community

Campus Update – September

Dear Families,

It is with immense joy and gratitude that we take the opportunity today to announce our new, permanent location on Mercer Island as part of a joint land development opportunity with Herzl-Ner Tamid synagogue. As the announcement below describes, this is a joint venture to develop a parcel of property that will meet the needs of JDS, HNT, and other Jewish organizations in Seattle.

We would like to take this time to thank the many members of the JDS Board of Trustees, school leadership, and community members, past and present, that have spent countless hours working to make this project a reality. To those members of the New Campus Task Force over the last five years, Hoda Mezistrano, Eric Oliner, Barrie Galanti, Nevet Basker, Ida Wicklund and Nathan Goldberg, the JDS community is particularly indebted to you for your dedicated efforts towards finding JDS a permanent home for the future.

In addition to the Board of Trustees, we would also like to extend our sincere appreciation to you, our JDS community. This decision has been several years in the making, and we are grateful for your patience through this lengthy but worthwhile process. A thriving and sustainable future for our school was always at the center of the Board’s decision-making process so that our students could benefit from a JDS education for generations. We are certain of our path ahead and we invite you to join us for the exciting journey forward.

While announcing our decision is an end in some respects, it is also just the beginning of the next phase of building, planning, and moving to our new home on Mercer Island. We know that there are likely many questions, some of which we can answer and some which may still require more time and plan development before we will have specific information.

We plan to hold two initial Q&A sessions to hear your feedback and provide as many details as possible at this time. The first will be on Friday, September 8th at 8:30 a.m., in conjunction with our first community PA meeting. A second will be held online via Teams on Monday, September 11th, at 6:30 p.m. Most importantly, we plan to celebrate this momentous new beginning as we welcome the new year at our Rosh Hashanah Kehillah on Friday, September 15th at 8:40.

Thank you again for your time, dedication, and passion for JDS. We can’t wait to share more about our future Mercer Island location with you.