Gan Shalom Cemetery, flanked by the rolling, manicured hills of Briones Regional Park near Martinez, is a beautiful, solemn space. I was there recently on a freelance photography assignment for Sinai Memorial Chapel, the Bay Area’s Jewish funeral home — and as I arrived, I felt as if I’d been there before. 

On a hunch, I asked the cemetery administrator to check for the plots of my grandparents on my mother’s side and got confirmation that Gan Shalom is indeed their final resting place. It was my first time back since my grandfather’s burial nearly 15 years ago. 

As J.’s staff photographer, I have the privilege of traveling to Jewish spaces around the Bay Area. As a professional photographer on an assignment, I am expected to take full control of any shoot — posing subjects carefully and moving from location to location while keeping careful track of time and cultivating a comfortable environment. Despite what I’d just realized about my grandparents, I needed to stay focused on the task at hand. 

Toward the end of the shoot, as I was walking with a group that included the administrator and Sinai Memorial Chapel staff and volunteers, I could feel my heart beating a little faster. An unexpected wave of emotion washed over me as we got closer to my grandparents’ graves.

When I read the names and dates on their gravestones, memories flooded back: their kind, gentle presence in my childhood, some of my final memories of them, and the person I was when they passed away — a young teenager trying to make sense of himself and the turbulent world he lived in. 

Lisa Finkelstein, the communications director at Sinai, lit candles and placed them on my grandparents’ gravestones. I knelt and began to weep softly.

Crying is unusual for me. It doesn’t come easily. But when I do cry — when all the factors that allow me to relinquish control over my emotions fall into place — a weight is lifted off my chest.  

Perhaps it was a combination of factors that led to my emotional state. The previous workday was a long one, and I’d had little sleep. Regardless of how they came about, the tears helped me mourn.

After a few minutes, I stood up and quietly recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. I wiped away my tears, and then pulled myself together. After all, I had a job to finish. I put a smile on my face and rejoined my group, eager to finish the long day, both physically and emotionally taxed.

This photo shoot reminded me about the privilege I have as a photojournalist. I show up in person and deal with people and events head-on, in all sorts of environments. My work becomes a medium that itself absorbs some of the emotionally and intellectually complex situations I face. It likewise can serve as a conduit for processing my feelings and thoughts. 

As challenging and complicated as my job can be sometimes, I’m grateful to work in this community.

It’s been an intense year. Over the past 12 months, J. staff photographer Aaron Levy-Wolins documented many of the moments that will stick with us: celebrations and memorials, incidents of antisemitism, trauma over the Israel-Hamas war and the installation of a new Jewish mayor in San Francisco.  As the year ends, we invite you to reflect on Bay Area Jewish life in 2025, as preserved in these striking photos.

January

Faith and community leaders placed hands on Daniel Lurie for an interfaith blessing at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco the day before his inauguration as the city’s mayor.

Luba Grungras, who was 100 when her life story appeared in J., is believed to be the last living survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp residing in the Bay Area.

John Yerina waves Israeli and U.S. flags during a regular vigil on a Lafayette overpass calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas.

February

From left, Wyatt Sklarin, Gideon Witchel, Stanford Hillel Rabbi Eli Weinbach and Ben Stettin held etrogs ahead of Tu Bishvat at the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm in Palo Alto.

Elisheva Basseri shows off her self-portrait made from everyday objects during a workshop led by Israeli artist Hanoch Piven (not pictured) at Yavneh Day School in Los Gatos.

March

A wicked “drunken grandmother” challah babka with a marbled poppyseed filling and a bourbon sugar syrup for Purim, made by recipe columnist Faith Kramer.

Josh Eibelman (left), playing the part of a groom, celebrates with his “bride” Lia Weiss (center) and Rabbi Tsipora Gabai during a henna party, which explores and celebrates Middle Eastern Jewish wedding traditions, at the the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley.

April

Layla Alsheikh (left), a Palestinian woman whose her 6-month-old son died in the West Bank in 2002 when an Israeli military raid on her village prevented her from taking him to the hospital, smiles as she holds hands with Mor Ynon, an Israeli woman who lost her parents to Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, as Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers who’ve lost loved ones share their stories at the JCCSF.

Miriam Peretz (left) and Lisa Tilton performed during “Mimouna: A Moroccan Jewish Celebration,” marking the end of Passover, at the JCCSF.

May

A worshipper chants from a siddur at Congregation Emanu-El as local Jews mourn the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.

Miss Gefilte Fish, also known as Noah Zweben, tries on glasses that turn lights into Stars of David during Value Culture’s Jewish American Heritage Month event at the Academy of Science in San Francisco.

June

Congregants circle an altar in the center of the room during Reveal, an all-night event celebrating Shavuot through spirituality and art, at Renewal congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley.

Wearing hot-pink “Proud & Jewish” T-shirts and even temporary tattoos, Jews march down Market Street during the San Francisco LGBTQ Pride Parade.

July

Penina Eilberg-Schwartz and her mother, Rabbi Amy Eilberg, are featured in a story about communicating across their deep divide over the Israel-Hamas war.

Jewish artist Chance Rein performs at Brick & Mortar Music Hall.

August

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, who took psilocybin mushrooms for the first time as part of a Johns Hopkins study, stands in the Giant Sequoia Grove in Berkeley.

Basil sits on the grass as Congregation Sha’ar Zahav hosts a Dog Shabbat in San Francisco’s Dolores Park.

September

People mingle in the courtyard during a reception and Shabbat service celebrating the reopening and renovation of Congregation Emanu-El’s building in San Francisco.

Sunny Schwartz sounds a shofar during Tashlique, a tashlich ceremony and celebration by Reboot and JCCSF, on Rosh Hashanah at San Francisco’s Crissy Field East Beach, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

October

The spire of St. Ignatius Church peeks through the slated sukkah roof at the University of San Francisco. The sukkah was built by USF’s Jewish Studies and Social Justice program.

Ava Chrysanthe protests against conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens while he speaks inside Congregation Emanu-El.

November

A robotic arm takes a board with bagels and puts it onto a rack at the Boichik Bagels factory in Berkeley.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, parents of slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and former Bay Area residents, spoke at the Z3 Conference at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto.

December

Judith Kaminsky, owner of kitchen supply store Cookin’, will close her shop at the end of the year after more than 35 years on San Francisco’s Divisadero Street.

On the first night of Hanukkah at San Francisco’s Union Square, people hold candles to commemorate the 15 Jews killed in a mass shooting during a Hanukkah celebration that day at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.

Even after decades as one of the Bay Area’s top rock ’n’ roll photographers, Jay Blakesberg still remembers his first time in a darkroom.

It was 1977. Together with a friend, the 14-year-old “Jewish kid from New Jersey” had just gotten back from a Jerry Garcia concert, having shot a roll of black-and-white film. “We developed it and I was hooked,” Blakesberg said in an interview, fondly recalling “that magic liquid chemical soup and watching a picture come up for the first time.”

Forty-six years and countless Fillmore concerts, music festivals and Rolling Stone assignments later, he is the subject of “RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped,” a solo exhibition of photos and rock ’n’ roll ephemera. The exhibition will run at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from Aug. 31 through Jan. 28, 2024.

The heart of the exhibition is 200 photographs shot in the Bay Area between 1978 and 2008. They include portraits and concert photos of the Grateful Dead, Paul McCartney, B.B. King, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Carlos Santana and many more legends. Included in the ephemera — all of it from Blakesberg’s personal collection — is everything from ticket stubs to test Polaroids to magazine tear sheets featuring Blakesberg’s first published photos.

“When I first started taking photos at concerts, my only goal was to create my own memorabilia to tack on my bedroom wall,” Blakesberg said. “My collecting this stuff was my way of adding to that memorabilia. I wasn’t thinking, in 40 years I’m pretty sure the CJM will do a retrospective.”

In addition to the materials on display, the CJM will sponsor activities around the exhibition, including a free Oct. 21 concert featuring several local bands.

From the get-go, Blakesberg had both the eye and the chutzpah to make it as a rock photographer, though it was the music that hooked him first. Growing up in pre-internet 1970s suburbia, he recalled, “If you wanted to be cool, rock ’n’ roll was your way. We went to a lot of concerts. We lived for it. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, except we were too nerdy for sex.”

His first published photo, of former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen on stage, ran in Relix magazine in 1978, when Blakesberg was just 16.

A year later, while attending an anti-nuclear march and concert in Washington, D.C., he noticed a phalanx of photojournalists taking pictures of actor-activist Jane Fonda while she addressed the crowd.

“I’m looking at the photographers with their long lenses, and I said, ‘Gosh, I wish I could be one,” he recalled. “I found a discarded press pass and before Jane Fonda finished her speech, I was on stage taking pictures of her.”

His love of the Grateful Dead lured him to the Bay Area in 1985, and in no time he was shooting at venues such as the I-Beam in San Francisco, Berkeley Square and the Greek Theatre. He became the house photographer for classic rock station KFOG and landed assignments from magazines such as BAM and, eventually, Rolling Stone, for which he served as the Bay Area photographer. Once he opened his San Francisco studio, Blakesberg added celebrity portraiture to his skill set.

He did experience one serious interruption early in his career. A drug bust at age 19 landed him an eight-month prison sentence. But Blakesberg made the best of it, demanding and being granted permission to hold a Passover seder and a Yom Kippur service while incarcerated at the Youth Correctional Institute at Annandale, New Jersey.

The inspiration to mark Jewish holidays in prison stemmed from his Jewish upbringing in Clark, New Jersey. Years later, Blakesberg sent his children to Brandeis School of San Francisco. In fact, the CJM show’s origins trace back to an Instagram account run by daughter Ricki Blakesberg, in which she posted classic photographs of her dad’s. That led to a book of photographs, which led to the exhibition.

Having a Jewish institution like the CJM host the exhibit is a big deal for him, he said. “San Francisco was the cultural zeitgeist I wanted to be part of,” he said. “The Dead fan base is hugely Jewish. And the greatest Jewish rock ’n’ roll story that ever happened here was Bill Graham.”

He is referring to the Jewish Holocaust refugee who escaped Nazi-occupied Germany, came to America, turned the Fillmore West into a major rock venue and, as a promoter, helped shaped rock and pop music from 1965 until his untimely death in a helicopter crash in 1991. Graham was proud of his Jewish identity,and played a key role in the first public Hanukkah menorah lightings in San Francisco’s Union Square.

“All my work has been based here,” Blakesberg added. “So for the CJM to step up and see it from all angles — the S.F. angle, the Jewish angle, the pop-culture angle — really impressed me.”

Blakesberg is still at it, photographing artists and feeling as inspired by their music today as he was when he started out.

“The live music experience meant something to me,” he said. “Those artists were rebels. We believed in what they were telling us, and we believed in the lyrics. We were learning how to lead our lives by listening to this music.”

“RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped”

Aug. 31 through Jan. 28, 2024 at Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St, S.F. Included with museum admission.

Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.

The mouth-watering aromas of baked cheese, rich sauce and warm bread filled the streets around San Francisco’s Washington Square Park for the first-ever Pizza, Bagel and Beer Festival. Dozens of local pizzerias, bagel shops and breweries set up their wares and welcomed hordes of hungry eaters and thirsty drinkers.

Eat and drink they did! A wristband bought all-you-can-eat pizza and bagels as well as four tickets that could be exchanged for beer, cider and seltzer.

The festival was a dream come true, a carbohydrate wonderland.

Saturday’s North Beach fest was hosted and organized by Tony Gemignani, owner of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana — which made one of my favorite pizzas of the day, more on that later — in collaboration with the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club Foundation.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed presented him with awards from her office and from the Board of Supervisors, celebrating him for bringing the neighborhood together for a day of carb pleasure.

Gemignani said he wanted to create a food festival after the Covid-19 pandemic died down and realized he could make it more interesting by not only inviting pizzarias but also bagel shops and breweries.

“For me, I think San Francisco is as good as New York and Chicago when it comes to pizza,” Gemignani told J.

He noted that pizza makers have been slowly adding bagels to their repertoire.

“There’s a movement in the industry for the last maybe five years or so of pizza makers that make bagels,” said Gemignani. “It’s not uncommon if you’re in the pizza industry. It may be uncommon from a consumer’s point of view. Putting them together in a festival isn’t too crazy.”

Gemignani himself has expanded into the bagel business. He named his shop Dago Bagel because he’d been called, “dago,” an ethnic slur, and opted to reclaim the word instead, according to his shop’s website. Gemingnani said Dago Bagel baked 1,200 bagels the morning of the festival.

“I don’t think it was a giant leap to make bagels,” he said. “It was something I wanted to do for a long time.”

Gemingnani said his bagel shop also produces sourdough bread and the pizza dough for his pizzeria, allowing one business to feed the other. His goal was to create a New York-style bagel, which he claimed couldn’t be easily found in the Bay Area.

“When you have that bite of an East Coast — primarily a New York — bagel, it should be a little tough, not fully yeast, not super sweet. It’s not Montreal,” said Gemingnani. “It’s hand formed. It’s specifically boiled in liquid malt. It’s twisted by hand. It’s cooked on burlap boards upside-down, and you flip them over. So there is a technique just like different styles of pizza.”

Gemingnani praised the various bagel shops and pizzerias that served hungry festivalgoers.

About that great slice I had from Tony’s place — it was the extremely unkosher Motorhead, a massive square of Detroit-style pie that featured four kinds of meat. (The bagels flowed freely at the event, but so did a lot of very unkosher pizza. I’ll spare you all the juicy details, but I had a great time.)

I also got to try the seeded bagel from Gemignani’s shop. It was an OK bagel, though it came with some really excellent honey butter.

Emily Winston, owner and founder of the Berkeley-based Boichik Bagels, saw the festival as an opportunity to increase awareness in San Francisco of her growing operation. She brought along about 2,000 bagels to do just that.

“It was a really fun time. I’m really glad that Tony invited us. I ate a lot of pizza and beer and bagels. I was really stuffed,” Winston said. “A lot of people who live in San Francisco … came and said they had never had our bagels before, so they were excited to taste them. So that was great.”

I’m one of those people. I had been meaning to try Boichik Bagels, but never found a chance until the festival. They didn’t disappoint. The bagel I had was soft with chive, poppy seeds, sesame seeds and onion. Plus, they were served by Boichik COO Rob Soviero, who shouted into the crowd a pretty convincing slogan: “If you eat more bagels, you can drink more beer!”

Boichik came about as an effort to re-create the bagel experience that Winston had growing up in New Jersey with H&H bagels. Like Gemignani, Winston attempted to mimic a New York-style bagel.

“Basically I studied whatever I could get my hands on about New York bagels,” said Winston. “I was just trying to re-create my most-beloved New York bagel. So there was a lot of research into: What is it they’ve been doing in New York for a hundred years? How are they making those bagels?”

Winston said she studied everything from methods to ingredients and sought advice from local bagel shops. After that, she said there was a lot of trial and error.

“The real fantasy I had was maybe one day The New York Times will say that my bagels are acceptable,” Winston said with a chuckle. “That would be just the greatest thing.”

Then, the Times actually wrote about Boichik and other shops in early 2021: “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York).”

“That was completely stupendous that they came back and said we’re even better,” she said.

Jeff Krupman’s PizzaHacker served a lemony arugula atop its pizza. I would have appreciated the sourdough crust if the greens weren’t in my face with every bite. Since 2018, Krupman has been turning PizzaHacker into a bagel shop called BagelMacher on weekend mornings. So aside from the pizza, they handed out hundreds of bagels throughout the festival.

Other bagel shops on hand included Daily Driver, BagelMacher, The Laundromat SF and Kaz Bagels.

Having tasted 13 pizzas, two bagels and one beer, I was more than just satisfied. I was bloated. As I left, Jewish rapper Kosha Dillz was introducing himself onstage as having been on Nick Cannon’s show “Wild’n Out” and launched into a bagel rap. My pace quickened. I was done with food for the day.

For nearly a century, the great edifice of Congregation Emanu-El, with its red tiled roofs and soaring dome atop, has filled out nearly a full city block in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, buzzing with Jewish life. Now that energy has been replaced with the sounds of hammers, drills, backhoes, excavators, falling debris and other noises of destruction and reconstruction.

Today demolition crews and other workers come in and out of the fenced-off building. People in hard hats and brightly colored safety vests toss bits of tile from the roof, while others rip out interior paneling and fixtures. The five-story building’s once grand courtyard, with its stone fountain, is filled with piles of wooden doors, wiring and other detritus.

Emanu-El — the largest synagogue in the Bay Area by membership and, founded in 1850, one of the oldest in California — is undergoing a massive renovation, seismic retrofit and expansion. From the street, the mammoth building will look largely the same, with the original main entrance reopened and newly highlighted. But once inside the courtyard, it’ll be an entirely new world.

The project, originally estimated at $79 million when it was first announced in 2019, will now cost $91 million and is set to be completed in 2025, 100 years since construction originally began in 1925. Dedicated in 1926, the building was designed by Arthur Brown Jr., the same architect behind the gleaming dome of San Francisco’s City Hall.

J. was granted access to the construction site on Aug. 2, about six weeks into the renovation process, to see the current state of the iconic building.

The courtyard where a fountain once stood is being excavated. Workers plan to dig 15 feet down through the sand to build an entirely new floor of offices and to help stabilize the building with a seismic retrofit.

Now devoid of decorations and art, the top floor of the building is all gray and beige, save for bright orange notes to the demolition crews scrawled on the walls — and these stained-glass windows that represent the Israelite tribes at the end of a hallway overlooking the courtyard.

While many historical elements will be demolished, some details will be saved for reuse — such as the finials atop these pillars in the courtyard, which will be made into benches in the future.

This new large gap is in the side of the courtyard that had been used as the secure main entrance in recent years. When the project is complete, visitors will once again enter through the original grand arched entrance.

While most of the fixtures were gone when J. visited, workers were still ripping out lighting and other materials prior to demolition.

Workers remove the building’s distinctive red clay roof tiles, tossing them into a massive pile in the center of the courtyard along with other debris.

The near-centenarian building’s face-lift will significantly expand it, with plans to build everything from new classrooms and clergy offices to a children’s play area on the roof.

A worker carries a wall panel out of the building — one more thing to add to the growing pile in the courtyard.