This message has 730 words and will take about 3 minutes to read.

I would like to start this year’s series of Shabbat Messages by shining a light on some of the unsung heroes in our community: the professionals who spend their days working to help our community and its organizations be the best they can be. Jewish communal professionals – and of course here I mean all professionals who work in our community, whether or not they identify as Jewish – are rarely in the spotlight, yet they have dedicated their careers to helping our most vulnerable, to connecting the disconnected, to working with our lay leaders and volunteers so together we can make the biggest impact we can.

Earlier this year, I joined the board of JPro Network, a new evolution of what was once the Jewish Communal Service Association. It’s a wonderful organization, whose executive director Ilana Aisen is based in Toronto, that supports career growth and serves as the central resource for professional development for people who work in our community. As my colleague Jeff Finkelstein, president and CEO of Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and chair of JPro explains, “The strength of a Jewish community and all its facets are deeply dependent on having high-quality, well trained and deeply motivated professionals.”

Here at Jewish Federation, we have a long history of supporting the professionals in our community. From providing professional development workshops to our local day-school teachers and classroom assistants; to sending our own staff to Jewish Federations of Canada conferences focused on how best to support seniors, address poverty, and foster inclusion; to organizing ongoing training for all community professionals on the very pressing issue of community security – we believe strongly in the benefit to all when our own staff and all communal professionals have an opportunity to learn, to share best practices, to grow and connect.

One of the big questions I’m often asked is whether Jewish communal service is a job or a career. Well, what’s the relationship between, say, synagogue programming director, a camp counsellor at the JCC, a social worker at Jewish Family Services and the principal of a Jewish day school? What do they share in common? Many of us who serve the community do it because it’s more than a job to us; in many ways it’s a calling. Whatever the job, it is performed in service of creating the solid foundation upon which the entire community is built.

To be part of the community while working for the community creates a deeply intertwined kind of life. I say often to our staff at Jewish Federation that we do this work not only for the people we help today, but also to make a better community for our children, and even for ourselves, into the future.

We know that the volunteer leaders who serve and have served on our boards and committees feel incredibly inspired by their experiences. I want to spend time this coming year helping the people serving our community in a professional capacity to sustain their inspiration levels over the course of their careers, as well.

The last time I was in Israel I had one of those small-world moments you can only really have there. Sitting right by us at dinner was a group of JCC professionals from across the continent, some of whom knew Michelle Pollock, the former Vancouver JCC president who was travelling with our group. Many more of these connections take place in online forums, on social media, and even through such simple things as monthly calls with colleagues across the country. When Jewish communal professionals have the opportunity to grow together, our entire community grows with them.

This kind of growth is possible in our community in large part because we are in the unique position of not competing with each other. Whether we’re representing Federation, PJ Library or a school, we have huge opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other in ways that don’t always exist in other sectors. There are times when we have looked to other communities in search of new and innovative ideas, and many times when they’ve turned to us.

Taking advantage of opportunities to up our game as professionals ultimately has a positive effect on both our individual organizations and the community as a whole.

I’m sure at least some of you have made resolutions over the past few days. One of mine is to expand opportunities for Jewish communal professionals to find their way to the very top of their game.

Shabbat shalom,

Ezra S. Shanken
CEO, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver