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Jewish Community News
News: May 2004
JCC comes tumbling down, Levy Family Campus to rise in its place
By Cecily Ruttenberg
More than 100 people gathered at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos on April 1 to celebrate the tearing down of the old, and making way for the new.
The groundbreaking ceremony marked the official start of construction for the Gloria and Ken Levy Family Campus, a $22 million, 116,000 square-foot Jewish campus that will include a 500-seat theater, teen and senior centers, dairy cafe, fitness center and more.
The campus will act as home to the Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose, the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center, Jewish Family Service of Silicon Valley, the JCC Preschool and Yavneh Day School, a 600-student kindergarten-through-fifth-grade elementary school.
The campus is being funded solely by donations from the community. The center’s two largest donors, Gloria and Ken Levy and Eli Reinhard, spoke at the ceremony. Ken Levy, founder and chairman of the technology company KLA-Tencor, rode on “Godzilla” the excavator, while it tore down the first historic piece of the Oka Road property.
When Eli Reinhard spoke, he explained that the building would be dedicated to his parents Isidor and Elizabeth Reinhard. “It is on their shoulders that I stand,” Reinhard said. “That has enabled me to do the work that I have done.”
Keeping it in the family, Reinhard passed the microphone to daughter and Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center President Ruth Fletcher. “We’ve waited too long to have a vibrant Jewish community presence in Silicon Valley, and it’s all coming now,” Fletcher said.
Other well-known attendees at the groundbreaking ceremony included Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose President Brett Borah, Los Gatos Vice-Mayor Mike Wasserman, and former California Governor and now Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown.
Brown served as governor of California when the Jewish Community Center served as regional headquarters for the controversial helicopter malathion spraying to resolve the Mediterranean fruit fly crisis.
“The Jewish community has forged a powerful identity that is not only powerful for the Jewish people but for the gentiles, too,” Brown said. “As a secularist, I come here realizing the power of traditional faith passed from father to son to son. This is what creates family, not us politicians that like to talk about it.”
While demolition of the Oka Road property generated excitement for the new Levy campus, it also allowed members of the community to remember the history.
Originally the buildings on Oka Road housed the old Berry Elementary School. When school enrollment increased in the 1970s, the elementary schools moved. After the schools moved, hopeful buyers approached the city of Los Gatos. The group included several developers and the JCC. Because open fields for sports and athletic teams were already scarce, the city worked with the JCC to buy the property and keep more open fields available to the community. After the JCC purchased the property, it hosted the Medfly helicopter center in 1981 and 1982. Seven years later, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the JCC buildings acted as FEMA headquarters for families in need of help.
“This truly has been a wonderful resource for not only the Jewish community but the community at large,” said former Los Gatos mayor Joanne Benjamin.
To date, approximately $13.5 million has been raised toward the $22 million project. The Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose is actively working with the Silicon Valley Jewish community to raise the remaining money needed to complete the building.
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