Podcast 340 – You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Belong at the JCC – Janel Margaretta

You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Belong at the JCC

Janel Margaretta is the Chief Impact Officer at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, the 52-acre Zaban Park campus off Tilly Mill Road in Dunwoody, Georgia. She helped raise the money for the biggest renovation the Marcus JCC has seen since 2000, and the number she wanted to talk about was not the construction budget. It was 60,000, the number of people who walk through those JCC doors every year. The revitalization of the JCC Dunwoody MJCCA Atlanta is a testament to the community’s commitment to inclusivity and growth.

In This Episode

• Janel Margaretta, Chief Impact Officer of the Marcus JCC of Atlanta, has worked at the J since 2007 and led fundraising for the Zaban Park and Camp Barney Medintz renovations.
• The capital campaign closed in March 2024 at $36.4 million, with $20.5 million of it going into the Dunwoody campus.
• The Zalik Outdoor Aquatic Center opened in June 2024 with three pools, a splash park, water slides, and a snack bar with a liquor license.
• Club J buses kids from eight area schools, including Dunwoody, Vanderlyn, Chesnut, Kingsley, Austin, and Montgomery Elementary, to the JCC every weekday afternoon.
• MJCCA membership is open to everyone regardless of faith, and nine out of ten members report making a new friend at the J.

A Dunwoody Original, Sitting on the Same Land Since 1961

Here is the thing most people who move here never learn. The JCC got to Dunwoody before most of Dunwoody did.

In 1961, real estate developer Max Kuniansky and his friend Erwin Zaban bought 40 acres of farmland out on Tilly Mill Road. Kuniansky was running the JCC at the time and needed Zaban’s financial backing to pull it off. Day camp was the first thing they ran on that property. There was no city of Dunwoody yet. That would not happen until 2008, forty seven years later.

The organization itself is older still. It started in 1909 as the Jewish Educational Alliance, in a building on Capitol Avenue in downtown Atlanta, near where Turner Field would eventually go up. It became the Atlanta JCC in 1946, moved to a new building on Peachtree Street in 1956, and finally consolidated everything out here at Zaban Park in 1995.

The name you know it by came in 2000. Gifts from Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank funded a major renovation, the Zaban-Blank building opened, and it became the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.

That 2000 date matters more than it sounds like it should. Keep it in your head for the next section.

The JCC Dunwoody MJCCA Atlanta continues to be a hub for community events and activities, welcoming individuals from all backgrounds.

What Did the JCC Renovation Actually Build?

When Janel says the campus had not been renovated since it reopened in its current state, she means since 2000. Twenty five years. Anybody who has owned a house for twenty five years knows exactly what that means.

So here is what the campaign covered.

The Zalik Outdoor Aquatic Center opened in June 2024 and is the piece most families notice first. Three outdoor pools, named the Alterman Pool, the Dinerman Medeiros Pool, and the Samsky Pool. A splash park for the little ones. Two water slides. Sue Sue’s Snack Bar, which now has a liquor license, so the adults can have a grown-up minute while the kids wear themselves out on the slides.

There is also an indoor pool, the Northside Hospital Family Aquatic Center, which is why aquatics at the J runs year round instead of shutting down in September.

The Eva G. Lipman Pickleball Complex is 15 courts, 11 of them covered, each individually fenced. More on that in a minute, because the pickleball story at the J is better than you would guess.

Add a million dollar playground, a new turf field with another one on the way, and you start to understand why Janel calls this one of the most rewarding projects of her career. Her words: it really changed a lot for the Dunwoody community.

How Much Did the JCC Capital Campaign Raise?

The campaign was supposed to launch in early 2020 and got derailed by COVID. During the shutdown the JCC used the time to rethink what it actually wanted to build. By the time they announced it publicly at the March 2023 board meeting, $31.5 million was already committed, including $12 million from The Marcus Foundation and $6 million from The Zalik Foundation. That Zalik gift is why the pool complex carries that family’s name.

The campaign closed in March 2024 at $36.4 million, about half a million over goal. Of that, $20.5 million went into Zaban Park and $9.7 million went up to Camp Barney Medintz.

Zaban, Zalik, and Why Locals Mix Them Up

Quick untangling, because I had this wrong myself for a while.

Zaban Park is the campus. All 52 acres of it, named for Erwin Zaban, the man who backed the original land purchase in 1961.

The Zalik Outdoor Aquatic Center is the outdoor pool complex sitting inside Zaban Park, named for the Zalik Foundation family who helped pay for it in 2024.

Two different families, sixty years apart, both with their name on something out there. If you have been calling it the Zaban pool, you are not wrong about where it is, just about whose name is on it.

What Is Club J and Which Schools Does It Serve?

This is the part I think gets overlooked, and it is the one that matters most if you have elementary schoolers.

Club J is the JCC’s after-school program for kids from Pre-K through fifth grade. It runs Monday through Friday, 2:00 to 6:00. A bus picks kids up at their school and brings them to Zaban Park for homework time, snacks, STEAM projects, community service, outdoor time on the campus, and weekly Shabbat and Israel programming.

The participating schools for this year are Austin Elementary, Chesnut Elementary, Dunwoody Elementary, Kingsley Elementary, Montgomery Elementary, Vanderlyn Elementary, Kittredge Magnet School by way of Peachtree Middle, and both campuses of The Davis Academy.

Two things worth knowing before you get excited. Transportation only runs from those participating schools, not every public school, and it depends on enough kids signing up. Club J families also have to be current MJCCA members.

Janel laid out why the whole thing works, and it clicked for me immediately. Your kid rides the bus over. You come work out before pickup. Somebody else in the family has a swim lesson or a gymnastics class. It all happens in the same place at the same hour.

As she put it, you are not necessarily driving all over town to satisfy all the needs your family has. Any parent in Dunwoody who has done the 4:45 dance between two activities on opposite sides of Ashford Dunwoody knows what a gift that is.

The Preschools Most People Do Not Know About

The J runs three preschools, and only one of them is in Dunwoody.

The Weinstein School is here on the Zaban Park campus and it is the largest of the three. The Schiff School is in Sandy Springs. The Sunshine School is in East Cobb. All accredited, all licensed.

Janel’s own daughter is a Weinstein School graduate, and she said it set her up for success through elementary and middle school. When the person running philanthropy for an organization sends her own kid to its preschool, that tells you something.

How Pickleball Took Over the J

Everybody thinks pickleball showed up around 2021 and took over the world. At the Marcus JCC it has been going since about 2010.

Here is the part I love. It started as a program mostly for the active senior adults. And those seniors were not content to just play among themselves. They started teaching other people. They taught folks their own children’s age. Then they taught folks their grandchildren’s age. The uptick in younger players came from the older ones handing it down.

That is how you end up with a 15 court complex. It started as 12 and demand got so heavy they converted a basketball court into three more.

My father in law plays up there a couple of times a week. He brought me along once. I am an athletic guy, forty five years old, and he absolutely destroyed me. I would chase a ball down and hit it right back to him, and he would put it somewhere I was not. That is the whole appeal. It is a genuinely timeless game.

Janel said her partner went to the University of Georgia, and almost every time he plays, he runs into somebody he knew in college and had lost touch with. That is a pretty good description of the whole place.

Do You Have to Be Jewish to Join the JCC?

No. Marcus JCC membership is open to everyone, and this is the single most common misconception about the J in Dunwoody.

My last name is Weber. My sons are Samuel and Micah. I have been welcomed into the Jewish community here for years, and I still meet people who assume the JCC is not for them.

Janel was direct about it. All are welcome at the JCC. People of every race, every religion, different ethnicities, different abilities. There is a robust special needs program for children and adults with disabilities. And even for Jewish families, she said, nobody is checking whether you keep kosher or speak Hebrew. None of that matters to us. We just want you to come.

The history actually explains why the door is open that wide. The JCC started in 1909 helping new immigrants find their footing in American life at a time when there was a lot of antisemitism in this country. An organization built to be an on-ramp does not suddenly become a gate.

Her summary was the best line in the episode. It is all based on human values of kindness and love and honesty and caring for one another. That’s it.

What 60,000 People a Year Actually Means

The JCC measures its impact, which is a rarer thing among nonprofits than you would think, and it is literally Janel’s job title.

Sixty thousand people come through the doors every year. Nine out of ten of them report making a new friend or acquaintance there. Nine out of ten report feeling safe and secure while they are there, and increased feelings of well being after participating in a program. Jewish members say they feel more connected to their Jewish community. Members who are not Jewish say they understand the Jewish community better.

Janel calls the J a third spot. You have work, you have home, and then you have this. I think that framing is exactly right, and it lines up with something CEO Jared Powers told me back on episode 285, when he said the goal was for the JCC to be the town center of Dunwoody.

Why My Family Keeps Coming Back

I can tell you what it looks like from my side of it.

We were members a long time ago, then we joined the pool in Dunwoody North and hung out there for ten years. When they rebuilt the pools we came back, and honestly, we are probably JCC members forever now. My son is playing basketball there this fall

When I first moved here I thought of it as my gym. That was it. Now it is where my kids’ friends are.

I will say the quiet part out loud too, since this is what I do for a living. As a REALTOR® I can tell you property values around the J run higher, and people specifically want to live near it. That is not an accident. That is what happens when an institution shows up for a neighborhood for sixty five years straight.

What Is Coming Up at the JCC This Fall

A few things worth putting on your calendar.

Camp Barney Medintz registration opens September 23. Camp Barney is the JCC’s overnight camp, and it is not in Dunwoody. It sits on more than 500 acres with two lakes up near Cleveland, Georgia, in the north Georgia mountains, and the JCC has owned and run it since 1963. It takes campers from rising first grade through rising eleventh, with one, two, and four week sessions.

The first ever Mah-Jongg Tournament is October 18, and registration closes September 18. Mah-jongg is having a real cultural moment right now, and this is the J’s first go at a tournament.

The 35th Book Festival of the MJCCA runs November 1 through 22. November is Jewish Book Month, and this is one of the largest Jewish book festivals in North America. This year’s lineup includes Harry Connick Jr. on November 14, Rachel Goldberg-Polin on November 2, Heather Morris of The Tattooist of Auschwitz on November 3, and theatrical producer Marc Shaiman on November 8. The full lineup is at AtlantaJCC.org.

Connect with the Marcus JCC of Atlanta

The J is at 5342 Tilly Mill Road in Dunwoody, and the website is AtlantaJCC.org.

If you have never been inside, they will give you a free week to try it out. Just call the membership office. Walk the campus, swim, get on a pickleball court, see if you run into somebody you know. You probably will.

And a quick thank you to two of the people who make this podcast possible, Dr. Bret Freedman at Village Orthodontics and Discover Dunwoody. Both of them are JCC partners too, which Janel pointed out on the episode. We are all in this together out here.

If you want to hear more about the campus itself, go back and listen to episode 285 with MJCCA CEO Jared Powers. He started as a camper at Camp Barney, came back twenty years ago for an entry level job in the sports department, and worked his way up to running the whole thing. It is a good one.

What Is What’s Up Dunwoody?

What’s Up Dunwoody is a local media platform created by REALTOR® Matt Weber, focused on living in Dunwoody, moving to Dunwoody, and staying connected to the community. It began as a podcast and has grown into social media content, local guides, and two of the largest Dunwoody-focused Facebook groups where residents share recommendations and stay in the loop. Matt has expanded slightly outside of Dunwoody and now covers the entire top end of the Perimeter through his Top End ATL channels.

Matt is a Dunwoody REALTOR® who helps people navigate buying, selling, and moving in the area. Stay in the loop with local updates, listings, and insights by signing up here: whatsupdunwoody.com/email

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