When I was growing up in San Francisco, every Passover my very secular mother would try, with mixed results, to ensure my brother and I had something of a normal Seder. At those Seders, one of which was written about in the pages of this newspaper in 1980, there were sometimes more Catholics than Jews around the table and nothing could start until I got home from baseball practice and asked the four questions — CYO athletics did not cancel practice for Jewish holidays back then. We never quite knew what we were doing and the Jews seemed much less stressed out about it than the Catholics, but the food was always excellent. Those long ago seders reminded me of why Jewish San Francisco has always been both fascinating and puzzling for me.

It has long struck me that back in New York the question “Are you Jewish?” was usually met by a one word answer, yes or no. In San Francisco, it has always been more of an essay question.

Those essay responses I have heard over the years include things like, “Well, we’re not religious, but my family is Jewish and we sometimes…” Or “My father is Jewish and my mother converted, but I haven’t set foot in a synagogue (very rarely shul) for years and I never had a bat mitzvah…” Or “Culturally I am, but I don’t believe and I don’t speak any Hebrew…”

It is always nice to learn more about people, but the unwillingness or inability of many Jewish San Franciscans to answer that simple question has always mystified and bothered me. I am also aware that my own personal story of being a Jew who spent 10 years attending a San Francisco Catholic School is a source of frequent comfort, and humor, to my Jewish friends and family in New York.

A few years ago, I found myself reconnecting with an old friend with a Jewish sounding last name and asking her, “To what extent are you Jewish?” I used the odd syntax because, anticipating an essay in response, I asked an essay question. She explained that she was in fact Jewish, with a family history not unlike mine and then indicated that she had long thought there was a lot of anti-Semitism at our old high school, but had never really discussed it. I assured her she was right about that.

For many generations, Jewish San Francisco had a very different feel than other urban Jewish communities in the US To use the language of another group, Jews in San Francisco were not always quite out, never fully comfortable or public about who we were. It is also true that San Francisco’s Jewish community has long played an important role in the political, civic, cultural and financial life of San Francisco. These two points are probably related.

The long history of Jewish San Francisco includes numerous civic and business leaders going back to Levi Strauss in the days of the Gold Rush and including people like Herbert Fleishhacker and Benjamin Swig in the last century. The City also was one of the first in the country to have a Jewish mayor, actually two — Washington Bartlett and Adolph Sutro, almost 80 years before New York.

But for much of that time, the unspoken social contract for Jewish San Francisco was discretion in exchange for tolerance. That arrangement seemed to work in some respects, as San Francisco has always been a city where Jews can succeed in pretty much any professional field they want — including managing the local baseball team to the best record in the Major Leagues, as Gabe Kapler did last year — but also where speaking Yiddish loudly, flaunting our religious observance and reveling in Jewish American culture was never quite accepted.

In other words, San Francisco was for many years an easy place to Jewish, but less so to be a New York Jew. Or less charitably, a fine place to be Jewish, but not to make such a fuss about it.

Many Jewish San Franciscans with deeper roots in The City than me — my family arrived from New York in 1971 — understand this dynamic instinctively, but it took us a long time to figure it out. During the 1970s and 1980s, when we heard the phrase “pushy New Yorker” out of the mouths of too many San Franciscans, my mother, brother and I understood it to be code not simply for “Jew” but for “New York Jew. ” However, New York has been the capital of world Jewry for well over a century, so if you have a problem with Jews from New York, there may be uglier sentiments lurking there as well.

As any San Franciscan with a sense of history knows, The City’s most famous proud New York Jew was Harvey Milk. Milk was brash, had a quick and sarcastic sense of humor, spoke with an unmistakable and charming (at least to some of us) Outer Borough accent and brought a Jewish perspective to his advocacy for LGBTQ rights, not least through his frequent mention of how the Holocaust informed his views as a gay Jewish man.

The story of Milk’s assassination is well known, and it is primarily part of LGBTQ history, but the Jewish angle has also struck me as oddly overlooked. In many other American cities, if a right-wing politician who had campaigned on a pledge to “eradicate malignancies that plague our city” had killed the highest profile Jewish politician in town, who had arrived recently from New York, it would have been understood as also a Jewish story. But that perspective has usually been overlooked in San Francisco.

Things have changed since the 1970s, as Jewish San Francisco has been altered by more Jews from the East and the Midwest moving in, making the Jewish experience in San Francisco a bit more like that of other major cities. San Francisco’s Jewish community has not been entirely transformed, but those essay answers may be getting shorter. So, as we used to say in Catholic School, Chag Sameach!

Lincoln Mitchell has written numerous books and articles on The City and the Giants. Visit lincolnmitchell.com or follow him on Twitter @LincolnMitchell

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Craftsman with Jewish family services does odd jobs for seniors

Updated: 10:17 p.m. CDT May 21, 2021

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THESE UNUSUAL JOBS. WE HAVE THE BIG OAKS OUTSIDE. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT AND GODTSER GOT YOURSELF TODAY. IT’S A BIG DEAL FOR US. JEFF TALKS ABOUT THE HOME HELP HANDYMAN SERVICE OF THE JEWISH FAMILY SERVICE PROVIDER TO HELP EVERYONE WHO HAVE TO DO WITH THE PANDEMIC ESPECIALLY IN THE LAST YEAR, THE LIST IS GROWING AND IT IS PROBABLY NOT TO TRY FOR YOUR BEST. SO WE GET IN AND CHANGE TAPS. WE MOVE FURNIRETU FOR THE ELDERLY. WE WILL CHANGE THE LIGHT BULBS THIS DAY. IT’S GOOD WK FOR ME TO STAND UP ON THE ROOF IMMEDIATELY TO CLEAN THE GUTTERS. IT’S REALLY DANGEROUS IF THE PROGRAM HAS BEEN LAUNCHED TO HELP SENIORS AND OTHERS WITH HARD CHALLENGES TO HAVE A CRAFTSMAN TO DO THOSE WEIRD jobs that do things they are unable to do. IT IS A SERVICE. JEFF SAYS IT HAS BEEN USED SEVERAL TIMES. HOW TO FIX A TOILET OR DISPOSE OF A RUBBISH. IT’S SOMETHING HE TELL HIS FAMILY COUNCIL. THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOME AND BEING IN AN FACILITY. MANY OF THEM. HAVE NEVER BEEN A LONG TIME BUT IT’S GOOD TO ONLY HAVE CONVERSA

Craftsman with Jewish family services does odd jobs for seniors

Updated: 10:17 p.m. CDT May 21, 2021

Jewish Family Service said its handyman utility was launched to help seniors and others with difficult challenges do odd jobs around the house.

PRAIRIE VILLAGE, Kan. –

Jewish Family Service said its handyman utility was launched to help seniors and others with difficult challenges do odd jobs around the house.

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Three residents of the San Francisco Jewish Life Campus have died from complications related to Covid, according to an update on its website.

The SFCJL is now the second Jewish senior citizen facility in the Bay Area to have coronavirus deaths. Eight deaths were reported in October as part of the memory care program at Rhoda Goldman Plaza in San Francisco.

“While residents were near the end of their lives near the end of COVID,” said a letter signed by SFCJL CEO Daniel Ruth, “the board, staff and other members of our community are deeply saddened to hear their deaths.” These residents have been members of our community for an extended period of time and as [a] The result is that our employees have developed deep and meaningful relationships with them, and we are all feeling this tremendous loss. “

Ruth described this time as “the most difficult time in our 150-year history”.

The SFCJL, one of the largest long-term senior facilities in the Bay Area of ​​325 residents and 700 employees, announced a “significant outbreak” of the virus last week. Thirty-nine residents in a single quarantine unit have tested positive since December 7th. A total of 33 employees have tested positive since March.

The last facility update did not specify the number of direct caregivers in the affected unit. SFCJL was said to be working to contain the outbreak with help from local and state health officials and the facility’s infectious disease doctor.

Since the pandemic started in March, the SFCJL had largely avoided a surge in the coronavirus. Before December 7th, only two long-term residents and 22 employees had tested positive.

The current outbreak was discovered after a caregiver tested positive in the week of November 30th and a decision was made to quarantine the unit.

The news of the coronavirus deaths comes just before the SFCJL will receive a shipment of the Covid-19 vaccine sometime between December 21 and 28. In an email to J. Dec. 17, SFCJL spokesman Marcus Young said they will receive these 195 doses.

At Rhoda Goldman Plaza, 15 employees and 25 residents have tested positive for coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to the state Department of Social Services. In the Reutlingen community in Danville, seven employees and five residents had tested positive by December 8, according to Todd Murch, who currently runs the facility.

Coronavirus cases explode in city and state. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco reported an average of 280 cases per day this week and a record 335 cases on December 16. On December 17, the Department of Health ordered a mandatory 10-day quarantine for anyone traveling to the city from outside the Bay Area. The order came into effect on December 18th and will last at least until January 4th.

California is also seeing an increase. In early November, the state saw a seven-day average of 4,138 cases. According to CNN, that average rose to 38,774 on December 17th.

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