Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
Andre Krug is the president and CEO of KleinLife in Northeast Philadelphia. While he has risen to the top position at the Northeast Philadelphia community center, he first came to the place he affectionately calls “Klein” the same way as so many others: as a refugee, looking for Jewish community in his new country.
“Klein was the first place we went because they gave us refugees from the former Soviet Union a year of free membership,” he said. “Basically, we used to hang out here. All of my friends, we met at Klein.”
While Krug was new to the United States and had never heard of KleinLife before coming to the country, he quickly figured out that it was the place to be for a foreign Jew who needed support in the early stages of his new life. KleinLife thrives on word-of-mouth endorsement within the Jewish refugee community, and people have never stopped coming.
“It’s a phenomenal thing,” he said.
Krug said that he has been proud to work on behalf of the organization’s mission, which is simple.
“We’re doing something that is really basic and easily explained: We cater to seniors because we’re the largest senior center in the city of Philadelphia, we cater to immigrants because there are a lot of Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants in this area and we cater to the remnants of the [Northeast] Philadelphia Jewish community because pretty much all of the Jewish activities in Northeast are provided here,” he said.
While Northeast Philadelphia has a long tradition of Jewish life, it has been waning in recent decades. Now, only a few synagogues dot the area.
Under Krug’s leadership, the organization has kept its work simple and thorough. Its mission is easy to understand and its execution is straightforward. While much of the Philadelphia Jewish community is situated in more affluent parts of the area, KleinLife caters to a different crowd.
“We’re very nimble because the population that we serve is poor, and we’re trying to serve them to the best of our abilities,” he said.
What this looks like in practice is a diverse array of offerings. KleinLife’s monthly schedule includes tech help, exercise classes, chess classes and more. It regularly has more than a dozen activities on a given day. Krug is proud of how committed the organization is to its mission.
“We want to serve the populations that need our services. According to the [Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia’s] Jewish population study, we still have over 40,000 Jews in the Northeast, and we’re pretty much the only agency that has a physical presence here and is trying to accommodate them all.”
Krug said that, since becoming CEO in 2009, he has worked to make life easier for KleinLife attendees regardless of what background they come from. For instance, as the community has continued to serve Russian immigrants, KleinLife has hired Russian-speaking staff. Now, when a Russian-speaking newcomer comes in, they don’t have to worry about taking out their phone to translate or communicate in broken English.
“These are the kind of policies we started to implement right away,” he said.
KleinLife still serves more than 200 Holocaust survivors and still has a Yiddish senior choir. There is a Hebrew school for Russian-Jewish children. There are also free services for the community. More than 2,000 people attended KleinLife’s Yom Kippur services last year. The center held not one but two Passover events recently to accommodate demand.
“This is a deeply, deeply Jewish place,” Krug said.
KleinLife serves over 35,000 people a year, and it has more than 2,500 people in the building at any given time. This October, KleinLife will turn 50. While the Northeast Philadelphia community isn’t the same size that it once was, KleinLife remains a bustling hub of Jewish activity and a place for those who need it most to find help.
“I spoke to people who’ve been here from the start. Nobody in their wildest dreams thought that 50 years from [when] the building opened it was going to be much busier than it was in the beginning,” he said.
For Krug, there are daily reminders of the path he took from a nonpaying member of KleinLife to the organization’s CEO. Perhaps none has meant more than a situation that has arisen in recent years relating to Krug’s own journey.
“Refugees from Ukraine started showing up in our building a couple of years ago, right? When we started talking to them, they said that they were refugees from Ukraine, from right under the bombs — places like Kharkiv, where I come from,” he said. “We’re not [a] Ukrainian organization … but nevertheless they come to us because we’re welcoming and we don’t say no. We’re trying to help people out.”
