SARINA ROFFE
DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOVIE FIELD OF DREAMS? KEVIN COSTNER PLAYED RAY, WHO KEPT HEARING VOICES THAT TOLD HIM “IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME,” SO HE BUILT A BASEBALL DIAMOND. AND PEOPLE CAME FROM FAR AND WIDE TO WATCH BASEBALL.
When parents follow their passion, it is bound to have an effect on their children. Such was the case for Jeff Beyda, who saw his parents Barbara and Joseph Beyda A”H, work tirelessly for the benefit of the community.
“My parents never told me explicitly to involve myself in community work. Because it was such a high priority in our house and we always saw it happening it didn’t need to be said; we lived it,” said Jeff Beyda. “My father was always involved in community work and in helping people. Even after he retired, he went back to school to earn a degree in social work because he loved helping people so much, he wanted to do it full time. Unfortunately, he died at age 57, so only had a few years in practice.”
as they work with the Israeli government on resettling Syrian Jews in 1992.
Joseph Beyda is best known for his work as president of Sephardic Bikur Holim (SBH) and affecting its rise from a small organization to a premier mental health organization. Like Costner, Joseph forged forward, believing that if you build a program that serves an important need, people will use it. “My father felt an intense responsibility to meet the needs of our community. He, with others at the time, made tremendous efforts to remove the stigma around mental health, and to their credit it was largely successful. The amazing work done in the mental health field today at SBH is in part a testament to the correctness of his vision, his dedication to the work, and all the committed volunteers and professionals who joined him in the effort, then and now.”
But it was more than that. Jeff watched as his father, along with many other committed community members, work tirelessly to help in the resettlement of the new Syrian immigrants in the early 1990s. “There was so much to do that it was a full-time job for him. The new immigrants were arriving so quickly and needed housing, to learn English, and schools for their children. SBH, to their great credit, led the effort. They even even made hotel arrangements until they could find everyone someplace permanent to live,” he said.
Barbara Beyda, Jeff and his siblings David and Shirley, learned to share Joseph with the community. “When we walked home from synagogue it took an hour because people always stopped him to chat along the way. One day, my dad came home from synagogue upset and sad that some of the newcomers felt their accommodations were inadequate. He took his work very personally,” said Jeff. “Yet, despite all the time and effort he put into his work, he was always there for us, as a family, very present and active in all our lives.”
Jeff went to East Midwood Hebrew Day School and Sephardic High School, finishing his education with a Political Science Degree from Boston University. He met his wife Nava while living in Israel, when they both served in the Israel Defense Forces. Now 52, the couple has two sons and two daughters.
“I watched how my father emphasized working with young people. He made SBH a cool place for youth volunteerism, encouraged them to be involved by visiting the sick in hospitals or at home, and by delivering Shabbat packages to the elderly. Many young people met each other and bonded through the camaraderie,” he said. Here again is an example of how a program was built to inspire youth to volunteer.
Over the years, Jeff has volunteered for organizations he believed in and was passionate about. He was on the national board of Friends of the IDF, helping them raise millions of dollars in the community,
He was on the board at Barkai Yeshiva and was the co-founder of ILEAD with Shilo Plesser (currently run by Richie Chalme) a five-week summer program for high school junior and seniors to motivate future leaders to be active and give back to the community, as well as form a connection to Israel. The ILEAD program is named The Joseph D. Beyda Leadership Program, in memory his father and how important youth development was to him.
Jeff agrees that sometimes you need to build programs to address current and future needs of the community despite initial skepticism. For example, when starting The ILEAD program many felt the program, which took teens out of their comfort zone, might be too rustic and challenging for our youth, and parents and kids alike would not be interested. More than 400 teenage boys and girls have since gone through the selective program, which fills up each year with a waiting list.
Jeff is now President of the Sephardic Community Alliance (SCA). He believes in maintaining the Sephardic culture and heritage we all grew up with. Among the core values of SCA are Torah, education, tolerance and respect for others. SCA has 48 community organizations as affiliates.
“I wanted to be part of SCA so my kids could grow up in the same kind of place I did,” said Jeff. “The community has become a much bigger place with many specialized professional groups and institutions. So as a community, we are more capable of handling complicated challenges—but it requires a higher level of coordination and collaboration amongst our rabbis, lay leaders, institutions, and the community at large than it did in the past—and the SCA is very good at facilitating.
And this was more important than ever during the coronavirus pandemic. With so many organizations signed on to its mission, the SCA utilized its resources and network by bringing together rabbis, medical professionals, and community leaders to help give both medical and halachic guidance. They held many webinars that helped inform and advise community institutions and members on effective actions, strategies, and responses.
Today, the SCA is using that same collaborative model to address other strategic issues. It is helping develop our youth’s ability to be strong and self-assured advocates for Israel. As students attend the nation’s college campuses and encounter anti-Israel, Anti-Semitic and Anti-American sentiments, they are well prepared and have a strong sense of their identity. Social media literacy is also a focus area, to equip people with critical thinking skills that allow them to more easily discern for themselves what is misinformation and to form their own opinions, and not be led astray from the values that have served our community and our families so well.
“While the SCA agenda addresses a variety of existing and emerging challenges, the core of everything we do, as in life, rests on the foundations of our Torah learning. Ensuring that we continue to platform our phenomenal teachers and make them as widely accessible as possible, is and will always be our number one priority. We recently completed a large and lengthy investment with the launching of virtualmidrash.com where our live and recorded classes are available. There is also a free app you can download for mobile access.
“At its core, we hope to inspire and have a respectful, tolerant community that lives in the modern world, while retaining our Torah values, Sephardic heritage and culture and have pride in who we are,” said Jeff. He continued, “Things aren’t the way they are because it’s the way they have been. To preserve and build the great aspects of our community and minimize the negative impacts society delivers to our door, it requires an effort by everyone, it doesn’t just happen by accident. And BH that’s exactly the kind of people that make up our great community. If programs are developed for the benefit of the community as a whole, people will participate.” If you build it, they will come.
A genealogist and historian, Sarina Roffé is the author of Branching Out from Sepharad, Backyard Kitchen: The Main Course, Backyard Kitchen: Mediterranean Salads, and the cooking app, Sarina’s Sephardic Cuisine. Editor of Dorot, Sarina holds a BA in Journalism, and MA in Jewish Studies and an MBA. She is President of the Sephardic Heritage Project, Co-Chair of the Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative and Chair of the Sephardic Research Division of JewishGen.
