Social worker to the community
Susan Greenbaum talks about the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey
Sometimes someone is just born for a specific job.
It might take her some time to find it, but when she does, she knows, and so does everyone else. It just clicks.
Part of the art and the love and the skill of finding the perfect job and doing well is knowing when and how and why to leave it.
That’s what Susan Greenbaum of Teaneck, the CEO of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey, is doing.
After more than a decade as the head of the social service agency, and a decades-long career as a social worker and administrator, she is retiring to make aliyah; it’s a long-held dream, jolted by her daughter’s having made the move earlier this year.
As she plans to leave next year— and as the agency plans to honor her, along with Tracy Silna Zur, at its annual dinner on November 17 (see box) — Ms. Greenbaum looked back at her time with JFCS.
“It’s grown dramatically to meet the needs of our community,” she said. “During my 11 years, we went through a merger and a pandemic, and now we’re dealing with the newest ongoing catastrophe of the Jewish people.” The agency is going strong now, she added.
The merger, between the Teaneck-based Jewish Family Service of Bergen and Hudson and the Fair Lawn- and Wayne-based Jewish Family Service of North Jersey, was finalized in 2016, more than a decade after the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey and the Jewish Federation in Fair Lawn merged.
Despite the obvious logic of the merger, it took patience, tact, and kindness to get two proud organizations to join. “We were extremely attentive to the leadership of both legacy organizations,” Ms. Greenbaum, who began her tenure as the CEO of the Jewish Family Service of Bergen and Hudson, said. “We paid attention to their concerns, hopes, and dreams. We kept almost all the staff” — everyone was invited to stay — “and although the two very large boards had to be cut in half, every donor who left the board still is a donor.”
How did that happen?
“When you are a social worker, everybody is your client,” Ms. Greenbaum said. “The staff is your client. The community is your client. The leadership is your client. You have to be professional at every turn. It’s not about you.
“When I came to the JFS of Bergen and Hudson, there were 19 people on staff. Now, our staff is in the 60s, and our budget is over $12 million.”
Soon after the merger was completed, “we were in the first cohort of a program of the Legacy Heritage Fund; we were nominated by the Berrie Foundation,” Ms. Greenbaum continued. “It is an 18-month program for an organization’s CEO and two lay leaders. It’s all about capacity building. We learned a lot.
“We had to raise half a million dollars, and we got another $250,000.
“That’s how we were able to build out our development department; it’s how we were able to hire Michael Danzig, our marketing director, and how we were able to have a grant writer for two years.
“This is how we were able to write a marketing plan, how we were able to rebrand and to create a new logo. It was uplifting for us, and it set up the new Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey for success.
“It was a huge privilege,” she said. It was a major big deal. “It enabled us to grow a team that could sustain a new, bigger agency.”
So the Legacy Heritage Fund helped JFCS grow into its new, larger catchment agency. “And that capacity building was essential. And then the pandemic happened, and it tested our ability to be nimble, and to transform ourselves on a dime.”
Part of that transformation necessarily was internal.
“We had been big snobs. Our entire team of psychotherapists — which includes me — were dismissive of virtual psychotherapy. And then, in a 24-hour period, we went 100 percent virtual. The country shut down, and every program and service except the food pantry, Corner Market, and Kosher Meals on Wheels went online.
“Corner Market never closed — it was open every day — and Kosher Meals on Wheels never stopped. It was delivered on Mondays and Thursdays — Torah reading days. But everything else was virtual.
“We were nimble. Our team was amazing. I am so proud of everyone. Our staff, from the bottom to the top, from inside out, is incredibly dedicated. Everyone supports one another. They are incredibly hard workers. Our focus is always on our clients, on the community. And that’s essential, because our strength is essential if we want to be able to care for the most vulnerable in the community.”
And now, with the merger long completed, the pandemic in the past, and the mental health issues that began to become increasingly visible before the pandemic and a source of yet more worry during the shutdown being addressed with sensitivity and creativity, the rise of open antisemitism and the horrors of October 7 and the war that has followed have become JFCS’s latest concern.
“And in this sudden example of unexpected trauma, we also are personally traumatized. It’s been a very traumatic time for all of us on staff, whether we’re Jewish or not.
“Many of us have children in Israel. Many of us have children in the IDF. There are many seniors who are dual citizens and haven’t lived in the States for 40 years but they’re here now because their children live here and wanted them home. We’ve been dealing with their health issues. We’ve been working with them to activate their Medicare — they’re entitled to it, as U.S. citizens, but they’ve never used it until now.
“And there are still the mental health issues of children and adolescents and parents, and how to help them deal with the news, and the fears that the news evokes.
“A lot of our clients, and even our clinicians, are terrified about the election, and what will happen in the streets. Will they even be safe going out to go shopping?”
Some of these fears were similar to what people lived through during the pandemic, but there’s an extra twist now, Ms. Greenbaum said. “The entire world was dealing with the pandemic. It wasn’t different for Jews. Now it’s different if you’re Jewish.”
JFCS has offered an afterschool program that local public schools have used, some of them for years. “Club Ed is a completely separate department,” Ms. Greenbaum said. “Basically, we’re the vendor — we offer things like someone who can help with math homework and be there while kids play basketball. It’s not at all Jewish programming, and it’s in districts that don’t have a lot of Jews.”
This summer, one of the school districts stopped working with JFCS, and didn’t say why until very late, “when their business manager sent an email to us saying ‘We are going in a different direction.’” That was after a string of unanswered phone calls and emails. “They ended up bringing a private vendor,” Ms. Greenbaum said. “I believe that it is antisemitism.”
JFCS also has provided psychotherapy to public school students; although that relationship has ended, as similar relationships generally do eventually, the agency continues to provide either in-person or online therapy to the students who’d already been clients.
It’s hard to know what’s antisemitism, what’s budget-driven, and what’s the result of normal change in personnel, but certainly the climate has changed, Ms. Greenbaum said.
Now, Ms. Greenbaum is looking at retirement. She feels that now is a good time because she and the board are finishing up a new strategic plan.
“It’s the second plan since the merger,” she said. As she looks back at the first plan and the work she’s done since it was implemented, she’s pleased, and she’s excited about the proposed plan, but she believes that “it’s time for a new, fresh professional leader, who will bring new strengths to the table.
“When I first got here, JFCS needed me, with my strong human service, social work, and personnel management background and skills,” she said. “Now we have to be out in the community more. We are now a significant player in the organized Jewish community, and our role will continue to expand over time.”
She listed some of the growth areas, as defined in the new strategic plan. “We will expand our mental health services into more intensive outpatient services,” she said. “We will have an employment program for people with disabilities, and we will expand our programs and services to people with disabilities.
“What I’d like to have emblazed in neon lights is that we want to enlarge our role in the community. JFCS should expand into being the human services organization that the community needs and deserves.”
It can do it, Ms. Greenbaum believes. It’s poised for the future.
As for her, “my plan is to make aliyah and to continue both to work in the area of mental health and to consult with nonprofits, both here and in Israel.
“My children both are grown now,” she said. “My daughter, Sarah, made aliyah in August, and my son, Yoni, recently started a masters program in Copenhagen.”
All three of them now have Polish citizenship, she added. Her parents, both from Poland, survived concentration camps. Now, the Polish government offers citizenship to the descendants of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. So now, although her father used to say, “I am not Polish. I am a Jew born in Poland. A Jew never could be Polish,” ironically enough, now both she and her two children have brand new passports that make clear that all three are Poles, at least theoretically. The language in those booklets is Polish, which neither she nor her children speak.
But now, Ms. Greenbaum said, many Holocaust descendants she knows are getting passports. They used to feel safer here than they do now, and a passport to which they are entitled offers some protection, although they hope they’ll never have to use it.
Meanwhile, Sara, who “is an amazing teacher, is working for a company called City Kids in Tel Aviv, developing curricula and programming. And Yoni is learning about biodiversity and plans to work in sustainability.
“They’re both contributing to the world.”
Getting back to the job that she loves but is leaving, in the agency that she thinks of as “my third baby, that will always be in my heart — I know that I always will be attached to it,” she said. “This has been my dream job.
“It has been such an honor to grow this agency, which meets the needs of the people in the community who need the help the most.
“This community, which is so rich in Jewishness, is where I have had the privilege of landing and then of raising my children, whose Jewish identity is so solid. It was a kind of Gan Eden on earth for us.”
Her children both graduated from the Frisch School in Paramus, and she and her family are members of Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck; both those institutions also are extraordinary, she said, and they contributed to the sense of community she knows she’ll continue to feel, even after she leaves.
So Susan Greenbaum is leaving her dream job to pursue her dream.
Who: The Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey
What: Its yearly gala
When: On Sunday, November 17, at 5:30 p.m.
Where: At the Edgewood Country Club in River Vale
Honoring: Susan Greenbaum and Bergen County Commissioner Tracy Zur
For information and reservations: Go to www.jfcsnnj.org/celebration or call (201) 837-9090.
comments