Howard Charish, reflecting on his years as executive vice president of UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey, said that graduates of the Berrie Fellows program are already doing valuable work in the community and will help to frame the Jewish future.

The Jewish Standard spoke with some of them.

Paramus resident David Goodman, who was in the Berrie program’s first cohort, said that it “brought him in touch with peers who were as passionate as I was about Jewish communal service.”

Goodman, who has been involved in the field “from a fairly young age,” was recently presented with the Marge Bornstein Award — what he called “a kind of life-achievement award.” He is 46.

The community activist said that what he found most powerful about the Berrie program was learning the history of Jewish leadership and “characteristics of Jewish leaders that go back to the Torah.”

“We’re just another generation of leaders,” he said.

Laura Freeman, left, David Goodman, and Stephanie Goldman-Pittel

Goodman is spearheading the implemention of UJA-NNJ’s recently adopted strategic plan.

“We’re changing how federation operates,” he said. “One of the things we want for the future is for federation to be perceived as adding value to the community … not just through the giving out of money, but [figuring out] what other ways we can make the umbrella organization of the Jewish community have relevance in today’s world.”

“It’s quite a challenge,” he said, “but the community is up for the challenge.”

Goodman, the immediate past president of Jewish Family Service of North Jersey and a current vice president of UJA-NNJ, said he learned from his role in searching for an executive director for JFS that “you choose the best candidate for the position, that it doesn’t have to be age-related.”

“Howard has done a great job,” he said. “I’m sorry he’s leaving. But … I understand. Maybe he just felt that he came in with a vision and now he’s accomplished it and is ready to move on. It’s great to leave when you’re on top.”

Berrie Fellow Laura Freeman, Wyckoff resident and president of the town’s Temple Beth Rishon, said the Berrie program took her from being a “Type A leader to a Type B leader — from someone who manages meetings and puts out fires to one who is looking to make a difference, to create a vision and galvanize teams of people to work towards it — one who plants seeds that will grow long past her own leadership cycle.”

“The Jewish landscape is changing,” said Freeman, “minute by minute. The most important thing a new [federation] director needs to know is that the skills and commitment that took us to where we are are not the same as those that will take us to where we need to be tomorrow. It’s a daunting task.”

Freeman, who said she was surprised to learn that Charish will be leaving, said his replacement will need to be “a visionary and a risk-taker. He’s got a lot of challenges, balancing yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

Among the biggest of those challenges is “getting secular Jews to understand their role in perpetuating Jewish life and their responsibility to help Jewish life.”

Secular Jews “structure their whole life on choice,” she said. “They’re hard to engage.”

Still, she said, a successful federation leader can build an organization that will accomplish this task, helping such Jews “understand their role in sustaining the community.”

Stephanie Goldman-Pittel, a Berrie Fellow in Cohort 2 and a resident of Norwood, echoed Charish’s contention that Berrie graduates are “all doing such wonderful things. I feel blessed to be part of that community,” she said.

As an example of the Fellows’ communal involvement, she cited Michael Starr, who is heading up federation’s Synagogue Leadership Initiative and chaired the committee that drafted the organization’s new strategic plan.

Characterizing that plan, she said “the key word is accountability ... having the organizations we fund be accountable for the projects they’re going to implement.” She noted that other organizations she serves, Jewish and non-Jewish, seem to be striving for the same goal.

As regards the qualities needed in a leader, “my thought is to get someone who is a great listener. That’s a very important quality.”

Commending Charish as “a brilliant speaker and someone who has footholds in all areas of the community,” she said she would seek someone “who is basically open” and pays attention to other people’s points of view.

When the General Assembly kicked off on Sunday, some North Jerseyans had already been in New Orleans for days volunteering with organizations dedicated to repairing the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey brought 32 volunteers to New Orleans last Wednesday as part of the seventh Klene-Up Krewe to volunteer in parts of the city still struggling to recover from Katrina’s devastation.

“We are continuing to do rebuilding, repairs, and renewal in New Orleans,” said David Goodman of Paramus, co-chair of the Klene-Up Krewe with Larry Weiss of Wyckoff. “The need is there. Even though it’s five years later, you still hear from people you meet along the way and they say thank-you.”

Last Thursday, the group served breakfast and lunch with Just The Right Attitude, a food pantry and soup kitchen. That evening, they had dinner at the New Orleans Hillel house, which is still under construction and scheduled to open officially in January.

David Goodman presents a donation to Debra South, founder of the Just The Right Attitude food pantry.

Last Friday, they volunteered with the St. Bernard Project, a charity based in St. Bernard Parish, 90 percent of which is still uninhabitable, Goodman said.

“People who go down to New Orleans and stay in the tourist area will think that the city has come back and is looking terrific,” Goodman said. “And it is, it’s really exciting to see how much of the downtown has come back. A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to travel into the neighborhoods we go into, to see the work that still needs to get done.”

The Klene-Up Krewe split into two groups in St. Bernard. Some worked on rebuilding homes for people who could not afford to rebuild after Katrina or have been cheated by contractors, while others went to work clearing plots of land the St. Bernard Project received in the Ninth Ward to build new homes.

“Over 120,000 homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina,” Goodman said. “You can’t really think of what 120,000 homes look like. If you get on the ground and see what that extensive area and how that number really equates, it is absolutely unbelievable.”

UJA-NNJ has brought 250 people to New Orleans on seven Klene-Up Krewe trips in five years. Each participant shares in the cost of the trip, said Stuart Himmelfarb of the UJA Federation of New Jersey.

“We are all deeply committed to helping,” he said. “This is one of those projects outside of the Jewish community but not outside of Jewish values.”

The timing of the trip with the General Assembly was coincidental, but that meant some participants were able to extend their trips for the conference. Each year, the fall trip coincides with UJA-NNJ’s Mitzvah Day, which took place on Sunday. For the next trip, scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in January, UJA-NNJ is partnering with the teen philanthropy program at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades.

Because of his efforts, Goodman received UJA-NNJ’s 2010 Marge Bornstein Award for Outstanding Volunteerism.

“The Klene-Up Krew is a role model for the entire country,” said David Gad-Harf, associate executive vice president and chief operating officer of UJA-NNJ. “We’ve really made a difference in New Orleans and touched people’s lives.”

For more information about the Klene-Up Krew, call (201) 820-3900.

For David Goodman, federation is a family affair.

Goodman is the incoming president of what will be known as the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey.

When he was growing up in Fair Lawn, his parents were active in the Jewish Federation of North Jersey. His first federation leadership role came as a teenager, when he and some friends organized a walk to raise funds for Soviet Jewry.

Goodman left Bergen County to study at Tulane in New Orleans. When he returned to New Jersey and joined his father’s accounting firm, his adult federation involvement began. “My dad introduced me to the people who were his peers in federation. They saw me as a young person who was interested and I enjoyed every responsibility that was given to me,” Goodman recalled. He joined the federation board in 1993.

David Goodman

“I didn’t know how to say no,” he said.

Most recently, he chaired the committee charged with implementing the federation’s strategic plan. He has been campaign co-chair. And he has helped lead the federation Klene Up Krewe project, which has taken eight trips of federation volunteers to help after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans.

He has also served as president of the Jewish Family Service of North Jersey and was in the first cohort of the Berrie Fellows Leadership Program.

The federation offered more than responsibility.

It gave him his bride.

“Both my mother and mother-in-law have been on the board of Jewish Family Service for a long time,” he recalled. “They never really socialized. However, some years ago, my mother-in-law was chairing a federation Women’s Division event and my mother attended. So did my lovely bride-to-be, Hope. My mom saw Hope talking to her mother. My mother fell in love with Hope and asked her if she was available.

“She actually had a blind date planned, but said if it didn’t work out I could call. And here we are,” he said.

Now, the couple has four children. Three attend the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County in New Milford; all this past year joined their father as he made phone calls for Super Sunday.

“I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and call people and ask them to support something I believe in,” said Goodman.

Goodman’s predecessor, outgoing federation president Alan Scharfstein, said he believes Goodman “is going to be an extraordinary president. He has all the skills and qualifications for this position. He has his heart in the right place and is also a very organized individual who I think will be an extraordinary president.”

And there’s one more family connection to federation. Howard Charish, who served as the federation’s chief executive for eight years until December, is Goodman’s uncle.

“His lifetime of service to the Jewish community is an example for me to follow,” said Goodman. “He just did it on the professional side, I do it on the volunteer side.”