A professional community volunteer, Marla Schulman blames her rabbi for her ample local involvement in the Jewish community.
Her two kids attended preschool at B’nai Israel Congregation in the early 2000s when Rabbi Michael Safra sought out a volunteer to help the synagogue.
“Rabbi Safra cornered me one day and said, ‘We need you on the membership committee,’” Schulman said. “And that was my first volunteer role in the Jewish community space.”
More than two decades later, Schulman has held numerous other roles, including serving as a board member of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington since July 2020 and as chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington’s new Community Leadership Council.
The Bethesda resident remains an active member of B’nai Israel, where she is the faith community outreach chair. She also served as the congregation’s president from 2017 to 2019.
“One of the big issues we dealt with when I was president is we had a very large board — 100-plus people — and we did a redesign to downsize our board,” she said.
After the “very time-consuming” but rewarding presidency, Schulman took on a topic she’d long been interested in: social and racial justice. “I started doing some deep dives and educating myself,” she said.
She thought about social and racial justice in the context of B’nai Israel and the synagogue community. Robin Hettleman Weinberg, the president of the local Federation, connected Schulman with Karen Herron of Washington Hebrew Congregation due to their common interest.
Together, Schulman and Herron collaborated to create an educational initiative. SEA Change, which stands for Study-Engage-Act, aims to train congregations to “organize and tackle racial injustice” within and beyond their communities.
“[It] has now grown into a network of almost a dozen synagogues across the Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative movements in the DMV,” Schulman said.
She is currently seeing her synagogue through a milestone year as the co-chair of B’nai Israel’s centennial celebration and campaign, citing an “amazing” Labor Day barbecue she helped organize that was attended by more than 500 community members.
As the inaugural head of the Federation’s Community Leadership Council, Schulman said the group is very new: “We are flying the plane as we build it.”
“We are learning what this group can be and can do for the Federation and for our community,” she said, adding that she is tasked with convening the Federation’s cohort of about 100 lay leaders and using those meetings to build relationships and identify issues prevalent to the Jewish community.
Her current goal is to listen.
“Part of this exercise is to turn outward to the community and have conversations and listen and go into it with an open mind,” Schulman said. “We’ll try to identify those themes and opportunities that resonate across our Jewish community that can help us build not just this vibrant Jewish community but a Federation that’s open and connected.”
What prompted the mom of two to stay so involved?
“I immediately realized that we have so many of these wonderful organizations [and] institutions here in the Washington area [that] build Jewish community,” she said. “And we often think of them as the ‘them.’”
Friends at the synagogue would ask her, “Why are they doing this with the dues?” or “Why are they handling this that way?”
“As soon as I became involved at the committee level, I really had the sense that there’s no ‘us’ and ‘them’ — there is a ‘we,’ and we are all in this together,” Schulman said. “Members of these organizations and synagogues are no exception, so if we want to help shape our community, we have to get involved.”
Schulman is passionate about togetherness and collaboration.
“When I have the opportunity to be part of an effort that is not just providing a service to the community, … but actually shapes how we’re thoughtfully engaging community members, that’s where I thrive,” she said. “What gets me out of bed [in the morning] is regularly interacting with so many people who believe in this work of community building.”
This sense of community stems from her strong Jewish upbringing.
Schulman was raised by an Israeli rabbi father and an Orthodox Jewish-raised mother. By the time Schulman was six years old, her family had moved from New York to the Silver Spring area, and her dad no longer worked as a pulpit rabbi.
“I didn’t really grow up as the daughter of a synagogue rabbi, but certainly the fact that he is a rabbi and Israeli really informed a lot of my Jewish upbringing,” she said. “It meant that Judaism was very central to home and our family. Shabbat dinners were sacred.”
Schulman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School through eighth grade, then went to Churchill High School.
In addition to her volunteer responsibilities, she took over the small business that her father launched: a language translation company.
“[My father] was the entrepreneur; he was the one who had the chutzpah to say, ‘I’m going to start a business from scratch,’” Schulman said. “I studied linguistics. I realized I had an affinity for business. … I was the small business owner who was able to better operationalize systems and really grow the business.”
She ran the business for 25 years before handing over the reins to a managing director. These days, Schulman spends her time dedicated to being a professional volunteer.
“That’s how I think of myself: as a community builder,” Schulman said.
