “On a Happy Life” includes 11 of the most important lessons he believed one must follow to achieve peace, Arthur C. Brooks writes in The Atlantic. This includes several with connections to philanthropy, including: “Lesson 5: I will so live as to remember that I was born for others, and will thank Nature on this account: for in what fashion could she have done better for me? She has given me alone to all, and all to me alone. In other words, charity is a gift to the giver. Service to others is one of the easiest ways to get happier. Volumes of research attest to the fact that giving to charity and volunteering, spending money on others, and more radical acts such as donating blood and organs all raise well-being…Lesson 7: I will think that I have no possessions so real as those which I have given away to deserving people: I will not reckon benefits by their magnitude or number, or by anything except the value set upon them by the receiver. The idea here is that the true value of what I do is not how much it costs me, but how much it benefits you. For example, the true value of your work is not your salary but rather how much it helps others. Altruism won’t pay the rent, but if you take this lesson to heart, it can change your priorities, and maybe even lead you to a better job.” [TheAtlantic]

Pic of the Day

Screenshot

Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker speaks on Thursday at the United We Stand summit at the White House, which addressed hate-motivated violence. Cytron-Walker is the former rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where he and other congregants were held hostage by an attacker earlier this year.