Welcome to the Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center on the Steve Saks Campus

By Jane Schiff, JFGN Board Chair

For many years, close to seven years, my dream of a “home” for our Federation has been percolating. In 2016, our Board of Directors engaged Sallie Williams to facilitate a strategic planning process. Based on what we learned, we quickly had a needs assessment/demographic study conducted by Brandeis University. Based on both those endeavors, we had an idea of what we needed to do for our Federation and what we needed to do for our community. Build, rent or lease? All ideas were on the table.

Marc Saperstein approached me and asked if he could take on the task of finding us a new home. Little did he know that he would spend the next six years working 40 to 60 hours a week, for free, to make the dream a reality. The next two years were spent finding a location. Saperstein looked at many, many properties. Sometimes he would send me to look at the properties and I remember thinking to myself, “What’s a nice Jewish girl doing standing in a parking lot counting parking spaces?”

A group of people, including David Braverman, James Knafo, Jeffrey Feld and myself, previously met and discussed the possibility of using the land next to Temple Shalom; however, that thought was never conveyed to Saperstein. Rabbi Miller suggested the unused land to Saperstein over lunch one day. After multiple discussions with our Board and the Temple Shalom Board, then headed by its president, Debra Antzis, the idea of leasing the land to Federation for a building was sent to the membership of Temple Shalom in the spring of 2018. The membership of Temple Shalom embraced the idea with 80% to 90% of the membership voting in favor of it.

The next steps seemed to move in slow motion. The two big issues were lease negotiations between Federation and Temple Shalom, which was the easier of the two issues, and receiving approval from the County to build. Before getting County approval, we needed drawings, engineering recommendations, traffic studies, environmental studies and a myriad of other required items.

We needed our team and hired our fabulous architect, James Knafo; our amazing building partner, DeAngelis Diamond; our engineering firm, Grady Minor; and our real estate attorney, Rich Yovanovich. This core team walked us through the permitting process, which was delayed due to COVID19. The process itself, without COVID, is not easy and a year is not an unusual amount of time.

By the end of 2020, we had our approval, which meant the project was a “GO.” Up to that point, we had raised about $200,000, mainly from the Board, to get through the approval stage. With a green light from the County, fundraising went into high gear. Saperstein and I sat outside the County offices and solicited each other. From there, we went to many of the funders whose names now appear on the plaques you see as you walk into the Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center.

We were thrilled with the reception from funders. As of the writing of this article, we have raised about $13.3 million from over 600 donors. Without the financial support of the community, this building would not be possible. The cost of the building, thanks to Saperstein keeping every detail cost as low as possible, is right at $11 million. The extra money raised will be used as an endowment to underwrite the operational costs of the building. We could use another $2 to $3 million in that endowment.

Once we had approval from the County, there were other governmental agencies — the EPA, the State of Florida and others — that needed to sign off on the project. Each approval required another study, another meeting and another time to wring our hands.

James Knafo now needed to provide detailed construction documents and we needed to hire a design firm. Wegman and Associates was chosen because they could handle everything from furniture to lighting to carpeting and signage (oy, is there a lot of signage). DeAngelis Diamond started gearing up and bidding out the job. But, it took a full year past County approval for us to break ground on Nov. 19, 2021. In reality, the project had begun a couple of weeks earlier with ground clearing, but the ceremonial groundbreaking was very exciting. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to open it to the entire community, again because of COVID.

With the building underway, two important committees and meetings were held for the next year on a regular basis. One committee was the Building Committee, which consisted of Brian McKenzie from DeAngelis Diamond; James Knafo, our architect; Marc Saperstein; Merlin Lickhalter (co-chair of the Building Committee); Deborah Fidel and Ed Alexander, both representing Temple Shalom; Jeffrey Feld; Marcy Friedland, our Capital Campaign Director; Steve Iser; Sam Roth; David Braverman; Nat Ritter; and me. That committee met every three weeks and made major decisions about every aspect of the project.

The other committee was the OAC (owners, architect and construction) Committee, comprised of Marc Saperstein, Merlin Lickhalter, James Knafo and the team from DeAngelis Diamond, which met weekly for the last year until DeAngelis Diamond turned the building over to us. Early summer, as we got closer to finishing the building, Jeffrey Feld, Nat Ritter (House and Grounds Committee chair) and I joined the weekly meetings. And when Phil Zoltek was hired to be our facility manager, he, too, joined the weekly meetings.

The myriad of details is mind numbing. How anyone keeps it all straight is beyond my understanding. But here we are, conducting business from inside the Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center on the Steve Saks Campus at 4720 Pine Ridge Road.

Each month, Saperstein has reported to the Board of Directors on the progress, keeping the Board in the loop and allowing for questions and comments. This project has been a major undertaking for our Federation. It is a statement about who we are and what we want for our community.

I read something in eJewish Philanthropy that I want to share to explain why we built the Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center.

“Having physical places to gather is fundamental to who we are as people. Our strength comes from our connections to one another. And yet, for many years, Jewish membership organizations have primarily focused on responding to individual requests as quickly as possible. This hub-and-spoke organizational model values transactions over community building. If you work for a communal organization, or sit on the board of one, and doubt this, just look at how time is spent. You might not want this to be true, but the math won’t lie. The structures, processes and cultures of communal organizations have created alliances of acquaintances,” write Allison Fine and Beth Kanter, authors of “The Smart Nonprofit: Staying Human-Centered in an Automated World.”

Human connections are what life is about. We all moved here from somewhere (except for a few younger members in our community). We need to be together. We need the connections. COVID took those connections away. The Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center on the Steve Saks Campus returns the opportunity to enjoy each other, be together, learn together and grow as a community.

This is your building, please use it wisely.