When Marjorie Wolf wants to make a tallit, she brainstorms the overall design, weaves for several months or more and — voila! — a prayer shawl fit to hand down through the generations.
If only running a Jewish federation were so straightforward.
When Wolf began her two-year term as board president of the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay in July, she had a clear idea of what she wanted to accomplish, with locating a permanent site for the federation near the top of her list. Following Sept. 11, however, the federation’s priorities have shifted.
“The things we are concerned about now and are being called to do seem to be a little different than pre-September 11. Concerns seem to have surfaced,” said Wolf, a Piedmont resident. “Things like safety, anti-Semitism, changing of the economy, dealing with people who are concerned about travel — a number of issues we thought were behind us seem to have resurfaced.”
For example, Wolf points out, terrorism and war have brought more and more voices questioning Israel’s right to exist, out of the woodwork.
“Does this mean the federation should take on a different kind of presence in support of Israel?” she asked. “Should we make statements we haven’t made in the past? We might not have discussed this in August.”
Another thing the federation wouldn’t have discussed in August is the status of its youth trips to Israel. After canceling trips last year, Wolf, Executive Vice President Ami Nahshon and others haven’t yet figured out exactly what to do this year.
In these troubled times, though, Wolf is proud that the federation is serving as the anchor for East Bay Jewish organizations.
“We’re getting a lot of calls from our agencies asking what they should do about the physical security of their premises or what should they do about mail. We’ve become the resource for that,” said Wolf, whose husband, Julian, is a former federation president.
“We’re looking at being available for members of our community to tap into our expertise. We wouldn’t have done that four months ago.”
Wolf had hoped the federation would have lined up a future location and began a fund-raising drive by the end of her term, a scenario she would still “love to be able to do.” But war, terrorism and an economic plunge have forced her to “back off a little bit.”
Yet the federation’s problems are very small indeed when compared with the Albanian health-care system — another area of great interest to Wolf.
“There was a larger Jewish population there at the end of the war than the beginning. They rescued their Jews” during World War II, said Wolf, who attends services at Oakland’s Conservative Temple Beth Abraham. “It’s a community that doesn’t know anti-Semitism.”
A longtime health-care consultant, Wolf has made several trips a year to the small Balkan nation over the past four years at the behest of the Albanian minister of health. She describes her work as a “turnaround effort” to modernize management practices throughout the nation’s health-care system.
Wolf’s work at the federation is hardly as sweeping. War and tough economic times aside, she feels the federation will eventually get back to business as usual.
“We’re moving forward on our usual stuff, but we felt like it was really important to stop and take the tenor of the times before we moved forward,” she said. “Supporting the local Jewish community and international Jewish community are all part of the basic mission. That’s not going to change.”