Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Hundreds Rally To Save Detroit JCC

Hundreds showed up at the Jewish community center in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park in an effort to save the building.

Some 800 people, the maximum number allowed in the JCC building, showed up at a discussion Monday night to protest the center’s closing, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Leaders of the center and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit recommended that the building be shut down by May because it is losing approximately $1 million a year.

Residents at Monday night’s meeting such as Alan Hitsky, 69, accused the area’s Jewish leaders of “only caring about the country-club set instead of worrying about those in need.”

Others proposed starting a grassroots funding campaign; one woman wrote a $1,000 check.

“We’re not abandoning this neighborhood,” Scott Kaufman, CEO of the area’s Jewish federation, told the Detroit Free Press. “We’re going to continue servicing the community, but at a price we can afford.”

The JCC’s financial problems surfaced in late 2013 when an oversight committee composed of JCC and federation leaders calculated the center’s debt at $6 million.

Another public meeting at the JCC will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.