In this, the season of our renewal, I am proposing a transformational agenda for our Los Angeles Jewish community. While not lacking in institutions, money, talent or ideas, our community is missing connective tissue: regional coordination, durable relationships across difference and mechanisms that could turn our individual concerns into collective action.
Greater Los Angeles shares some of these same challenges, therefore making our Jewish community a laboratory for rebuilding the City of Los Angeles!
The aim should not be restoring an earlier format of Jewish life. Much of the “traditional” Jewish communal order was exclusionary, environmentally unsustainable and institutionally fragmented. A more effective and necessary objective will be in restoring our community’s capacity for common action.
Beginning with resources: I am suggesting that we audit land and resources owned by synagogues, schools, social-service agencies, camps and communal organizations, identifying parking lots, excess buildings and underused parcels that could support affordable or workforce housing, childcare, safe parking, new initiatives or supportive services.
Are we able to turn Jewish facilities into year-round resilience hubs with solar power, emergency supplies, trained volunteers and multilingual neighborhood contact systems, serving both our communal needs and those of our city?
Jewish L.A. is enormous but decentralized as confirmed by the 2021 community study. Among the important conclusions involved low synagogue membership and organization affiliation patterns. This however does not imply Jewish indifference. Younger Jews, according to this study, frequently connect through conversation, culture, media, friendship, Shabbat and informal activity. Therefore, “connecting the infrastructure” suggests something far more inclusive. We must make the whole ecosystem navigable and give people multiple doors through which to belong and connect, especially at a moment when many in our community are feeling vulnerable, isolated, and in need of Jewish entry points.
I would create an independent coordinating organization provisionally called Jewish L.A. Commons. Federation could incubate this organizing effort, but no single institution should own or control it. It would have six integrated components:
Neighborhood Tables: Create “tables” involving approximately 10–12 geographic areas. Each would include congregations, schools, camps, service providers, cultural groups, young adults and residents who hold no membership. Each table would employ or share a trained community organizer. Its first assignment would be hundreds of one-to-one conversations — building interpersonal and institutional connections while promoting trust.
A Common Digital Platform: Such a structure would establish a shared calendar with geographic and accessibility filters; a service and referral directory; volunteer and mutual-aid matching; space and transportation sharing; a community skills registry; and an emergency communications network.
A Jewish Service Passport: A person could participate through any entry point — camp, preschool, film festival, food pantry, synagogue, volunteer project or cultural event — and, with consent, receive personally relevant invitations elsewhere. Instead of asking, “Are you a member?” ask, “What is your next meaningful Jewish connection?”
Shared Operations Program: Institutions could pool functions that do not define their mission but support their infrastructure. At a time of such spiraling costs, it would be expedient for creating a joint purchasing and insurance service, cybersecurity and safety training; substitute teachers and specialized educators; facilities and energy management; and grant writing and evaluation. These collaborations can save money, but more importantly they create habits of trust.
A Civic Assembly: Hold an annual representative assembly selected partly through institutions and through public engagement. Serving as a type of Jewish congress, this body could legislate communal priorities. Among the features of this new organizing body would involve the appointment of a professional staff, the introduction of lay leadership training initiative, the promotion of a community listening campaign, and the release of community studies.
A Microgrant and Experimentation Fund: Offer rapid grants of perhaps $2,500–$25,000 for collaborations involving at least two institutions or one institution and an informal resident group. Favor experiments that can be replicated across neighborhoods.
In building this new community platform, six organizing activities might enhance community connection and involvement:
• Civic Shabbat: hundreds of simultaneous home and institutional dinners focused on one L.A. question, followed by neighborhood action, creating the mantra: ONE JEWISH L.A.!
• Institutional Facilities Collaborative: technical and financial assistance enabling nonprofits and congregations to develop new uses for their property.
• One Communal Benefits Card: reciprocal access to selected JCC, cultural, camp, adult-learning and synagogue offerings.
• Jewish L.A. Year of Service: paid placements for young adults and retirees in Jewish and non-Jewish neighborhoods.
• Affordability Compact: coordinated scholarships, transparent aid applications and shared transportation for those who are financially insecure.
• Pluralism Covenant: An agreed set of practices for handling Israel, denominational, partisan and identity conflicts without demanding consensus.
There are other community ventures worthy of study, including ONE L.A., L.A. Voice and JOIN for Justice, as other Los Angeles-based organizing models. Within the broader Jewish world, Moise House, Limmud, Jewish Emergent Network and within Israel, BINA’s neighborhood operations. Ireland promotes “Citizens Assemblies” worthy of exploration.
Among the actionable outcomes, give individuals and families and communities of activists’ actual authority over a defined problem or provide a defined pool of communal funds to experiment with a possible new organizing project.
Evaluating Impact: Measures of success should include new relationships, leaders developed, cross-institutional participation, geographic reach, service referrals completed, collaborative dollars deployed and tangible civic wins.
Transformation of how we think about and participate in community will involve connection, belonging, leadership, collective power and public accomplishment
If Jewish L.A. can link its extraordinary institutional wealth to neighborhood relationships and disciplined civic action, it can offer the larger city something more valuable than another policy agenda: a working demonstration that fragmented Los Angeles can become governable through innovative organizing and planning.
Steven Windmueller is an Emeritus Professor of Jewish Communal Studies at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of HUC in Los Angeles. His writings can be found on his website, www.thewindreport.com
