News & Impact

Looking at Helen, you’d think 92 is the new 75. Spry, quick-witted, and intellectually curious, she believed, until recently, she could do it all. But when a pulled muscle in her leg turned out to be severe arthritis in her hip, she acknowledged, “Now I know that I can’t do everything on my own.” That’s when she turned to Seniors At Home, JFCS’ senior care program that had served her late husband so well while in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease. “My laundry was piling up because I couldn’t get up and down the stairs so easily any longer,”… Read More

The facts are clear: Attending a Jewish summer camp as a child leads to a stronger identification with the Jewish community as an adult. Without the generous camp scholarships provided by JFCS, Micah and Rachel, 10-year-old twins on the Peninsula, would have missed out on this vital experience. The siblings lost their Israeli-born father to multiple sclerosis five years ago. Since then, it has been the hope of their mother, Pam, who is struggling financially, to connect her children to their father’s heritage through the Jewish summer camp experience. “But I could never afford it,” says Pam. “JFCS has helped… Read More

CBS SF Bay Area Listen to an interview with Lynne Fingerman, MSW, Director of Adoption Connection… Read More

US News and World Report by Susan Johnston Each year, U.S. citizens adopt over 100,000 children, according to the Child Welfare Information Gateway. Costs can range from very little for adopting a child from foster care to $40,000 or more for a private domestic adoption, says Nicole Witt, executive director of The Adoption Consultancy in Florida. For families having difficulty conceiving, the cost of infertility treatments can also run into the tens of thousands of dollars or more, but adoption offers a key benefit that medicine doesn’t. “[Adoption is] always a roller coaster of ups and downs, but at the… Read More

NBC Bay Area By: Lisa Fernandez, reporter Helen Farkas is one of a dwindling group of Holocaust survivors still alive to relay the horrors she experienced. At age 94, the Romanian-born woman is still an active speaker, telling children and civic groups how she scrambled for scraps of bread and escaped the infamous Auschwitz death camp march with her sister in 1945, during a guard shift in the middle of the night. Read the entire story and hear Helen’s interview from NBC Bay Area… Read More

Even before Karen and Scott adopted their son, Gregory, more than four years ago with the help of JFCS’ dedicated adoption agency, Adoption Connection, the couple felt a strong commitment to the domestic adoption process. Karen has a brother who was adopted, and as child, she lived on a street with at least four households with adopted children. “I grew up with it,” says Karen. “It was just the norm.” So when she and Scott decided to grown their family, it seemed only natural that they’d come to Adoption Connection. “I knew about Adoption Connection because I had volunteered… Read More