Liza Rosenberg, a new member of the Jewish Philanthropies of Southern Arizona Young Women’s Cabinet, went to the YWC retreat Aug. 21-22 knowing only two of the other women.
She left, she said, feeling “like I’ve known all the women for years and years and years.”
Rosenberg, 40, started a business last year and admits she initially thought of YWC as a networking opportunity.
“It was really amazing how we bonded, and it just turned into so much more,” she says. “I feel like every single person went in very vulnerable and very willing to listen, and as a result, it was just so beautiful. Everyone just kind of got to know each other on a much deeper level.”
The programming allowed everyone to open up, she says, explaining that the 19 women broke into smaller groups to discuss questions such as “Who shaped you as a person?” and “What legacy do you hope to leave in the Southern Arizona Jewish community? What do you hope people will say about this group 20 years from now?”
Josh Faryab, 40, attended the Young Men’s Group retreat at a cabin on Mt. Lemmon Aug. 28-30.
“It’s a great way to meet new people, build a community, have friends all in a similar space in life,” says Faryab, who notes that he’d never been part of a formal group before.
He’d met some of the 17 other retreat participants briefly at previous JPSA events, but this was his first opportunity to really get to know them. “Acquaintances before, friends after,” he says.
Along with enjoying the social aspect of the retreat, Faryab was impressed with the programming, which included envisioning hypothetical situations, such as “Imagine you’re part of the JPSA board. How would you choose to allocate money to greater causes and what values drive you to focus on this particular cause?”
Exploring those scenarios was “a fun exercise. I’ve never really been involved in philanthropy before,” he says, and the retreat helped him feel that he was coming into his own as an adult.
“I still don’t always see myself as this person who’s 40 years old, who has his family, and now he’s part of the community — an opportunity to lead something and see something that’s bigger than himself,” he says. “But it is my time, and this is a really nice way to take that first step towards leadership.”
Faryab appreciated the diversity of careers among the 18 men at the retreat, who included doctors, lawyers, people in real estate, city workers, and more.
Rosenberg, whose first name is pronounced “Leeza,” grew up in Tucson but was born in the former Soviet Union. She was three when her family emigrated.
Her mother worked for many years with the infants at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, and Rosenberg spent a lot of time there growing up. She attended Tucson Hebrew Academy with JPSA Young Leadership Manager Nate Weisband, who invited her to join the Young Women’s Cabinet.
Now she’s the age her parents were when they left Belarus, uprooting themselves to give Rosenberg and her sister a better life, where they were free to embrace Judaism.
“Watching my parents learn a new language when they were 40 … it’s all kind of going full circle,” she says of joining YWC. “Maybe that’s also why it hit me — it’s just so nice to be rooted in the community too and just be surrounded by so many strong women.”
For Rosenberg, while the programming at the retreat was intriguing, equally important, she says, was an unscripted after-dinner bonding session, when the 19 women gathered in YWC chairs Jamie Kippur-Yoder and Melissa Landau’s hotel casita in their pajamas.
The women made pressed flower bookmarks, ate snacks, and chatted. “We didn’t talk about being Jewish, but we all connected on things we like and who we are as humans and our kids and our spouses and all of that stuff. It was so nice to have that time too,” says Rosenberg.
When he was growing up in Los Angeles, being Jewish didn’t feel particularly important to Faryab, although he attended Jewish day schools from third through eighth grades.
“As I’ve gotten older, the cultural and traditional aspects of Judaism and Jewish culture [became] so important to me that I really want to have that as part of my life that I could pass down to my child,” he says, explaining that beyond his immediate family, he didn’t have a Jewish community in LA.
Along with an invitation from Weisband to join the Young Men’s Group, Faryab was influenced by his friendship with former YMG member Michael Shiner. Faryab met Shiner when both were students at the University of Arizona, and the friendship was a factor in his decision to move to Tucson in 2021 with his wife, who was pregnant with their daughter.
“There’s always something about Tucson that felt special,” he says. “This feels like a really nice place to have a family.”
