By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Jewish communal professional Glenda Sacks has retired after a local career of three dozen years. She served at the Chabad Hebrew Academy, San Diego Jewish Academy, the Agency for Jewish Education, the Jewish Federation of San Diego County, and, most recently, as a Hillel director dividing her time between the Catholic-run University of San Diego and California State University at San Marcos.
Retirement date was June 30th and almost immediately, the South African native traveled to a retreat center at Kfar Blum, Israel, for a family reunion that brought together relatives from various parts of the English-speaking world. Having just returned to San Diego, her most immediate task is training her Hillel successor, Danielle Botvin, but beyond that she is looking forward to “learning how to chill – I’m not good at that.”
Sacks engages in Daf Yomi – the study of one page of Talmud a day — which takes 7 ½ years to complete the cycle. She goes Israeli dancing “a minimum of twice a week” and she has walking buddies. She anticipates adding t some adult learning classes to these activities. “I will try to not over-plan,” she said. “I don’t want to make myself so busy that I don’t know which end is up.”
Having spent 15 years with Hillel, the last seven as a part-time director at USD, Sacks suggested that for Botvin, who will be full-time, “the most important thing will be working with the school … to highlight Judaism because the school is very much about diversity.”
For example, she added, the university hosts an interfaith seder, a prayer service for all faiths, and an annual 9/11 memorial in which representatives of the various faith communities participate. She said there are about 200 Jews among a student population of 8,000 at USD.
In contrast to USD’s President James T. Harris III, who is supportive of the Jewish community, on several occasions the student government adopted antisemitic, anti-Israel positions. In one instance, Sacks said, a political battle broke out within the student government between an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas group called ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and defenders of Israel including one non-Jewish student whose advocacy prompted a successful move to boot him off the student council. More recently, she said, tensions have been exacerbated by the creation of a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
“We worked very hard to explain what antisemitism was, and to have the Jewish students stand up for themselves,” she recalled. The administration brought in the Anti-Defamation League to conduct a seminar on antisemitism and also tried to foster dialogues between Jewish students and Palestinian supporters, but whereas Jews attended, Muslim students boycotted the sessions, Sacks said.
Part of her job was to counsel Jewish students who were emotionally impacted by the level of hatred expressed on social media against Israel and Jews, she said. There was one student who became so distraught that she was unable to take her exams, so Sacks spoke to a professor in her behalf. “I was there to help Jewish students and to help them present their case and be supportive in whatever way they needed,” Sacks said.
One year, students held a rally at a point in the middle of the campus, during which pro-Palestinian protesters chanted about “freeing” Palestine from the river to the sea. Without realizing what the temporary structure was, the students congregated next to a sukkah which USD had given Hillel permission to construct. Some protesters accepted invitations to come inside, to sample some food, and, in the process, to learn a little about Judaism, Sacks related. The protesters hadn’t realized the connection between the sukkah and the people of Israel, she said. “It was a very good teaching opportunity, and it worked out really, really well.”
The sukkah was just one of Hillel’s efforts to teach about Judaism on a predominantly Catholic campus. During the usual confluence of the Passover and Easter holidays, Sacks led an interfaith seder for which “there was a huge interest; some had been to one before, many had never,” Sacks said. “It’s a perfect way to showcase our religion and the connections between the religions.” There were also Chanukah displays and programming in winter.
The university-sponsored “all-faith service was always, for me, one of the most beautiful events,” she reminisced. “Six faiths were represented and the students all marched in with flags. There were always Jewish students with an Israeli flag, and then a Jewish student would deliver a prayer and someone would speak on behalf of Judaism on whatever the topic was for that year.” Besides Christianity and Judaism, the other faith communities represented were Islam, Native American, Hindu, and Buddhist.
An English professor, whose course included the works of Shakespeare, had Sacks come to her class when The Merchant of Venice was being studied, to talk about the antisemitism that focused on the character of Shylock. “This is not really how Jews were,” Sacks would explain to the students.
Hillel also sponsored on-campus presentations by representatives of the Anti-Defamation League and by Holocaust survivors, in particular the late Rose Schindler. “So many non-Jewish students bought her book, I was blown away.”
As at California State University at San Marcos, where students are mainly commuters rather than residents of dormitories or nearby apartment buildings, Sacks regularly met over coffee with USD students and faculty.
A favorite memory was of one Jewish student who went home for the High Holy Days, and suggested to her parents that they go to synagogue – something that they hadn’t done since their wedding. Sacks said it was a wonderful feeling to learn that perhaps her enthusiasm for Judaism had influenced the student and “had helped to make a difference” in the family’s life. She also takes pride in marriages of students who had met at Hillel activities and went on to have Jewish children.
Before joining the Hillel staff, Sacks worked on a variety of projects at the Jewish Federation of San Diego. “I did 11 Super Sundays; the first-ever women’s seder, which was a huge success; and I was the assistant budgeting and planning director. I was originally employed to do the Russian resettlement program. … We did the programming for the Russians.”
Super Sundays were all-day fundraising programs at which volunteers would telephone every known member of the Jewish community in San Diego to ask for a pledge. Local politicians, both Jewish and non-Jewish, often would make an appearance at the all-day telethon, sometimes taking a turn at the phones to ask for pledges. Arranging and staffing the event “was a lot of work,” she sighed.
After immigrating in 1987 from Cape Town, South Africa, “I worked at Chabad as a teacher, and then at the (San Diego Jewish) Academy as a teacher, and then at the San Diego Agency for Jewish Education. I was involved in education because in South Africa, I was a teacher at an all-boys, public elementary school.”
Sacks said that she had intended to make aliyah from South Africa to Israel – “I was the world’s biggest Zionist” – but both her brothers, who are physicians, had already moved to the United States, and her parents wanted them to all live in the same country, “so I came here.” However, her brothers, David and Anthony Sacks, ended up on different coasts of the United States. David has done groundbreaking research in the field of diabetes at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, while Anthony, in San Diego, recently turned over his longstanding Sharp-Rees-Stealy-affiliated practice in family medicine to his son, Adam.
Sacks has two daughters. One, Liora, has followed her into Jewish communal work, serving in Germany on the staff of HIAS, which is an international resettlement agency that began as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The other daughter, Atara, has a master’s degree in public health.
The new retiree describes herself as a “voracious reader – I never had a television my whole life – and so I read about 60 to 80 books a year.” As a hobby, she has proofread a number of books for friends, and “I would consider doing it for more than a hobby—maybe for remuneration, I don’t know. … I am good at finding other people’s mistakes, not my own. I go to a restaurant and if they spell ‘tomato’ wrong, I get hysterical.”
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com