Meeting needs drives Nierenberg's leadership

By Deborah Moon Seldner

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Dani Nierenberg, Ph.D., said that before moving to Camas, Wash., three years ago, she was an active consumer of and participant in Jewish life; since then, her involvement as a community leader in Portland's and Southwest Washington's Jewish communities has been rapidly expanding.
This year, Nierenberg joined the Portland Jewish Leadership Institute. Convened and funded by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, the PJLI is designed to strengthen the Jewish community's leadership base for all of the community's agencies, congregations and organizations by teaching participants the personal, leadership and analytic skills they will need in the 21st century. The Jewish Review has been profiling several of the 30 participants.
Since moving to the region, Nierenberg has taken leadership roles in a family program of Vancouver's Shalom Chapter Hadassah, Congregation Neveh Shalom's shoreshim and membership committees, and Portland's Save Darfur Rally. She is involved in efforts to develop a sustainable Jewish community center and a hevra kadisha (burial society) in Southwest Washington.
Nierenberg said she and her husband Ron might not have moved to the area if Portland Jewish Academy had not been available for their youngest son, Joshua, now 5. Older son Ryan Newhouse, 24, had had such a good experience at a Jewish day school in California, that the couple wanted the same experience for Joshua, who graduated from the Foundation School and will begin kindergarten at PJA in the fall.
When the family moved to Camas, Nierenberg said she attended a Hadassah Training Wheels program in search of other area Jewish families with young children, and she was quickly drafted to lead the group.

For the past three years she has been involved in an exploratory committee researching the feasibility of creating a sustainable JCC to help Southwest Washington meet the needs of the Jewish community in an era of changing affiliation and involvement.
"So many Jewish institutions are having a hard time with people's affiliations," said Nierenberg. "We've done a thorough job of researching how to have a sustainable JCC. Now we feel we have a good handle on this."
So the committee has joined the Jewish Community Center Association as an emerging community and is putting together a formal steering committee. She said that the JCCA has a staff person to aid emerging communities.
In collaboration with Congregation Kol Ami Rabbi Aviva Bass, Nierenberg is also working to create a hevra kadisha for residents of Southwest Washington. The two women attended the National Jewish cemetery and hevra kadisha conference held in Portland in June and have been working with Neveh Shalom's hevra, which has been extremely helpful according to Nierenberg.
"It's a concern of mine to make sure we can at least handle life cycle events," she said. "The Columbia River can be a huge divide. People end up doing without things."
Nierenberg and her husband are rail enthusisasts in their spare time, which is very limited right now since daughter Konika Rosenbaum, 30, is getting married in August. But the couple is building a model train layout that features places they visited during a 1998 trip to Israel. The layout will include the Golan Heights (with its windmills—which ties in with husband Ron's work as a wind energy consultant), Jerusalem, Masada, Tsfat and Maoz Hayim, the kibbutz where Ron's mother escaped the Holocaust.
In Israel, she said she enojoyed being able to read the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are visibly displayed in glass cases.
When Joshua begins kindergarten, Nierenberg said she plans to return to her profession in clinical psychophysiology and biofeedback. But she plans to continue her involvement in the Jewish community, which she said will be aided by her participation in PJLI.
"The program has been of a quality equal to, or exceeding, others I have attended in the best business and academic settings," she said. "It is hard to imagine another venue in which such busy and committed people from our dynamic and diverse community would have had the opportunity to come together over an extended period of time to study, build connections and look together at ways we can best serve our evolving Jewish community."
"I am hopeful that I will be involved in continued efforts to build bridges between Jewish groups within our community and to participate in efforts to find new ways of making vibrant and inclusive Jewish life sustainable in light of changing Jewish patterns of affiliation and involvement," she concluded.