Perhaps it’s retirement. Perhaps it’s the death of a spouse. It’s often the desire to be near children and grandchildren. Whatever it is that prompts seniors to move to the Bay Area, once here they often make their way to the JCC to help ease the transition.
Alan Entine, a retired academic, is one of these latecomers. When Entine, 67, moved to Walnut Creek last July after a stint in Chicago, he knew right away that the key to becoming acclimated was to get out and meet people, especially as a single man who had lost his wife to cancer four years ago. “So the first thing I did when I got here to help me with this transition — the very first thing — was to join the JCC,” he says.
Although his two daughters and their families live in the Bay Area, he has also created an active social life in his new home through his participation in Contra Costa Jewish Community Center activities, including a Tuesday morning lecture series, trips to museums and the like. In the end, he says, “it was less the events and the lectures but meeting people that was key to my strategy here.”
Meeting people, not just keeping busy, was also important to Edna Eichelbaum. A widow when she arrived from New Jersey some 10 years ago, Eichelbaum, 77, joined the JCC of San Francisco at her sister’s prompting.
“My sister was after me, saying, ‘Well, Edna, you have to get out and do things and make friends — everything that you have to do when you come to a new area.'” Eichelbaum decided to eat lunch every day at the center. “And every day I had lunch, but I never sat at the same table, because I thought this was a chance to make friends. And it worked. Actually all of my friends that I have today I met at the center.”
In reality, though JCCs may help people go through life changes, it isn’t necessarily deliberate. “I don’t know that I plan things from the standpoint of transition for people,” says Shiva Schulz, senior programs manager for the Montefiore Center at the JCC of S.F. “This venue may not be as profitable for people as maybe counseling groups or therapy when dealing with loss.”
Rather, she says, it could be “the feeling that we’re here, we care, we’re in your corner.”
Of course, synagogues also address this need, and many newcomers end up joining both a religious institution and JCC.
Shoshana Eliahu, senior adult services director for the Contra Costa JCC, suggests that while synagogues connect members to their spirituality and heritage, JCCs are more “activity driven.”
Schulz agrees. “Maybe people see the JCC more as a social force than a synagogue.”
JCCs also attract a diverse slice of the Jewish community at large, notes Entine, including the observant and the not-so-observant.
Still, it’s being Jewish that is often the initial point of connection. “For me, it was having something that I could feel that I belonged to, especially since I came out here,” says Eichelbaum. “It was a question of going someplace where I’d be comfortable.”
For some, the JCC feels right, like a second home.
“Haimish. That’s the way I feel about people there; they’re very haimish,” says Shirley Geffner, a 76-year-old retired nurse who moved from Brooklyn to Sunnyvale four years ago. She and her husband, Jack, an 83-year-old retired podiatrist, relocated to be closer to their daughters and their families. The couple agrees that Palo Alto’s Albert Schultz JCC welcomed them with open arms.
Early on, one of their children had suggested that Jack, who served in the Air Force during World War II, check out a lecture at the center given by a WWII pilot. Now the couple’s days are filled with concerts, lectures and trips around the Bay Area, not to mention socializing with other JCC couples outside of the center.
“Our daughters are now sort of complaining that they have to make an appointment with us before they can get to see us,” Jack Geffner says, laughing. “They say, ‘You’re so busy there at the J.'”