By Zach Benjamin, President/CEO

Evolution is a theme that is woven through Jewish history, and which is critically important as we write our Jewish future. It is a tremendous personal and professional joy, then, to join the Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg as president and CEO in this time of monumental evolution for our Jewish community and its agencies.

My family’s journey to Harrisburg has, by every measure, been an exercise in both evolution and beshert. As the COVID pandemic ebbed, and my time as CEO of Jewish Long Beach (the integrated Jewish Federation, Jewish Community Foundation, and Alpert JCC serving Long Beach and West Orange County, California) came to a close, my wife, Taina, and I began an introspective process that we hoped would guide us to a community that we could embrace for the long term.

Meanwhile, Federation and its leadership navigated their own evolution process, completing the agency’s relocation to the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life and managing generational change, both locally and against an increasingly challenging global Jewish backdrop.

It would take almost exactly a year for Harrisburg and my family to discover each other via a process that saw the convergence of an institution seeking professional leadership and a family seeking its permanent home. Next week, our daughter, Zoe, will begin first grade, and our family will continue its own evolution as we settle into our lives in Harrisburg. Here, we feel exceptionally fortunate to have found precisely the type of warm, nurturing, idyllic Jewish and broad communities in which we have long sought to put down our roots.

Professionally, I bring to Jewish communal work a belief in a variety of fundamental realities. I believe deeply in the principle of kol Yisrael averim zeh v’zeh: that all Jewish people are responsible for one another. Furthermore, it is imperative that, especially during times of challenge for the Jewish people, we work diligently to live in the common ground that sustains us, rather than be tempted to dwell in the differences that threaten to distract us. It is also critically important, as long as the Jewish people thrive in diaspora, that we serve as a light unto the broad communities of which we are a part.

Each Jewish individual is one of 15 million singular threads that, when woven together, create the remarkable fabric of global Jewish life. Our communities are the stitches that bind us, anchored by a thriving State of Israel, without which the Jewish future would find itself at existential risk. Although the Jewish people have settled over a vast geographic footprint, the triumphs and challenges of one Jewish community are interconnected with those of all others. Thus, Federation must fulfill its responsibility as an institution to forge and foster deep connections with Jewish communities in Israel and around the globe. We must also ensure that people and businesses throughout the Harrisburg area—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are equipped to fully leverage current and potential cultural and economic connections with Israel.

As the Federation, along with the Jewish communities of Harrisburg and the surrounding areas, continues to evolve, we must understand that change and adaptation are difficult but necessary processes to ensure the strength and continuity of Jewish life, both locally and worldwide. Ultimately, the type of change to which Harrisburg’s visionary Jewish leaders have committed will result in both excitement and trepidation, mourning for that which we must leave behind and enthusiasm for that which lies ahead. We must respect and honor the richness of our past, while understanding that it is our obligation to future generations to be in a constant state of evolution so that we may meet our ever-changing needs and challenges.

One of the most important elements of my role is to be accessible to any and all who wish to express thoughts, ideas, and concerns. I hope to serve as a sounding board and to earn the community’s trust as a sensitive, pragmatic representative not only of the Federation, but of our Jewish community and its leadership. Perhaps most importantly, I am deeply committed to listening with empathy and speaking earnestly.

Evolution is a necessarily long game that requires difficult conversations and sometimes painful compromise. If we are successful, then our work today will ensure that those not yet born may access Jewish life, values, and engagement, from birth to end of life, from generation to generation. It will also ensure that they will maintain a voice, venues, and institutions through which to facilitate the difficult conversations that will inevitably be necessary as Jewish life and community continue their perpetual evolution long after the current generation has passed on.

I look forward to working with stakeholders and community members of all backgrounds and ideological stripes to help ensure that Harrisburg, its Jewish community, and its Jewish institutions go from strength to strength, enabling us to serve each other and our neighbors with purpose and joy.