At a ceremony last month, the Torahs of the former Congregation B'nai Emunah, which recently merged with another synagogue, were marched out of their home of nearly 50 years.
Bay Area-based Taube Philanthropies is celebrating the conclusion of a yearlong exchange program between local rabbis and Jewish community leaders across Poland.
The virtual exchange dubbed “Minyan Makers” saw local religious leaders log online to facilitate Jewish text studies for Polish professionals from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, the Galicia Jewish History Museum, JCCs in Krakow and Warsaw, and other organizations.
The exchange, inspired by a 2015 Jewish heritage tour of the Eastern European country for local clergy affiliated with the Northern California Board of Rabbis, brought 13 local rabbis together with 44 Polish professionals from 21 institutions, and was funded via a grant from Taube Philanthropies. Its founder, the Bay Area real estate developer and businessman Tad Taube, was born in Kraków in 1931, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1939 just months before the Nazis invaded Poland.
Myrna Melgar is a lot of things. Elected in November to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she’s a first-time office holder; the first Latina elected to the board; an immigrant from El Salvador; a descendant of Jewish scholars; a mother; the child of an engineer and a communist militant; and a part of the local Jewish community.
And she says that unique combination is what makes her go.
“That’s like my whole shtick,” she told J. recently, speaking about efforts to bring disparate groups of people together to focus on shared concerns.
“Sometimes in this town we wear our identity, in terms of who’s progressive, who’s moderate, this or that, in ways that are not collaborative, that are more antagonistic,” she said. “And because I’m used to walking in different worlds, I’m also used to engaging with people and finding what we have in common rather than what we disagree on.”