Terry Wunder: Rejoicing in a Jewish Identity

Editor’s Note: This is the 8^th chapter in Volume 3 of Editor Emeritus Donald H. Harrison’s 2022 trilogy, “Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5.”  All three books as well as others written by Harrison may be purchased from Amazon.com.

Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5, Volume 3, Exit 38 (Manchester Avenue): Temple Solel

From the northbound Interstate 5, take the Manchester Avenue exit which loops around and turn left.  Go beyond Mira Costa College to Temple Solel at 3575 Manchester Avenue.

Terry Wunder-Light, 37 in May 2022, was adopted from a South Korean foster care center at the age of six months by Ashkenazi parents who raised him as a Jew while doing whatever they could to acquaint him with his Korean identity.  However, there not many Jews nor Asians in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his family lived.

Growing up, Wunder had a mixed set of experiences – a family that loved him and was very protective of him versus schoolmates and authority figures who singled him out because he was Asian. “It was anything from kids making fun of your eyes to the food that you eat, or assuming you speak another language and making fun of it, even if you don’t,” recalled Wunder, who works today as Director of Community Engagement for Temple Solel in Encinitas. Wunder is also one of 15 persons across the nation chosen in 2022 for a Wexner Field Fellowship.

“I remember I used to ride my bike a lot with my friends and being stopped by the police in my own neighborhood and being asked, “Where do you live? Why are you in this neighborhood?’ and things like that.”  In addition, adults would ask him “whether or not I belonged in certain places, whether or not I was or was not Jewish, whether I was or wasn’t an American.”

For all that, said Wunder, “I never doubted that I was loved or that I belonged to my own family but certainly doubted whether I was loved or belonged in society.”  He wondered “where there is a place for people like me because I didn’t know other Asian Jewish children. You are on the outside because you are Jewish, and there are very few Jewish kids, and you are on the outside because you look different.”

Compounding the identity confusion, “I remember as a kid we used to go to New York a lot and being in Koreatown and feeling, “I don’t fit here either.”

In addition to his family, Wunder found a warm, accepting environment in the religious school of Congregation Nahalat Shalom (Inheritance of Peace), which was affiliated with the Jewish Reform movement. “It was very progressive. It had a female rabbi.  It was inclusive of LGBTQ+ people, had a lot of Native American people, a lot of interfaith families, and it was certainly ahead of its time in terms of Progressive Judaism,” Wunder said.

Nahalat Shalom “was so small we didn’t have a building, so our Hebrew school on Sundays would meet wherever we could meet – a church basement, park, and for a long time my class met at Fred’s Bread and Bagels on Central Avenue,” Wunder said.  “There was a big high-backed booth and six or eight of us would cram ourselves around this curved booth, and we would eat our bagels. This is where we had Hebrew school in the morning.  We would learn stuff, screw around, and have a good time. I remember everything about it – the smell of it, being in this crammed little booth – all the sights and sounds and feel of it.  Fred’s no longer exists, unfortunately. It was part of that neighborhood for a long time.”

The other environment in which Wunder continued to forge a positive Jewish identity was at the Camp JCC Shalom in Malibu, where over a couple of summers, as a teenager, he worked as a counselor. After graduation from high school, he attended the University of New Mexico for a semester. He had been working as a dishwasher in a café to pay his college expenses when The Shalom Institute offered him a job in April 2005 to live at the Malibu campsite, work in the office, do registration, administration, some programming, and some odd jobs.

“I moved out of my apartment, packed my clothes, sold my car, got on a plane, and moved to California a couple of weeks later,” Wunder related. “Then I lived at the Shalom Institute for a couple of years and did all the different jobs. I worked in summer camp. I worked at the office. I worked with the teen program and the school program. I did any job. There were times that I helped out in the kitchen and did maintenance. It was great. I learned a huge amount about what it is like to work in a Jewish camp and at a conference center. It was my first foray into doing that type of thing as a real job. I didn’t get paid a lot. I was so young. I was having a good time and living in California!”

California! It wasn’t just a place; it was a whole new lifestyle for a young man of 20. “The explosion of accents and cultures was exciting,” he said. “Anywhere you went or worked was filled with different kinds of people!  That was true too in the Jewish community because there were so many more kinds of Jewish people around.”

During this period, Wunder took some community college classes but never had sufficient finances or motivation to pursue a bachelor’s degree. In this way, he is unlike most other members of JPro, the organization of professionals serving non-profit Jewish organizations. He serves on the national JPro board.

After working at the Shalom Institute, he was able to secure a job as a program director, and later as the assistant director of Camp Alonim (Oak Trees) that was operated by American Jewish University in Brandeis, California, adjacent to Simi Valley. Following that, he worked in succession for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, then for the Foundation for Jewish Camps, and on to the Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles. At that Reform congregation, he was a multi-tasker with such assignments as associate director of the youth and education department, assistant director of the religious school, day camp director during the summer, and administrator for the teen and travel programs.

“We took kids to Israel and Lithuania,” Wunder said. “I think this experience helped me to learn a lot about the diversity of Jewish life in Los Angeles because that synagogue has a lot of Persian and Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Israeli Jews, and Russian Jews. The synagogue was a very robust social and cultural Jewish educational experience.”

And then came the Moishe House.

Today, Moishe House has its international headquarters at the Hive at the Leichtag Commons in Encinitas, about which more is written in a later chapter of this book.  The Moishe House movement, with 150 locations around the world, was started in 2007 in Oakland, California, by David Cygielman. He believed the best way to engage people in their 20s in Jewish live was to have activities organized by people of the same age. Wunder said that when Cygielman hosted Shabbat dinners, he would be joined by 75 people in their 20s. Philanthropist Morris Squire agreed to provide money to create Moishe Houses around the world, provided they were named for him. His Hebrew name is Moishe.

Fast forward to 2010 when Wunder, then still working at Stephen Wise Temple, was living with three other fellows in the San Fernando Valley.  Together, “we were hosting a Shabbat dinner every week for 30 or 40 people,” he related. “We were hosting seders and all kinds of Jewish community things for our friends and friends of friends and people who heard about it.” From a visitor, he and his housemates learned about Moishe House in Philadelphia and realized they were doing much the same thing. In coordination with the Los Angeles Jewish Federation’s Valley Alliance, national Moishe House executives agreed to sponsor Wunder and his roommates as operators of another Moishe House

“We did it for two years,” Wunder said. “We ran events. We had people come to our programs. We had people who met there, married, and had children. One of our roommates at the time, Jason, met Cassie, his now-wife and mother of his two children, at Moishe House. We had this wonderful time where we were creating Jewish community ourselves.”

All that activity in a residential neighborhood? How did his neighbors feel about it?

“Totally cool,” Wunder replied. “Our landlords were Jewish people who had kids who were in middle school and high school at the time, so they were totally psyched on the idea. They thought it was awesome. We were friends with our neighbors. We told them about it, and they said, ‘That’s cool.’  We had some Jewish neighbors and some non-Jewish neighbors. It was actually a very harmonious relationship with all the people around us.”

The programs included Shabbat dinners, a Passover seder, Chanukah parties, breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, planting on Tu B’Shvat, and building a sukkah for Sukkot. Additionally, “we would go out and do volunteering in our community. We did Jewish educational things where there were study groups at the house. Teaching how to do a seder, how to do some of these ritual practices. We would have guest educators who would come in. We had lots of friends who were Russian Jews, and they would bring in Russian Jewish food, and there were Persians and Israelis. We had tons of different experiences and then we had some things that were strictly social such as July 4 barbecues, watching the Super Bowl – just doing that with fellow Jews.”

A Moishe House involves between two and five people living together and hosting similar events for the community.  Another program is Moishe House Without Walls, which involves a single person putting together events at different locations.

In 2016, with such successes under his belt, Wunder moved to San Diego County to work for the national Moishe House organization, which in the interim had located here. His first assignment was to figure out how to build up the Moishe House Without Walls program. “Should it be focused on former residents? Should it be focused on alumni of other Jewish organizations, people who have shown interest in leading Jewish activities?” Wunder said the decision eventually was made to partner with the Shusterman Family Foundation and with local Federations to subsidize hosts. Following that assignment, Wunder became director of the program to create Moishe Houses around the world.

Among his colleagues at Moishe House during his 5 ½ year stint with the organization was Kristen Corradeno, the organization’s marketing manager. The engaged couple’s son, Oscar, nicknamed Ozzy, was born in September 2020. Likely to be a wise child, his initials are OWL – Oscar Wunder-Light,” noted the proud father. Wunder said he and Corradeno plan a wedding sometime in 2023.

If there were any drawback to working at Moishe House, said Wunder, it was that he had to deal with most of his colleagues around the word via Zoom. He missed in-person interactions. So, he was happy to accept an invitation when it was suggested that he meet at Temple Solel to discuss a possible new position with Rabbi Alexis Berk, Chief Executive Officer Dawn Grossman, and Board President Melissa Hirsch.

He started in February of 2022 as Director of Community Engagement at Temple Solel, a position with a bulging portfolio. He is involved in managing the membership experience, contributing to adult and teen programming, working with the religious school, working with the clergy, planning the fundraising gala, dealing with security concerns, and handling external marketing and internal communications.

Wunder said that Temple Solel has a “North San Diego County vibe, which is beachy, outdoorsy, light but not frivolous version of Judaism that is interested in deep learning.” A program typifying the “North San Diego County way,” according to Wunder, is “when the rabbi leads ‘lessons of the lagoon’ in which they do these three-mile leisurely lagoon walks while they are talking about texts and spirituality.”

The North San Diego County vibe, he added, “embraces consciousness of mental health, wellness, self-care, being good to oneself, and also being committed to the rituals and practices of Judaism. We are not offering yoga because people can get yoga elsewhere. We are offering experiences that people can’t get in other places.”

Temple Solel, he said, has different demographic sections within its membership. There are couples over 50 years of age, who have moved to California from other North American cities and have brought their love of synagogues with them. “Then we have this demographic of families with children K-12, a lot of whom are interfaith, interracial, multiracial, LGBTQ+ people – fairly diverse. We have an early childhood center, so you have those family groups too.”

Many members of Temple Solel are Caucasians, but not exclusively. “There are definitely Asian kids in the school, and Hispanic and Black families, Russian families and Israeli families.” He said he likes to highlight the diversity of the congregation, and that this has been well-received not only by Jews of Color but by White Jews as well, who welcome the spirit of inclusiveness.

About the same time he was joining the senior staff of Temple Solel, Wunder was also selected as a Wexner Field Fellow. “The Wexner Foundation’s mission is to provide resources, education, and coaching for Jewish professionals in the hope that these Jewish professionals will stay as Jewish professionals for a long time,” Wunder explained. “To have a thriving Jewish community in the future you have to invest in the people who are doing it presently so that they will continue to do it.”

The Wexner Field Fellowship was in its sixth year in 2022, Wunder said. “The commitment of the professionals is that they are part of a three-year fellowship program and that they will commit to working in the Jewish community for those three years and for at least three years beyond that,” he said. “Wexner provides access to personal and professional coaching; Jewish educational experiences funding like going on retreats or having Jewish educational tours; and other professional development opportunities.”

“Each class meets twice a year to do professional development work together,” Wunder added. “There are 15 people per class. Ours includes synagogue professionals, funders, people who run camps, JCCs, and work in national Jewish organizations. All the people are somewhere in age between 25 and 45 and at different points in their career.”

Twice a year, the classes get together at an institute. In Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier this year, the fellows of 2020, 2021, and 2022 convened for three days with Wexner Foundation staff. “It was the first they had done in person in a couple of years since COVID-19,” Wunder related. “It was relatively serious, few families, very present, people who really wanted to be there. The president of the Wexner Foundation (Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson) was there the whole time, interacting with people.”

Reflecting on his life and career so far, Wunder said he was glad to be involved and at home in a multiracial Jewish community.  “I’m glad to be here while it is happening,” he said. “I hope that it will continue to be a feature of the Jewish community for my kid as he grows up, so he doesn’t run into the same kind of racism, prejudice, and marginalization that I did. Instead for him, it will be a basic part of his life that he belongs. That is the part that I find exciting in my own life – the thing that is really motivating for me every day.”