‘A wonderful achievement’: Special moment for Tad Taube and the community

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 | by dan pine

If there’s one thing philanthropist Tad Taube can’t stand, it’s inertia, especially when it comes to a project he deeply cares about.

At one point during the long fundraising campaign for the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life, donations had slowed. With $115 million in the kitty, planners had come a long way, but were still short of their $140 million target.

That’s when Taube — president of the Koret Foundation and chair of the Taube Family Foundation — got an idea.

“I started discussing with [Koret Foundation CEO] Jeff Farber as to why we shouldn’t start going after non-Jewish donors,” recalls Taube. “We concluded there was no reason not to. After all, the Jewish community is hugely supportive of the community at large.”

A few phone calls later, Taube had raised another $5 million — all from non-Jewish philanthropic sources. That was the boost the project needed, and soon enough the rest of the required funding came through.

Taube will be present for the inaugural activities of the 8.5-acre campus that bears his name. For him, the moment comes after years of supporting many Bay Area Jewish institutions. But the Taube Koret Campus takes the cake.

A $20 million cake.

That’s the total amount the Taube Family Foundation and the Koret Foundation donated to the project. It was the largest single gift to the project.

Individual $10 million gifts also came from the Moldaw Family Supporting Foundation, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the family of M. Kenneth and Barbara Oshman.

Taube says the project intrigued himfrom the start because of demographic changes he had seen in the region.

“The center of gravity for Jewish life in the Bay Area has moved steadily southward for a number of years,” Taube says. “As the community’s social and intellectual development evolved, the JCC became more and more important. Today I feel the JCC may be the most important of all [Jewish] communal agencies.”

As the concept grew from stand-alone Jewish community center to grand multipurpose campus, Taube’s view of the project also evolved. He came to see it as the region’s prime expression of Jewish peoplehood.

“It’s meant to encompass the gamut of Jewish activity,” he says, “including history, language, humor, music, whatever it is that constitutes Jewish life on this planet. We wrap it all under the rubric of Jewish peoplehood.”

Taube admits there were plenty of “bumps in the road” — from snags in bond financing to staying on budget to sealing approval from local planning agencies.

But despite it all, the resources were there to bring the project to fruition.

“I thought it was rather remarkable the Jewish community was able to marshal the kind of funding we were able to get in a relatively short amount of time,” Taube says. “That part is terrific and we should all feel real good about that.”

Taube feels even better about the campus as a whole, and he hopes it will become the hub of Jewish life for the South Bay if not the Bay Area.

“It’s a wonderful achievement for the Jewish community in the Bay Area,” Taube says of campus. “I’m very proud of it. It’s an incredible facility, not only for Jewish people but for the entire community.”