![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ou.org\/life\/files\/Chip.jpeg\" "\\"Chip\\"")
<\/p>\nSomething strange is happening in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
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A growing number of Jews living at high-tech industry\u2019s doorstep are dramatically changing their surfing habits. They\u2019ve been clicking away from Google, Facebook and Twitter and onto Rashi, Rambam and Tosafot. The spiritual upgrade is not only changing their online habits, it\u2019s changing their lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are hundreds of people involved in learning\u2014in classes and chavrutot,\u201d says Rabbi Joey Felsen, executive director of the Palo Alto kollel, also known as the Jewish Study Network (JSN), one of the catalysts of this Torah fervor. \u201cThe religious infrastructure here has really taken off,\u201d Rabbi Felsen says.<\/p>\n
Due to an influx of dynamic Torah educators, many residents of the San Francisco Bay area, long bereft of Jewish resources, are getting excited about their Judaism. Palo Alto, located thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, serves as \u201cthe center of all this Torah excitement,\u201d according to Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman of Palo Alto\u2019s Congregation Emek Beracha. The city currently boasts a cohesive community, a nearby day school, a thriving kollel, two kosher eateries and an eruv.<\/p>\n
Amid the material and academic wealth of Silicon Valley, there\u2019s a hunger for meaning. \u201cThe kids [in the Silicon Valley region] respond to something more intellectual, more philosophical than your average kid,\u201d says Rabbi Effie Goldberg, executive director of West Coast NCSY. \u201cIt\u2019s part of the culture here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking more classes is actually considered \u201ccool\u2019\u2019 among Silicon Valley kids, according to Rabbi Avi Stewart, program director of JSN. \u201c[The students] are open to it,\u201d he says. \u201cAs it says in Pirkei Avot, it\u2019s like writing on a fresh piece of paper. They just want to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe raw number of Jews in the San Francisco Bay area is staggering,\u201d says Rabbi Steven Burg, OU managing director and international director of NCSY. \u201cYou had huge numbers of Jewish students who knew zero [about Judaism], yet there was very little in the way of educational resources for teens,\u201d recalls Rabbi Burg, who recently hired Rabbi Baruch Noy to start an NCSY chapter in Palo\u2008Alto. Rabbi Noy, who moved from Israel with his family, has been working round-the-clock to create cutting-edge social and recreational programs that appeal to teens and promotes Jewish identity.<\/p>\n
Rabbi Steven Weil, executive vice president of the OU, sees the Palo Alto chapter as an opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands of students who have virtually no exposure to anything Jewish. \u201cNCSY\u2019s quality programming is giving many of these kids their first meaningful Jewish experience,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at the future of Jewish America.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn every school I walk into to try to recruit kids, I find students who are totally disconnected from Judaism,\u201d says Rabbi Noy, who is currently launching \u201cLatte and Learning\u201d programs throughout the area. The program draws high school students to coffee houses with an offer of free coffee and stimulating conversations.<\/p>\n
A COMMUNITY IS BORN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n According to the 2004 Jewish Community Federation Survey (JCF), some 400,000 Jews live in the San Francisco Bay region, making it an area with the third-largest Jewish population in the US (falling in right behind New York and Los Angeles). This explosion in the Jewish population is most evident in the South Peninsula, which includes San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, where the number of Jews has increased by 250 percent since the JCF survey in 1986, the last survey conducted prior to the one in 2004.<\/p>\n The Jewish roots of Palo Alto date back to the 1960s, when some Torah-observant pioneers, mostly Stanford University graduates, established a Shabbat morning service at the campus Hillel. Over time, the \u201cStanford Hillel Orthodox Minyan\u201d grew into the \u201cPalo Alto Orthodox Minyan,\u201d which met in various temporary facilities. In 1995, the minyan hired Rabbi Feldman, its first full-time rav. In 1998, the minyan became \u201cCongregation Emek Beracha.\u201d Today, the shul enjoys a membership of 150 families, and a steady stream of newcomers.<\/p>\n Tagging itself as \u201cthe Orthodox shul for everyone,\u201d Congregation Emek Beracha, an OU-member shul, opens its doors to every type of Jew. \u201cWe have a happy mix of backgrounds,\u201d says Rabbi Feldman, a native of Chicago, who received semichah from Mercaz HaTorah in Israel.<\/p>\n According to Rabbi Feldman, the Bay area \u201chas a lot of Jews, always had,\u201d but lacked the infrastructure for religious life. \u201cSan Francisco had a thriving Jewish community until shortly after World War II, but it never took off,\u201d he says. \u201cChinuch wasn\u2019t addressed as robustly here as it was in Los Angeles. Over the years, when the population wanted to open Orthodox schools in LA, [the community\u2019s response] was \u2018whatever floats your boat,\u2019 while day schools in the San Francisco area faced open hostility. In the late \u201860s and early \u201870s, the Federation didn\u2019t want to give the [schools] funding. Its members were part of the assimilationist ethic and they saw the day school as un-American. Ironically, the day school model has now been embraced by some of the same people who originally rejected it.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently, the Palo Alto area does boast a Jewish day school\u2014the South Peninsula Hebrew Day School. Based in Sunnyvale, the school serves 243 students who come from Palo Alto and its surrounding communities.<\/p>\n Boris Feldman (no relation to the rabbi), fifty-four, a twenty-four-year resident of Palo Alto and a head partner in one of Silicon Valley\u2019s top law firms, made the switch from a Conservative shul to Congregation Emek Beracha. His daughter, Talya, started walking to shul and taking Torah classes with her mother. \u201cI\u2019ve gone to [non-Orthodox] shuls my whole life, but [the rabbis] never really talked about the Talmud,\u201d says Feldman, the son of Holocaust survivors. \u201cHow many Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations have you gone to where they actually talk about what\u2019s in . . . this week\u2019s parashah? . . . We have one of the world\u2019s richest troves of thought, knowledge, and debate, going back centuries. I never had this until I was in my fifties, [yet, I feel] a freshness and a joy from learning that other Jews get when they are in their teens or twenties. I feel lucky I found it.\u201d<\/p>\n Congregation Emek Beracha sometimes hosts community-wide events with the original kiruv couple in town, Rabbi Yosef and Dina Levin, of Chabad, who arrived in the early \u201880s. The Levins run the Chabad of Greater South Bay, and offer services including a teen club, Bar\/Bat Mitzvah instruction, holiday awareness programs and many other community events.<\/p>\n RAISING THE LEVEL OF JEWISH LITERACY<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Another powerful boost to the community arrived in 2001. Rabbi Felsen, a Toronto native and graduate of the Mir Yeshiva in Yerushalayim, was \u201clooking to make some kind of impact.\u201d \u201cMy wife and I wanted to start with targeting adult education,\u201d says Rabbi Felsen. He spoke with Moishe Bane, chairman of the OU Board of Governors, who has a keen understanding of the outreach needs of various communities. Mr. Bane urged him to bring his kollel to the Bay area. \u201cWith the presence of Stanford University, among other universities, the population tends to be highly sophisticated,\u201d says Bane. \u201cMy impression was that they were ripe for someone of [Joey\u2019s] talents.\u201d<\/p>\n Rabbi Felsen promptly arranged to bring six families from Eretz Yisrael to form the Jewish Study Network with the aim of \u201craising the level of Jewish literacy.\u201d Through its innovative programming, JSN provides entryways to Yiddishkeit that appeal to Jews at any stage.<\/p>\n If not for the significant changes taking place in the Bay area, Stanley Sussman\u2019s retirement would probably have looked very different. Sussman, an original member of the Stanford Hillel Orthodox Minyan and a co-founder of the South Peninsula Hebrew Day School, arises each morning at 5:30 a.m. to learn the daf with the rosh kollel and then participates in various shiurim. \u201cBetween the shul, the kollel and Chabad, there\u2019s a lot of learning [going on here],\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful place to live.\u201d<\/p>\n Seeking to grow, the frum community in Palo Alto does face significant obstacles. Jews primarily flock to the area for Stanford University degrees, making for a highly transient population. Furthermore, Silicon Valley\u2019s prohibitive real estate prices deter families from settling in Palo Alto. \u201cI think it\u2019s our biggest issue,\u201d says Jacqueline Bocian, a Palo Alto resident for twenty-two years whose family left the Conservative synagogue to join Congregation Emek Beracha. \u201cThe homes here cost between one and four million dollars; that\u2019s a real barrier to bringing more frum Jews here. [Otherwise], the area is idyllic. I think the Jewish community would expand by leaps and bounds if housing prices were normalized. There are not many communities\u2014with different strands of Yiddishkeit and different levels\u2014that work together the way we do.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Rabbi Feldman sees Palo Alto as an emerging Torah community. Intent on securing the community\u2019s spiritual gains for the next generation, JSN is gearing up to start a girls\u2019 high school by the fall of 2011. Rabbi Feldman views this as the community\u2019s most important development and hopes that a high school for boys will soon follow.
\nThe Feldman family\u2019s entry into the Torah community began with a phone call from Rabbi Feldman requesting the lawyer\u2019s help in attaining the rights to put up a community eruv. \u201cThey\u2019d been trying for seven years and the city had denied it,\u201d says Feldman [Boris]. \u201cIt took us four more years, but we got an eruv.\u201d In the process, he befriended the Orthodox community and discovered a penchant for learning Torah.<\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/ou-images\/content\/A-B_thumb.jpg\")
\u201cOperation Maccabim,\u201d for example, has JSN rabbis go Chanukah-party hopping from home to home, delivering thought-provoking derashot. \u201cWe had eight hundred fifty people exposed to some meaningful Chanukah content that they would never have had otherwise,\u201d says Rabbi Felsen. \u201cIt\u2019s all about networking, that\u2019s how the Silicon Valley works.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cPeople call me from the East Coast saying they have a job offer at Google, Yahoo, Hewlett Packard or any one of the high-tech companies and want to know if there\u2019s kosher food available, a shul, a day school and an eruv,\u201d says Rabbi Feldman. \u201cPalo Alto can answer yes to all those questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
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