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Zsuzsa Brings the Jewish Community into the European Jewish Spotlight
In her new role as the Director of the Balint-JCC in Budapest, Zsuzsa has undertaken a daunting, but rewarding task at a significant historical moment. Hungary has recently joined the European Union and, as home to Europe's 3rd largest Jewish community of over 100,000, it is positioned to be a key hub for all European Jewry. It is against this backdrop, that Zsuzsa aims to take Hungary's only Jewish community center, supported by JDC and located in the center of Budapest, and transform it into a central address for Jews of different generations and of different denominations.
Zsuzsa is not starting from scratch. For some ten years, as the Director of Youth and Children programs at the Balint-JCC, she has developed and grown the JCC's three most successful programs to date --the pre-school, nursery and children's clubs, including very popular mommy and me classes which are filled to capacity. Jorge, JDC's Country Director for Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania handpicked Zsuzsa for the JCC director position as a way to continue to promote and cultivate local talent and leadership. " Zsuzsa is a prime example of a Jewish professional whose work at the Balint-JCC, as well as the Szarvas Lauder/JDC International Summer Camp where she is Program Director, has been full of energy and vision," Jorge explained. Zsuzsa became the director of the Balint-JCC a year and a half ago and has already begun to shift the center's approach. For the last 11 years, Zsuzsa explained, the Balint-JCC operated mostly as a Jewish Culturual Center serving a phantom population, organizing programs for the Jewish public. She said that programming was difficult because the staff never knew what the Jewish public would really be interested in. For example, people came in hundreds if it was a famous Jewish psychologist and if it was a Jewish actor only 20 people came. Now Zsuzsa, together with her staff (many of whom are also Szarvas professionals who understand community development and are invested in the future of the Hungarian Jewish community) has shifted the paradigm. The goal is to make the Balint-JCC into an incubator for different organizations, agencies, youth groups and to offer partnerships at different levels. Examples include a reform congregation which is holding Kabbalat Services and study sessions. The Balint-JCC is becoming a home for diverse expressions of Judaism. When asked to provide a snapshot of the Hungarian Jewish Community for 2007, Zsuzsa explains that, like all communities that are large and spread out, the Hungarian Jewish community has a lot of challenges, as well as exciting opportunities. Among the estimated 120,000, some 20% are formally affiliated which means they are connected in someway to Jewish community through an organization or a Jewish newspaper. Zsuzsa embraces the wide open playing field and is planning many new initiatives that she hopes will resonate with a diverse set of groups. What others see as competition she sees as opportunity for enrichment. It is this optimistic attitude, coupled with Zsuzsa's intelligence and determination that is bound to build bridges in the Hungarian Jewish community. February 2007 |
