Young Adults Have Something to Say

By the time you read this, I will be on a plane heading to Israel to attend the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Board of Governors meetings with board chair, Candace Kwinter. Following that, we will join several members of our Board and our Israel and Global Engagement Committee, as well as community leaders from across Canada at the Coast-to-Coast partnership meetings in Kiryat Shmona.

Just as we were departing, King David students were returning home from the school’s annual trip—the first since pre-pandemic—and we are very proud to support this important experience.

Speaking of Israel, on November 1st Israelis headed to the polls for the fifth time in just three years. It can be confusing, so here is a video and a pdf to help make sense of it.

Mazel tov to our Choices and Women’s Philanthropy volunteers!

Before I departed, I had the pleasure of attending our first in-person Choices event since 2019. I always say that community is made of people who make the choice to be involved, and more than 450 of you did just that. Thank you!

Kol hakavod to Choices co-chairs, Jaclyn Dayson and Lisa Averbach, who brought their amazing energy, creativity, and fresh ideas to make this Choices a night to remember! They truly put their hearts into it.

We also want to thank Women’s Philanthropy chair, Sue Hector; Annual Campaign chair, Lana Marks Pulver; past chair of Women’s Philanthropy, Shawna Merkur; the stellar team of volunteers; and our sponsors for helping make this event a huge success.

We are grateful to our incredible community speakers Shoshana Lewis, Simone Kallner, Michaela Singerman for their important and deeply moving remarks, and Ellen Schwartz, our inspiring keynote speaker. Their thoughtfulness and authenticity shone through as they delivered messages that were both extremely personal and truly universal. Multi-talented singer (and VTT mom) Haley Davis was a huge highlight, too!

Young adults played an important role in the event, as they do throughout our organization and our community.

So, I am turning over the rest of today’s message to the co-chairs of the Ben Gurion Society (BGS), a national recognition society for young donors who give $1,000 or more to the Federation Annual Campaign, and the co-chairs of our Axis Steering Committee, who develop programming with and for young adults in our community.

We are beyond excited to be following in the footsteps of so many of our incredible leaders here in Greater Vancouver. We engaged with BGS from the beginning and have loved all the leadership opportunities it has given us. We took the opportunity to take the positions of co-chairs of BGS because this community made us the leaders we are today, and we wanted the opportunity to give back.

We both grew up in the Vancouver community and attended Vancouver Talmud Torah and King David High School. We were molded by this community and love having the opportunity to help mold our generation of leaders by creating unique opportunities for our BGS members. BGS has given us the opportunity to connect with likeminded young adults, give to Jewish Federation in support of our community, and create opportunities for us all to learn from leaders spanning multiple fields in our community. 

This year we will give members the opportunity to engage with our community in new ways, from speaker events to cocktail hours with donors and leaders, so we can all learn from organizations here and in Israel and create events that give members exclusive access to the best our community has to offer.

Tori Segal (née Simons) and Lucy Samuel (née Adirim), BGS co-chairs

We are incredibly honoured to be leading our community of Jewish young adults for the next two years. We believe that Axis events are vital to the young adults in our community, and it’s a great benefit to the Jewish young adult lifestyle.

We both came into this role after spending a few years on the Axis Steering Committee, helping plan events and volunteering to ensure that Jewish young adults in Vancouver can meet one another and become connected within the community. Since Axis has really helped us find ways to socialize in Vancouver, especially during hard times, we wanted to take on this opportunity to give back to the community that we’ve enjoyed for years.

Axis is an incredible program that has connected many Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s, provided volunteer opportunities, and widened the scope of our Jewish experiences for young adults.

We took on this role to support our incredible committee of volunteers who put their time into making these events happen. Looking at the next two years, we hope to run more in-person events to benefit young adults needing friendship and community to foster genuine relationships. We want to ensure that our events provide a wide variety of opportunities for young adults to engage with their community and their Jewish identities, and we are so thankful to Jewish Federation for making Axis possible.

Rachel Meadow and Adin Mauer, Axis Steering Committee co-chairs

From our leadership who are en route to Israel, to the women who made Choices a massive success, to the young adults stepping up to lead, and hundreds of others who give of themselves, volunteers are the backbone of a vibrant Jewish community. Want to get involved? Hit reply and let’s connect.