With San Jose and Silicon Valley achieving international prominence, it is only fitting that the region’s Jewish community have a world-class home.
A planned $12 million Jewish community campus in Los Gatos will not only bring the Jews of the region together, it will also attract unaffiliated Jews and help the community expand.
Certainly a state-of-the-art Jewish community center will be a big draw to unaffiliated Jews looking for a health club. Blueprints call for the JCC to be under the same roof with the Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose, Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Santa Clara County and Yavneh Day School.
When the new campus opens in 2002 or 2003, it will be a one-stop facility for the estimated 40,000 Jews in the San Jose federation area.
For years the small Greater San Jose Jewish community lacked a home and an identity of its own. For too long it has lived in the shadow of the much larger Jewish Community Federation, which extends from San Francisco to Marin and down the Peninsula to northern Santa Clara County.
Hopefully, the new campus will help the Greater San Jose community to raise funds, expand and develop its own self-image.
The proposed $12 million campus goes a long way to making such dreams a realization.
For those of us living elsewhere in the Bay Area, we can be proud and excited about all the construction under way at local Jewish facilities.
Before this decade ends, we will have a new JCC in Foster City, in San Francisco, in Los Gatos, and probably in Palo Alto. A Jewish museum will be built in San Francisco. New day schools will be built in various Bay Area locations. Plus a number of synagogues throughout the Bay Area are hoping to build new sanctuaries.
The Greater San Jose project is important not only to the Jews of the South Bay but to all Northern California Jewry. We should all be proud as our local Jewish world reaches new levels of growth and promise.