Today, Daniel Weiss is a Kaiserman JCC board member of five years, a longtime boys soccer coach for JCC Maccabi Philadelphia and a leader of Kaiserman’s effort to bring the JCC Maccabi Games to the Philly area in 2027.
But there was a time when he wasn’t that involved in the Jewish community.
Yet as the 39-year-old has grown older, he has become deeply committed to Jewish communal life. The lifelong member of Main Line Reform Temple-Beth Elohim, where he had his own bar mitzvah and where his kids will have theirs, started coaching soccer for JCC Maccabi Philadelphia in 2010, when he was two years out of college. And he’s been coaching ever since.
In 2021, he became a Kaiserman JCC board member. A year later, he led the effort to open the J’s Philadelphia JCC Maccabi Hall of Fame. Four years on from that, he’s helping to lead the JCC’s effort to host the games next year.
Kaiserman has already been working with the JCC Association of North America. To become the official host, it still needs to reach a fundraising threshold and get approval from its board.
“To me, Judaism is much more cultural, family-based. Family is the most important thing to me,” said the father of three.
Families need communities, and Weiss sees Kaiserman as that type of home. In line with the vision of Alan Scher, Kaiserman’s CEO since 2021, Weiss wants the JCC to become “the foundation of Jewish identity here on the Main Line.”
“It’s important for people to have a common denominator and a place they can go and be a part of,” he said.
As a teen, Weiss played Maccabi soccer for the Philadelphia team. A five-sport athlete at Harriton High School, he went to Syracuse University to kick for the football team because he got academic money. Though injuries impacted his collegiate athletic career, they didn’t dim his joy for sports, especially soccer.
After graduating, Weiss was working out at Main Line Health Fitness & Wellness when he ran into Marc Swarbrick, a coach of one of the older Maccabi boys soccer teams, who knew Weiss from growing up. Swarbrick asked Weiss if he wanted to coach a younger boys soccer team in the games.
Weiss described it as a “‘let’s do it’ sort of thing.”
But “let’s do it” quickly turned into two years. Then, in 2012, Weiss enlisted his father to coach alongside him.
“Since then, it’s just become this weeklong thing I get to do with my dad that’s very special,” he said.
For the next eight years, Weiss mainly cared about coaching. That was until he was asked, after COVID, to serve on Kaiserman’s board. The soccer coach was honest with the JCC’s leaders.
“I said, ‘I don’t really care about anything else,’” he recalled, referring to Maccabi.
But then he took the lead on the Maccabi Hall of Fame project and began sending his daughter to daycare at the J. The project gave Weiss the chance to engage in the business of the JCC. The daycare allowed him to experience its services.
“You have all these people who had this connection to the J through Maccabi. Then, when Maccabi ends, they don’t have the connection. A lot of the Maccabi Hall of Famers now have a connection to the J in some other way,” he explained.
“I think when she started going there, we started building more emotional attachment. We saw the attention to detail they had within the daycare system,” he added. “You’re involved in the PTA, the activities, the Purim carnival, the emails regarding security.”
In January 2023, Weiss and Scher began discussing the possibility of hosting the games. Since then, the JCC has been working on fundraising. Once it reaches the threshold, it will put the matter to a board vote.
“We said, ‘This could be an incredible opportunity for the JCC to reinvent itself and become a pillar of the community,’” Weiss recalled.
Today, Weiss tells parents that soccer and other sports are about 10% of the experience of the Maccabi Games.
“It’s mainly cultural,” he said.
The JCC board member also understands that, much like his Hall of Fame project, the Maccabi Games can help the organization increase visibility, strengthen infrastructure and galvanize donors. “It opens up the door to so many possibilities. I’ve been to maybe a dozen JCCs around the country. Our JCC is not the prettiest. That takes money; that takes time; that takes people who want to be involved,” Weiss said. “This can be that stepping stone that helps take the JCC to that next level.”