News & Impact

When Alex Ike got the call letting him know he’d been chosen to receive a scholarship through JFCS’ Financial Aid Center he almost fell out of his chair. He says, “I called my mother immediately, and she practically screamed … we were both ecstatic.” The same excitement and relief were palpable at the home of seventeen year old Simone Leibowitz after learning that she would also be a recipient of a $26,000 scholarship to be disbursed over four years. The JFCS Financial Aid Center’s Loans and Grants Committee reviewed applications from Bay Area high school seniors as part of a… Read More

Meryl Botkin was delighted when she heard that her granddaughter, Julia, had been accepted into the Manovill Holocaust History Fellowship at the JFCS Holocaust Center. She knew that she would get the chance to see her beloved granddaughter more often throughout the school year, and it would give Julia an incredible opportunity to study the Holocaust and patterns of genocide at a college level. Julia, a student at Presentation High, a Catholic college preparatory school in San Jose, was one of a cohort of eight exceptional Bay Area high school students accepted into the Manovill Holocaust History Fellowship – a… Read More

What’s that Porgy and Bess song “Summer time and the livin is easy”…? You may be thinking that certainly doesn’t describe my summer so far. Many parents are expecting with school out and the pressure of schedules and homework on the backburner their children will be calmer and less anxious. While that might be true for some, summer can have its own set of stressors that can be challenging to navigate particularly if your child is already prone to anxiety. Here are a couple common scenarios and suggestions for dealing with them: Boredom: Your child(ren) are either not attending camp… Read More

J Weekly Excerpt: A Bay Area woman struggling with mid-stage Alzheimer’s was obsessed with getting the mail. Her husband, serving as her caregiver at their home, let her bring in the mail each day, but later she would forget and want to do it again. And again. When her husband repeatedly told her the mail had already come, the woman would become agitated. “She couldn’t hold on to the fact that she had already brought in the mail, and her husband felt that he had failed her,” said Andrea Korsunsky, director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ Center for Dementia… Read More

Frank Stein and his life partner, Paul May, drove cross-country to San Francisco in the 1960s to seek their fortunes, knowing that they could live their lives more openly as a gay couple out west. In the years that followed they created an incredible life together and became successful businessmen and generous supporters. From his humble beginnings in Brooklyn, New York, Frank understood firsthand how some families struggle. With a generous grant to JFCS’ Parents Place (now the JFCS Center for Children and Youth), his and Paul’s success helped parents, children, teens, and families get the tools and support… Read More

USC Shoah Foundation Adds New Holocaust Testimony Collection from JFCS to its Visual History Archive More than 900 Holocaust testimonies recorded over four decades by the Jewish Family and Children Services Holocaust Center of San Francisco (JFCS) are now fully integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as part of the Preserving the Legacy initiative – an ambitious plan to save recorded eyewitness testimony and bring voices of genocide survivors to a wider audience. In a two-year partnership, the JFCS Holocaust Center engaged USC Shoah Foundation’s state-of-the-art infrastructure to digitize, archive and catalog Holocaust testimonies taken by JFCS in… Read More