BALTIMORE — Barak Hermann does not sit still. By the time I arrived at the JCC in Baltimore, Hermann was already on the move, steering the ship until he starts his new job as CEO and President of the JCC Association of North America this summer.
As I took my coat off and tried to settle in, he asked, “Want to see the gym?” The question was rhetorical.
We darted down flights of stairs, each step punctuated by greetings — friendly barbs with a custodian, a quick chat with some teenagers about their after-school plans and a nod to a trio of older men.
We arrived in the gym, already breaking a sweat, hopped on two treadmills and hit the start button. We were still moving — my heart rate rising, his words flowing — as he described his strategy for the future of JCCs, an age-old institution that must adapt and evolve. For Hermann, keeping pace wasn’t just metaphorical. It was literal.
From the family business to hospitality
Hermann, 54 and a native of Long Island, was never meant to be here. Raised in the shadow of a father who was a Reform rabbi and a mother who was a Jewish educator and whose family helped lay the foundations of the modern state of Israel, Hermann spent his early years resisting the gravitational pull of Jewish communal life. The family business wasn’t his thing.
He had his sights set on the hospitality industry. “I was obsessed with hotel management,” he told me, picking up his pace on the treadmill as if to echo the ambition of his younger self. But life, as it tends to, threw him a curveball — a conversation with an accounting professor, and an off-hand comment that would change his course forever.
“If a family shows up at midnight and they need a place to sleep, what can I charge them so I don’t lose money?” Hermann asked the teacher. “He said to me, ‘You’d send those people to the Motel Six if they couldn’t afford it.’”
Hermann paused, shaking his head, as if the idea of turning anyone away felt unnatural to him. “But I would never do that,” he said. “Even if I ran a fancy hotel, if someone needed help, I’d give it away.”
The professor’s response? “Barak, you sound like a not for profit guy.” And so the would-be hotelier became a community builder.
Reinventing the JCC
It is perhaps prophetic that Hermann has been honing his thesis — that the skills learned in the hospitality industry can transform Jewish community centers — for the past 13 years as CEO of the JCC of Baltimore, the oldest in the country. Established as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in 1854, the JCC has become, under Hermann’s leadership, a model of evolution, a place where tradition meets reinvention.
Take the 550-seat theater, which serves as both a venue for JCC-run programming and a money making rental hub, hosting children’s productions of Broadway shows and a performance of The Nutcracker by the local ballet. “Why can’t I offer a Christian show for the community during the holidays?” Hermann asked.
For Hermann, success lies beyond the confines of the Jewish community. The JCC campus isn’t just for Jewish programming — it’s a venue for police officer promotion ceremonies and city council meetings. Five outdoor pools are a hub of activity in the summer, when the daily number of visitors can top 1,000. There’s a newly renovated fitness center, complete with on-site trainers, indoor track and cycling studio. Perhaps most audacious, he’s installed a 30-foot bar that serves tequila and has IPA on tap.
“I’d go to JCC conferences, and people would say, ‘I have a new senior meal program,’” Hermann laughed. “I’m like, ‘We built a bar.’” It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the building is hosting a conference this week for CEOs from roughly 100 JCCs from across North America for a series of workshops.
It’s a far cry from the JCCs of yesteryear, when the idea of staying open on Shabbat would have been anathema. But for Hermann, the mission is bigger than tradition. It’s about inclusivity, about building a community where the doors are open to everyone.
“I’m not about uniformity,” Hermann said. The Baltimore JCC, for example, is in a county where more than 60% of the population is Black, so Hermann creates events like an Aretha Franklin tribute concert or a performance honoring the history of Black dance for 1,100 students from local public schools. A large sign greeting visitors at the entrance reads, in part, that the JCC is “where people of all communities are embraced.”
Another thing he learned from his accounting professor? “Embrace the data,” Hermann said. “Think about the trends in your community, and then the JCC needs to come up with the right business model. What might be great in Baltimore or at a JCC in Palo Alto on the West Coast could be different if it’s in the Southeast.”
An added bonus of his hospitality ethos, Hermann noted, is “because we’re doing so much service in the community, I believe in my heart that we have less antisemitism.”
For Hermann, the logic is simple: create a space where people — Jewish and non-Jewish, old and young, Black and white — come for one thing and discover others. It’s the same logic that leads developers to install big-box stores to anchor a shopping mall. But instead of a Costco or Target, you’ve got a fitness center, theater, and preschool, drawing people in, and then offering them something unexpected.
We hop off the treadmill and walk briskly to the lobby, where jazz music is piped in and a “kvell and kvetch” box encourages feedback from visitors. “Was the front desk nice to you when you came in?” Hermann asked, ever the consummate concierge.
I told him it was, shook his hand and our encounter ended. Hermann, his kinetic energy wound tight like a spring, was already on the move.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
