Hava Leipzig Holzhauer was due to start her role as President and CEO of Jewish Philanthropies of Tucson in December 2023.
After the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel, she jumped in early upon request, joining meetings remotely to help the community deal with the antisemitism that soon ensued.
Along with attempts by pro-Hamas activists to force a unilateral ceasefire resolution by the Tucson city council, “our community was experiencing denial of the 10/7 massacre, and anti-Jewish hate and discrimination spilling from the conflict. This was happening not just in Tucson, but across the country,” she says.
“We were blindsided,” she says, “by allies we thought we had and friendships we thought we had built in the previous decades. They were not there to support us.”
“There were exceptions, of course,” she adds quickly, explaining some of those friendships and allyships have endured and “they have been lifesaving.”
While the city council agreed not to call for a ceasefire resolution, misinformation and demonization of Israel and Jews have continued.
In response, JPSA has established a Center for Jewish Resilience (CJR).
The name “frames it as a positive,” says Leipzig Holzhauer, explaining that CJR seeks to enhance Jewish pride even as it deals with challenges. For example, CJR distributed microgrants and party packs to families with children to host Hanukkah parties for their neighbors and schoolmates, which builds bridges by showing others the beauty and meaning of Jewish traditions.
Through a grant from JFNA and generous community support, Leipzig Holzhauer hired JPSA’s inaugural Director of Public Affairs, Carina Bien-Willner, to help her work with staff and community to build out CJR.
The center will have three main focuses:
- Partnering with law enforcement agencies, government officials, and security experts to build and maintain a community security strategy.
- Educating, responding to, and pushing back against modern antisemitism.
- Strengthening relationships and building allies in the broader community through community relations work.
“We’re going to be moving from a model of individualized security for our different institutions into a community model,” Leipzig Holzhauer explains, with a task force to look at needs holistically and a community security roundtable that will meet regularly.
CJR is “amplifying and elevating the voice of our community when it comes to modern antisemitism,” adds Bien-Willner, who started as Director of Public Affairs in mid-August after playing a pivotal volunteer role in fighting the ceasefire resolution effort, where she and Leipzig Holzhauer first met. She had helped a cousin in another city challenge a similar attempt and had “a treasure trove of information” to share with the Tucson coalition.
“It has become very apparent that the general population does not understand what modern antisemitism looks like. It’s important that we educate people both in our community and outside our community to know what that is, how to identify it, and how to respond to it,” she says.
Aided by a new 14-member steering committee, CJR seeks to build relationships and advocate in the education (both K-12 and university), government, interfaith, business, nonprofit, and media sectors, says Bien-Willner.
During and since the city council issue, people in the community have been reaching out to JPSA and to Bien-Willner to report antisemitic incidents in all sectors, but especially in K-12 schools and at the University of Arizona, she says. She worked with Leipzig Holzhauer to formulate a response mechanism and particular responses. After several months, she was invited to join JPSA as a professional.
Jewish communal work is a second career, though a life-long volunteer passion, for both Leipzig Holzhauer and Bien-Willner. Leipzig Holzhauer is an attorney who specialized in employment law and civil rights; Bien-Willner is an architect who founded a studio in Los Angeles before moving back to Tucson with her husband and children during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bien-Willner’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Poland and Austria who all ended up in Argentina, where her parents were born. There had always been antisemitism in Argentina, she says, but her family left in 1985, when she was 5. It was after la guerra sucia, the military government’s “dirty war” against dissidents, she says, and the economy was in crisis. Leipzig Holzhauer’s grandparents were also Holocaust survivors, from Poland and Germany, who landed in Syracuse, N.Y., where her parents were born.
After a few years in Paradise Valley, Bien-Willner grew up in Tucson. She celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at Congregation Anshei Israel, attended Catalina Foothills High School and Hebrew High, and earned her architecture degree from the University of Arizona.
Bien-Willner says last year’s city council issue was all-consuming, leaving little time for her architecture projects. But sitting through hours of “gaslighting and blatant lies about Israel” at council meetings “made me feel like I had to dedicate my time to this, because I felt it was so important for my children to see me standing up for our community and making sure they have a place to grow up in which supports the Jewish people.”
The CJR has launched action alerts to educate community members about local antisemitic incidents.
“Through action alerts, we let our community know we are aware of the incident and what we are doing about it; we let our community know what they can do about it,” Bien-Willner explains.
One recent example highlighted a piece of art titled “Queers for Palestine” displayed at the UA Museum of Art that said, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
“We had the opportunity to educate university staff about why that piece was a serious problem for our community,” Bien-Willner says, explaining that most Jews see the phrase as a call to violence against Jews and the Jewish state. The piece also is a form of “pinkwashing”, the CJR action alert said, targeting Israel, when in reality, LGBTQ+ identifying people enjoy equal rights in Israel but in Gaza have been imprisoned, beaten, and murdered for holding queer identities.
“Unfortunately, antisemitism has exploded since 10/7; it’s never going to go away, and it requires our persistent attention to making sure that we push back against it and stand up for ourselves,” Bien-Willner says.
“I think for the last few decades here in America, we just became very comfortable,” she says, “and I think Oct. 7 revealed to all of us how pervasive antisemitism is and how important it is that we shut it down whenever we can. That’s really what the Center for Jewish Resilience is focusing on: We want to call out hate whenever we can, educate people, and advocate for our community.”
