Eighteen months ago, when my father-in-law unexpectedly died, I was of course by my wife's side at the levoya in Bournemouth. As I stepped over to the mound of earth to pick up the shovel to do my duty, a man I'd never met sidled up to me and in hushed tones asked "Are you the son who runs that JW3?". Me: "Er… yes… but… I'm…" Man: "Oh good. Can I have a word?" Me: "Er…I'm a bit…you know…my father-in-law…" Man: "It's about the security. My wife and I love going, but we can't believe you don't have better security… Me (interrupting): "Er… sorry… I can't… I'm burying my father-in-law…" (walks off to shovel earth on the coffin).
Before anyone misunderstands the point I'm making, and then complains about it, let me clarify: as perverse as this sounds, I don't, on the whole mind this (ok, family levoyas aside). In fact, I take it as a huge sign of success that an organisation like JW3, that's only been in existence for two-and-a-half years, has been so warmly embraced by the community that everyone wants to share their feedback, opinions, complaints, suggestions and advice about what to do better or differently.
As Oscar Wilde noted, the one thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about. It's not that long ago that, if JW3 was being spoken about at all, it was only to say that people didn't want it, that it was a waste of money, and in the wrong location, not to mention the lack of a car park.
Then we opened the doors and, within a short amount of time, established ourselves as an incredibly popular institution. Last year alone, we welcomed 225,000-plus visits to our Jewish Community Centre, and we currently see around 4,500 pairs of feet come through the front doors every week.
We now offer more than 150 classes, courses, workshops, performers, films, concerts, lectures, debates, demonstrations, clubs, events and activities for all ages and types every week. They range from literary events to cookery demonstrations; from talks with Oscar winners and Nobel Prize laureates, to the best of Jewish film from around the world; from choir groups to social-action projects; from school holiday play schemes to activities for Shoah survivors; from Torah study to new works of Jewish theatre, and much more.
Of the 6,500-plus events that we put on last year, we assumed that meant there'd be something for everyone. But we forgot the old adage: you can't please all of Our People, all of the time!
I genuinely love how the community has embraced JW3 and how so many people feel ownership of it as "their" community centre, and therefore feel comfortable telling us what they want. But I have to balance that out with the pragmatic realities of running it on sound business sense as a non-profit social enterprise. If we didn't, it would be lost to the community.
There are many wonderful ideas that our brilliant programming team come up with that personally, I'd love to see. And we could do all of them and have a spectacular year or two, and then close down. We'd go down in a blaze of fireworks and glory, but we'd be gone, and the community would lose out.
We face many challenges in running JW3, and we work hard to meet all those challenges head on to give the community the Jewish Community Centre it deserves. Among those challenges are finding the balance between top-down and bottom-up programming; between being democratic in our decision making and being led by a team of professionals who decide what they think is best; between loving the wonderful and creative suggestions and ideas that people come to us with, and the ability, resources, and finances to turn those ideas into reality. Financial sustainability is absolutely critical. Balancing "mission" and "money" isn't easy, but it is vital.
We receive more than 60 new proposals and suggestions from all over the community each week. They include people wanting us to exhibit their artwork, new playwrights hoping we'll commission their latest idea, those who loved the new exercise craze they tried while on holiday and want us to programme it in our dance studio, and bands from all over the world looking to us for a gig. We have put together a very talented programming team and I trust them to use their judgment when sifting through all these ideas. Some 10 per cent of them do end up becoming reality, and we are always excited when these are successful. As for the others, reasons for not doing them range from quality control and lack of space, to simple cost-benefit analysis.
Which brings us back to the "disgraceful" absence of Yiddish in JW3's language programme. Although JW3 doesn't currently run Yiddish language classes, our programme engages with Yiddish through many other events. These have included a Yiddish & More series with Dovid Katz, one of the world's foremost Yiddish experts; the only venue in the world to have produced David Schneider's play Making Stalin Laugh, which celebrated the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre; a production of Yiddish play Mirele Efros by JW3's amateur dramatics group, Spielers; and Zingt! our Yiddish singing classes led by Rachel Weston, one of the UK's leading Yiddish song performers. All of these have been covered and praised by the JC.
We currently have nearly 300 people in language classes every week, mostly studying Hebrew, but with some French and Arabic too, and I have always hoped we'd have Yiddish classes as well.
However, each time we have explored running Yiddish language classes, the demand wasn't high enough even to cover the teacher's fees
In our continued desire to respond to the community's interests and needs, we started a review of the demand for Yiddish classes (some weeks before Mr Walton's diatribe) that included emailing 29,000 people to ask if they would be interested. While the review is still in progress, I have to say that the response was little more than gornischt, so no matter how much we kvetch about it, or how much tsuris I get, I'm afraid that I can't promise that we'll be starting classes soon.
And for me that's a shame. But it's not just the shanda that Mr Walton's article claimed.
Raymond Simonson is the Chief Executive of JW3
