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Bay Area Jewish happenings are just a click away

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/18594/full/18594/bay-area-jewish-happenings-are-just-a-click-away/ Bay Area Jewish happenings are just a click away Friday, October 11, 2002 | by JOE ESKENAZI It's 8 p.m. Do you know where your Jewish buddies are? A pair of Bay Area Web sites seek to assure that no Jew will ever again find him or herself spending the evening alone, downing warm beers and cold pizza while watching bad reruns on cable. "I had a lot of friends that were looking for something [Jewish] to do. There was no way of finding out what events were going on," recalled Martin Singer, vice president and co-founder of PlanItJewish.org, a year-old Web site. "I came across a gentleman named Steve Kaufman, and he said he was always missing great events, and people were saying, 'I can't believe you didn't make it!' I said, 'What do we do?' And he said we should start a 501(c)3 [nonprofit] aimed at getting more Jews involved in the community." The sleek, professionally designed site—<a href="http://www.PlanItJewish.org">http://www.PlanItJewish.org</a>—now boasts more than 1,200 registered users, garnered mostly via word-of-mouth, e-mail lists and synagogue bulletins. Between 1,300 and 1,500 events are listed on the site monthly. PlanItJewish.org aims to offer "one-stop shopping" for Jewish events in the region and, eventually, the world. In the Bay Area, however, there's more than one shop. When he isn't working in Levi Strauss' human relations department, 28-year-old Jason Moses runs <a href="http://www.BayJews.org">http://www.BayJews.org</a> While possessing a decidedly more low-budget bulletin-board appearance than PlanItJewish.org, Moses' site still provides access to thousands of events organized by hundreds of Jewish groups. "Our main goal is to get people easy online access to events, so they can get offline and do them," said Moses, whose site currently boasts 700 registered users. In a move that has saved thousands of Jewish online users from e-mail overload, both sites offer users customized weekly e-mail compilations. Moses belongs to "tons" of Jewish e-mail lists, from which he gleans events for his site. Still, he says, "So many groups try to coordinate stuff, and people's e-mail boxes are getting flooded." Users at both sites can punch in what sort of events held in which neck of the woods they'd like to be notified of, reducing an e-bombardment to a single comprehensive letter. Thousands of events—ranging from weekly meetings of Jewish hiking and Frisbee clubs to visiting speakers, Torah-themed radio programs, Shabbat dinners, film screenings, health seminars and, of course, mah jongg nights—can be perused on either site in a simple, five-minute tour. For the biblically minded, BayJews.org also offers the week's Torah portion. While Moses' site is a low-budget affair, PlanItJewish.org required a significant financial investment of more than $500,000 from Kaufman and others, which has since been augmented by financial grants from a number of Jewish philanthropic organizations. "What's frustrating to me is that well over 50 percent of people in the Bay Area who identify as Jewish don't volunteer, donate money or even join the Jewish organizations," said Kaufman. "As I've gotten more involved over the years, I've discovered more and more Jewish organizations have wonderful programming." The site, which will expand to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in the fall, aims to spread throughout North American cities, and has spent the majority of its money developing database technology "scalabl and flexible" enough to allow nationwide expansion. Singer said an above-the-radar publicity campaign is planned for the near future, though 400 additional users registered during this past spring's "Israel in the Gardens" festival. PlanItJewish.org gives hundreds of Jewish nonprofits "an additional media outlet to attract new or uninvolved Jews who normally won't go to their Web sites," said Howard Brown, the site's chief operating officer and one of four full-time employees. "Also, [the other sites] have very low budgets and don't have the ability to take out an ad in the Chronicle or go on radio and TV. "For Jewish consumers, this is a personal site. You can self-select from your home, office or dorm room. This isn't in-your-face Judaism—this is the Judaism you choose to do." Users can also reserve seats at an event or send feedback, which will be shared, anonymously, with host organizations. "Sometimes we get 'the rabbi was exhilarating' and 'the chicken was cold,' and sometimes we get 'the chicken was exhilarating' and 'the rabbi was cold,'" Brown quipped. For PlanItJewish, the road to success entails making "partnerships with everyone and his mother," according to Singer. A recent collaboration with Jewish online dating service JDate, for example, resulted in more than 120 volunteers signing on to assist at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and cost PlanItJewish nothing. The brains behind both Jewish sites have been in contact with each other and, while a huge overlap in content will probably keep them from cooperating, they do not view each other as rivals. "We don't see ourselves as competitors; neither of us is trying to make money. This is not a for-profit thing," said Moses. "We're basically out there with the same purpose. The only difference is they're trying to go national and I'm keeping my focus in the Bay Area." In the end, the satisfaction for the managers of both sites stems from the same source: a note from a Jewish person thanking them for bringing an event to their attention they'd have never seen anywhere else. The site is "connecting the community to events every day, which is exactly why it was created," said Brown. "We're doing it every day. That makes the founders very happy."

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