Lane Ostrow
40 Faces of the J
Before There Was a J
My story with the Jewish Community Center in Charlotte doesn't begin with the JCC at all. It begins before it existed. When my family moved to Charlotte in 1968, I was seven years old, and the concept of a Jewish Community Center was still years away. In those days, Jews in Charlotte didn't have the luxury of choices when it came to clubs and places to gather. We all belonged to the Amity Country Club, a place that was about as casual as a country club could be, but it didn't matter, because we were all together, all the time, and for a group of kids growing up in the South, that was everything.
Those summers at Amity were formative in ways I couldn't have appreciated as a child. We swam in the pools from morning until dark. We played tennis on outdoor courts that could only charitably be described as high-risk; all hard surface and mostly uneven. Beyond the tennis court was a softball field where the men's Sunday morning games dominated the entire community. There was as much arguing about safe and out as there was quality play, but that almost made it more enjoyable. We were our own league, with our own rules, and we kids couldn't wait until we were old enough to join in. The food, burgers, onion rings, all of it, tasted better because of the company. Swim meets in the summer were genuine community events, everyone turning out for those evenings, which often ended with the whole crowd walking up Sharon Amity Road to take over the Pizza Hut at the top of the hill.
But the thing that has truly endured is simpler than any of those memories: the friendships. We had no choice of where we could be, so the result was that we were all together, always. And for those of us who grew up in that world, that was nothing short of remarkable. Many of my closest friends from those days and I mean the friends I still see today, are turning 65 this year alongside me. We have been friends for six decades. And what is remarkable to me, looking back, is that all of us, every one of the guys from those years, still lives in Charlotte today. We loved what we had growing up so much that we all chose to give it to our own children.
Finding Identity at the Edges
When Amity eventually became the Levine JCC, not much changed in our day-to-day experience but having a place with the word "Jewish" in its name meant something. It helped anchor a Jewish identity for all of us, even if we couldn't have articulated it at the time.
Growing up Jewish in the South also meant reaching outward. Most of us were deeply active in national Jewish youth organizations, BBYO, AZA, BBG, because that was how you came to know Jewish kids across North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. There were conventions, overnight stays in other families' homes, and hosting our own events here in Charlotte, based at the JCC. It was a network we built deliberately, because we needed it. When I went to summer camp in Maine and talked with kids from New York or New Jersey, none of them were involved in those organizations. They didn't need to be, they were surrounded by Jewish life every day and could take their identity for granted. We couldn't. We had to reach for it, and I believe that reaching is exactly what helped us hold onto it
Coming Home
I left Charlotte for five years to attend law school in Atlanta. When I came back, the JCC had moved into a new building, and one of the first things my wife and I did was buy a house as close to the J as we could. That was not a coincidence. We knew, without having to discuss it much, that this place was going to be central to our lives. We were right.
I became deeply involved at the J, joined the board, and eventually served as President from 1999 to 2002. My goals in that role were not complicated. I wanted people to turn in at the light, that was how I thought about it. Any reason we could give someone to engage with Jewish life, any doorway we could open, was a victory. I wanted the JCC to be the den of the Jewish community: a place where you were always comfortable, where you could let your kids run free because you knew that whoever was around knew your children and would keep them safe. That feeling, that sense of collective responsibility and belonging, was what I was trying to preserve and extend.
The Games That United a Community
One of the experiences that most powerfully illustrates what community means to me at the J was chairing the Maccabi Games in 1998. What happened that year was something genuinely extraordinary. The Charlotte Jewish community came together in a way I had never seen before and have rarely seen since. Families with Maccabi-aged kids and families without them opened their homes to athletes from other cities and other countries; including athletes from Israel. Literally everyone participated in some form. We hosted the largest Maccabi Games, relative to community size, in history. It was a galvanizing event in the truest sense: it reminded all of us, in the most tangible way possible, what it looks like when a community decides to show up for itself.
The 6 AM Game
Shortly after I returned to Charlotte, one of my oldest friends invited me to play in an early morning basketball game at the J. Six o'clock in the morning. That game has been running ever since — Jews and non-Jews, three or four days a week — and I played in it for more than twenty years. Over time we added racquetball, and that has been going for fifteen years now. The core group has changed, as groups do, but the game itself goes on. These are the kinds of things that are easy to take for granted until they're gone. Those games, those early mornings, those friendships, they are as much a part of my life at the J as anything that happened in a board meeting.
The Next Forty Years
I think it is genuinely wonderful that Jewish families in Charlotte today have choices, choices that simply didn't exist when I was growing up. But I also believe that abundance has come with a cost. Our children have not had the same experience we had. The necessity that held us together no longer exists in the same form, and without it, something has been lost.
What I hope for, more than anything, as the Levine JCC enters its next forty years, is that it finds its way back to being the place where Jewish kids, especially teenagers, want to be. Not because they have to be, but because it's genuinely, undeniably the best place to be. If the J can recapture that gravity, that sense that this is where life happens, then the friendships that form there will last a lifetime, just as ours have.
No matter what else has happened across six decades, those friendships are the part of my JCC experience that means the most to me. They are the part that made my life richer and more joyful in every way that counts. I would love nothing more than for the young people coming up today to be sitting somewhere at sixty-five, writing something very much like this — looking back on a lifetime of belonging, at the J.
Home.
