Shalom Orlando

by Jill Cousins

Dick Appelbaum clearly remembers the day Keith Dvorchik – CEO of The Roth Family JCC and executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando – approached him about the idea of the two organizations merging. It was 2018, and Dick and his wife, Dottie, were leaving the JCC after a workout in the Maitland campus gym. As Dick recalls, the conversation went something like this:

“You got a minute?” Keith asked Dick, a former two-time president of the JCC in the early 1980s and late 1990s and a former chairman of the Federation.

“Sure,” Dick responded.

“On the QT,” Keith confided, “we’re thinking about combining the JCC and the Federation into one better-operating unit.”

That’s when Dick jokingly admits he used some language that’s not fit for publication.

“I told him I thought it was the dumbest idea I ever heard in my entire life,” Dick says. “I told him, ‘You gotta be out of your mind!’”

Keith was undeterred.

“Great! Will you chair it?” he asked Dick, “because if we can convince you, we can convince anybody!”

Dick would, in fact, become chair of the merger committee, and it didn’t take long for him to get on board with the idea of the JCC and Federation coming together to form what will now be known as Shalom Orlando, starting this summer.

“At first, I thought it was a bad idea, because I had been president of the J and chairman of the Federation, and sometimes during that time we didn’t work well together,” Dick says. “But when I sat down with all these smart folks [on the merger committee] and figured out how efficient we could make it, I was 110 percent behind it. No question about it. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.”

According to Keith, the idea of merging the JCC and Federation has been tossed around for “probably at least a decade here in Orlando,” and similar mergers have become a growing trend in small and intermediate-sized Jewish communities around the country for more than 25 years.

“About four years ago, we sat together with some JCC leadership and some Federation leadership and brought it back up again, and there seemed to be real progress and real interest and real possibilities,” Keith says. “So we created a task force and began meeting and talking about it.”

The merger is expected to receive approval by both boards this summer, and after all the essential documents are signed, Shalom Orlando will become the official organization representing the Greater Orlando Jewish community.

The merger model has already been successful in several communities around the country including Tampa; Austin, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Columbus, Ohio; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

“It’s absolutely a growing trend,” Keith says. “It’s a way to maximize your lay leadership and maximize volunteers. You are able to share resources for basic things like marketing and accounting so you can accomplish more with less, and you get a better impact on the community. For us, that was critical. Together, we’ll be able to do so much more.”

During the past four years, while the merger was in the works, the JCC and Federation began coordinating programming and sharing services with great success. Now that the move is essentially complete, Keith expects Shalom Orlando to more efficiently serve the Central Florida Jewish community with a variety of services, no competition between organizations, and no scheduling conflicts created by over-programming.

For now, both organizations will keep their existing websites and phone numbers, with the websites merging into ShalomOrlando.org this summer.

“A lot of donors are saying this is something that should’ve happened a long time ago,” Keith says. “I think it’s really exciting.”