Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
The Rev. Alexander Larkin, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Saratoga, Lillian Silberstein (center) and Rabbi Melanie Aron of Congregations Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, frequently get together to discuss interfaith issues.
Doing Diversity
The silence that followed her own family tragedy convinced Saratogan it was time to start talking
By Sandy Sims
One July evening last year, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, Latter Day Saints, Sikhs, Muslims, Bahá'ís, as well as representatives from racial and government organizations, poured into Saratoga's Congregation Beth David. Some 1,000 came together to protest the burning of three Jewish synagogues near Sacramento and bear witness against other hate crimes like the burning of African American churches and a racially motivated shooting last year in Chicago.
"We could not have mobilized so easily if it weren't for our interfaith discussion groups," the Rev. Alexander Larkin, pastor of Saratoga's Sacred Heart Catholic Church says. "And those discussions," he says, "wouldn't be going so well if it weren't for Lil Silberstein."
Silberstein works on the schedules and resources and sets up the meetings, sometimes even at her home in Saratoga.
Silberstein, the executive director of the Silicon Valley Region of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ, formerly National Conference of Christians and Jews, also NCCJ), has a passion for breaking down barriers between diverse groups and for building community.
Her passion was born from a painful past. When Silberstein was a young woman, her grandmother left the United States to visit Poland and was never seen again. In fact, Silberstein's family on her mother's side all disappeared in the Holocaust.
Then there was silence.
"No one talked about what happened," Silberstein says. "No one said, 'I'm sorry about your grandmother.' I had nowhere to go with my grief and anger."
The horror of what happened and the ensuing silence set Silberstein on a path that has had little to do with the Holocaust itself but everything to do with preventing another one.
For 30 years, as NCCJ's director, Silberstein has been breaking down the silence and walls between diverse groups. "I know how dangerous hate is," she says.
She has eased communication between prisoners and their jailers. She has given difficult-to-reach teens a safe place to express their painful struggles and confront their own barriers. She has organized programs for Santa Clara County students to open communication between diverse groups, whether it is about race, religion, socio-economic issues, ability, disability or gender. She has established the county's Victim's Assistance Center. And she has been a driving force behind interfaith communication of religious leaders.
Here in Silicon Valley where diversity is the norm, Silberstein's work has been critical. And the community has shown its appreciation by giving her awards, including an honorary doctorate from Santa Clara University, a Distinguished Achievement citation from the county Bar Association, the San Jose Medical Center's Legacy Medal of Honor, the Urban League Whitney Young Award and the Bahá'í Community Service award. Last year the Junior Achievement organization inducted her into its Hall of Fame.
"We have a tendency to stay in our own familiar groups because it's safe," Silberstein says. "It takes courage to risk." Silberstein's forté is creating safe atmospheres so diverse groups can risk sharing openly with each other. The most recent thrust of her work through NCCJ's has been with the 34 schools districts in Santa Clara County.
One of the fastest growing programs is Camp Anytown U.S.A. From one camp in 1996, it has grown to 20 this year.
"It was the most amazing four days of my life," Joel Key, a Los Gatos High School senior says of his experience at the camp. At Anytown he met people from five other high schools--all races, all socio-economic levels. Through symbolic exercises, he felt the sting of bigotry, the distress of isolation and the burn of watching his friend isolated. Students discover the advantages and disadvantages handed to them just because of their birth. They learn and share what it's like to be African American, Latino, Asian, white, disabled, fat, thin, boys, girls, rich and poor.
"I always thought we should think of each other as alike," Key says. "I found out that people are proud of their race and ethnicity. It's part of who they are.
"We were completely open to each other. Everyone bawled, even the toughest guys," he says. "We were so close, we didn't want to leave." "It was the perfect world."
For a camp of 50 or 60 students, Anytown is staffed by some 20 volunteer counselors and an equal number of school faculty, police staff and community leaders from all walks of life who carry this experience back home.
San Jose Police officer Bryant Washington, has served as a counselor five times. Students don't know he's a policeman until the last day, so they bond with him as a person. "I listen to them," he says, "and it makes a difference when I'm dealing with kids on the street. I stay in touch with their humanity." He treats them with respect, listens and explains.
Washington patrols Independence High School in East San Jose one day a week. "Anytown kids come up and talk to me as a friend." It's great, he says, because other students who didn't get to know him through Camp Anytown see that he's more than just an authority figure and talk to him, too.
Amy Obenour, health science teacher at Saratoga High and counselor at Anytown, says alumni of Camp Anytown get involved in the school's Inter Cultural Council. They give workshops, and they keep in touch with each other. Students from one camp had a reunion at Christmas.
The perfect little world of Anytown is a far cry from the world Silberstein grew up in Washington, D.C.
D.C was segregated by race and by Jews and Christians. "There were covenants in certain neighborhoods not to sell houses to Jews," Silberstein says. "I had few Christians among my friends." When she first took over the job as director of NCCJ in 1970 most of the directors around the country were Christian clergy.
Though she has kept the staff small, Silberstein has grown the Valley's NCCJ from a precarious ready-to-close-down organization to fifth in size in the nation, including regions like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, and Detroit. Its budget exceeded $800,000 last year. Add to that the $1.5 million contract the organization carries with the county to administrate the Victim Witness Assistance program, and the local NCCJ is second only to Los Angeles.
"I got involved in this job accidentally," she says. With young children at home, she was substitute teaching and volunteering in schools. She met someone from NCCJ and through that contact was offered a part-time director position for $2,000 a month. There was a hitch. National gave her one year to increase the $10,000 budget and the activities, or close down. "I took the job as a hobby because it was just a couple of days a week," she says, "but it grabbed me."
Los Gatos and Saratoga High schools are enthusiastic participants in Camp Anytown U.S.A.
Her first office was above the Garden Theater in Willow Glen, and it was tiny. "It was a dark dirty room. The carpet was peeling up, and the cabinet fell over when you opened the top drawer," she says. "I sat there for three months and no one came to tell me what to do."
The small governing board didn't know what to do. So Silberstein took her clue from national NCCJ which was focusing on the conflict between the police and races. "I got up my nerve to walk into the sheriff's department," she says. [Then] Sheriff Jim Geary said there were problems between the jailers and the prisoners. He wanted to know if Silberstein could help. She discovered a psychiatrist in San Francisco who'd worked with jailers and prisoners. They set up a successful program, got jailers to role-play and talk.
Her focus then turned to the hostility between police and "disaffected" minority youth. Silberstein and the San Jose Police Department organized week-long camps at San Jose Family Camp, mixing 15 to 20 police officers and 20 to 25 "difficult-to-reach" minority youth. "Nobody was doing this then," she says.
Silberstein remembers the first camp. The police arrived in police cars, the teens in buses. After a couple of fights, those operating Family Camp offered the group a choice--leave or stay out in the open field. They stayed in the field. Family camp set up a ping-pong table and trucked out the meals. There was a pondlike water hole and a camp fire pit. "I thought this was nuts," Silberstein says. "But it turned out to be the best camp ever." Within 24 hours, the police and the kids were hugging and exchanging phone numbers.
From there Silberstein turned her attention to the Harold Holden Ranch for Boys. Many of the 14 to 16-year-old boys were gang members, abused and neglected, often with fathers or brothers in prison. Silberstein still recalls a 15-year-old, blond, blue-eyed boy whose mom put a name tag on him when he was 3 years old and left him on a corner.
Silberstein says she gathered a team of counselors who loved working with kids. They shepherded 25 boys to the Santa Cruz Mountains for two days and slept in bunk houses.
John Malloy, counselor at the Foundry (the Foundry, under the auspices of the Santa Clara County Office of Education, is a school for students who've been "pushed out" or have dropped out of regular schools) recalls the program.
Silberstein says the other counselor was a 29-year-old Latino who had been in every penitentiary and youth authority in the state, a heroin addict, who had awakened one morning in solitary confinement and decided this was no way to live a life. The young people could identify with him.
"We tapped into the spirit side of those boys," Malloy says. "They discovered they were more than their hurts or the jackets they wore." Through activities like running, singing, story-telling, meditating, eating ceremoniously and sharing, the boys got in touch with themselves, their gifts and how they could share them. They learned to think of other ways to live besides in institutions.
"For two days these kids were surrounded by love and respect," Silberstein says, "and they didn't want to leave." She recalls one African American boy who never uttered a word till the end when he got up and said, "If I live to be 100, I will never forget this, and I will bring my kids back here someday."
These days NCCJ's focus is mainly on schools. Saratogan Mike Fox, chairman of the board of NCCJ, says, "Silicon Valley schools tell us the students are socially isolated into ethnic groups on the playground, and they aren't talking to each other." The NCCJ responded by developing a program for every grade level.
Green Circle, a program for kindergarten through fifth grade, and facilitated by trained volunteers, is in its 19th year.
Junior high students kick off a workshop on "Experiencing Diversity" with the film Flash Judgments which shows how quickly people stereotype each other. Fox says the film is used in industry, churches and high schools. For the last six years, Saratoga High School's incoming freshmen have had this workshop.
NCCJ has also been teaching Holocaust studies and critical thinking in high schools and universities since 1980. "My kids went to Lynbrook High and never heard a word about the Holocaust," Silberstein says. Holocaust studies are now mandated by the state, and NCCJ's program is booked solid till June.
In addition to diversity programs, NCCJ also administers the Victim Witness Assistance Center, which advocates and compensates victims of crime. Last year the center helped more than 8,000 people.
NCCJ's name change to National Council for Community and Justice three years ago reflects the times. "We wanted to be inclusive," Mike Fox says. "Now there are Muslims and Buddhists and others involved." The organization started in 1928 when Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, was running for president--and the Ku Klux Klan added Catholics and Jews to their persecution list. With growing anti- Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiment, a chief justice, an ambassador, a minister and other national figures came together to discuss ways to combat prejudice. Their mission continues today on a broader scale.
Silberstein's involvement with NCCJ has brought personal healing, too, especially through interfaith discussion groups. "I was able to share my grief and anger over the Holocaust with Christian and Jewish clergy. They cried with me. It was transforming," she says. Last year Silberstein and her adult daughter celebrated their Bat Mitzvah at Saratoga's Congregation Beth David. This is a major step for Silberstein because she had distanced herself from her faith, afraid to raise her children to become objects of hatred just because they are Jews. In the statement she wrote for the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, Silberstein says, "If I gave in to my fear and anger and maintained my distance from Judaism, Hitler would win ... that I could not let happen." Silberstein and her husband of 51 years, grandparents of three, are awaiting the birth of twin grandchildren. Her work has made it safer for them.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
