News & Impact

By Robyn Bloom, LMFT, Director of Adult Services and Rabbi Daniel Isaacson, Director of Spiritual Care at JFCS Every year during Passover, we share our homes with family and friends and tell the Jewish people’s story of liberation from slavery in Egypt. But this year, after the trauma of October 7 and the ensuing six months of war, some of us may feel worried about the upcoming holiday. How do we make meaningful Passover seders this year for everyone around our tables? How do we stay connected despite differences of opinion? Here are four principles, grounded in parts of the… Read More

A woman in California, whose mother died from COVID-19 in New York, is struggling with the pain of never getting to say goodbye. A man in his 80’s, whose wife is alone in the ICU, now must quarantine from the rest of his family. An emergency room doctor, who has young children at home, is torn every day between caring for her patients and putting her family at risk. These are just three of the many calls that JFCS has answered since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of people have lost a loved one, and those who haven’t… Read More

Caryn Siegel, a spiritual care volunteer for JFCS’ Jewish Chaplaincy Services serving Stanford Medicine, has been dedicating her time to supporting hospital patients for fifteen years. Caryn offers her patients a compassionate presence and a listening ear. She also brings insight from a very personal experience. In 1987, Caryn’s son, Ilan, was born at Stanford Hospital severely disabled. Ilan was in and out of Stanford’s Intensive Care Unit for the next seventeen years of his life. Caryn vividly remembers sitting in the hospital with her husband, Mark, over the years—the two of them feeling very alone. When Ilan passed… Read More

JFCS’ Jewish Chaplaincy Services featured on Unorthodox podcast  At the age of 25, Vy Nguyen was diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive form of cancer. Vy had been raised Buddhist, but when a Buddhist hospital chaplain told her that her cancer was caused by “bad karma”, she decided to meet with chaplains of other faiths. One of them was Chaplain Bruce Feldstein, MD, BCC, founder and director of JFCS’ Jewish Chaplaincy Services serving Stanford Medicine, and Adjunct Clinical Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. While it is the doctor’s job to cure a patient’s disease, Chaplain Feldstein… Read More