Photo courtesy of Beit Yehudit Community Center
1972
In today’s world, even in a city as dense, layered, and alive as Jerusalem, a sense of community can be surprisingly fleeting. People live in separate homes, follow separate routines, and often pass their neighbors without truly knowing them. In a city made up of so many different populations, traditions, languages, ages, and needs, the absence of shared spaces is deeply felt. Urban life can offer proximity without connection, and diversity without encounter.
Community centers answer that need in the most practical and human way. They are among the quiet lifelines of city life, places where a neighborhood becomes more than a collection of streets and buildings. They bring people into the same rooms, courtyards, classrooms, sports halls, studios, and activity spaces. Children come after school and find company, structure, enrichment, and a safe place to grow. Teenagers gain skills, confidence, and meaningful ways to spend their time. Adults discover lectures, courses, cultural programs, volunteer opportunities, and ways to participate in the life of their neighborhood. Older residents find companionship, familiarity, and a reason to leave the house.
For decades, the Jerusalem Foundation has understood that community life does not simply happen on its own. It requires investment, imagination, and physical places where residents can gather. Over the years, the Foundation has helped establish more than thirty community centers throughout Jerusalem, serving the city’s many neighborhoods and populations. Each center was created in response to the character and needs of the community around it, and each one has brought new life into the neighborhood it serves.
The Jacob and Sara Feldman Community Center in Pisgat Ze’ev is one example of this vision. Established by the Jerusalem Foundation in 2000, the center was built to meet the educational, recreational, and social needs of the neighborhood’s tens of thousands of residents. Its original facilities included a multipurpose hall, preschool activity center, youth club, ballet and martial arts studios, science room, and arts workshops. Over time, the Foundation also supported the addition of a fitness room, seniors club, youth wing, and the Fannie and Bernard Schaenen Music Center, a music school for neighborhood children. Today, the center serves children, youth, adults, seniors, new immigrants, residents with special needs, and the neighborhood’s growing ultra-Orthodox community.
In Kiryat Menachem, the Jerusalem Foundation supported the construction of the Scheuer-Bressler Youth and Community Center in 1972, with additional wings and renovations carried out in the years to follow. For many years, Kiryat Menachem and neighboring Ir Ganim were considered part of Jerusalem’s geographic and social periphery, shaped by poverty, marginalization, and the challenges faced by many of the families who first settled there. While the neighborhood has changed considerably in recent decades, many residents still face economic vulnerability, making the center’s presence all the more vital. Through the broader Ganim Community Council, residents receive support across every stage of life, including senior clubs, programs for children with special needs, mentoring and enrichment for at-risk youth, early childhood development services, daycare, and activities for new immigrant communities. In this context, the center is not only a place of gathering, but a source of stability, care, and opportunity.
In Neve Yaakov, the Shein-Davidoff Community Center reflects the changing story of one of Jerusalem’s northern neighborhoods. The Neve Yaakov Community Center began operating in public schools in the late 1970s, with early Jerusalem Foundation support for activities that helped new immigrants, particularly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, integrate into the social and cultural life of the neighborhood. In 1995, the Foundation completed a major expansion of the facility and rededicated it as the Shein-Davidoff Community Center. The project included a preschool, afterschool learning center, computer room, and seniors club for the thousands of residents who used the center each week. Today, the center serves a large and young population, with significant ultra-Orthodox communities alongside earlier immigrant groups from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia.
Across Jerusalem, these centers do more than provide programs. They give residents a place to belong. They are where a child takes a first dance class, where a teenager finds a mentor, where an elderly resident recognizes familiar faces, where a new immigrant learns Hebrew, where a parent finds support, and where neighbors begin to see one another not as strangers, but as part of a shared community. They make the city feel less like an intimidating metropolis and more like a network of villages, each with its own rhythm, stories, and gathering places.
This is the lasting importance of the Jerusalem Foundation’s investment in community centers. In a city often defined by its divisions, these centers create everyday opportunities for connection. They offer not only services, but belonging. Not only buildings, but memory. Not only activities, but the simple and irreplaceable experience of being known, welcomed, and part of something larger than oneself.
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