The Northern California Board of Rabbis (NorCal BOR) on Tuesday announced a new program called the “Jewish Chaplaincy Program,” designed to fill a notable gap in San Francisco’s unaffiliated Jewish community.
According to NorCal BOR, the program will provide acute bedside care to unaffiliated Jewish patients in San Francisco hospitals. It is also expected that a system for contacting chaplaincy leaders and hospitals will be developed to provide information and support to unaffiliated Jewish patients facing illness or at the end of their lives.
The board is currently looking for a part-time rabbi-chaplain to lead the initiative.
California’s Golden Gate Bridge, near San Francisco (Credit: RICH NIEWIROSKI JR./WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
According to a 2013 Pew poll, one in five American Jews say they don’t belong to any religious community — or have “no religion.”
Jewish Life in San Francisco
The San Francisco Bay Area has the fourth largest Jewish population in the United States after the New York area, southeast Florida and metropolitan Los Angeles.
According to a 2018 report, the Jewish population in the San Francisco Bay Area has a higher proportion of young adults, at 37%, than any other recent major American Jewish community study. Not only young people are drawn to the region (around 70% of the Jewish population come from other countries); Once they get here, they move around. The Jewish population is growing in the East Bay while it is shrinking in San Francisco.
Reflecting the entire Bay Area, the Jewish population is more diverse than any other community in the country. There is one LGBTQ+ person in every fifth Jewish household in San Francisco. Across the Bay Area, there is one Hispanic, Asian American, African American, or person of mixed or other ethnic or racial background (other than white) in one in four Jewish households, The 2018 Portrait of Bay Area Jewish Life and Communities, the first comprehensive Study of the Bay Area’s Jewish population, said.
Danny Grossman contributed to this report.
