By Zoe Bell | Staff Writer
When Dr. Marcy Gringlas retired in 2011, she never expected to take on the roles of co-founder and president of a grant-making organization. But that’s exactly what she did.
The former developmental psychologist and her husband, Joel, started Seed the Dream Foundation nearly 13 years ago to expand access to education in the Philadelphia area. Seed the Dream now encompasses more areas of support and has an office in Israel as well as in Philadelphia.
Gringlas is among the Jewish Women International’s 10 “Women to Watch” honorees, who were recognized at a conference and gala luncheon in Washington, D.C., Dec. 15 and 16.
“It’s a great honor; [JWI is] a great organization,” Gringlas said. “I’ve been working with them for almost a year.”
Her journey with JWI began after Oct. 7, 2023, when Gringlas said she saw the need to gather and stand in solidarity with the Israeli survivors of sexual violence: “The silence was deafening after Oct. 7; [there] wasn’t an epidemic outcry.”
Gringlas, Meredith Jacobs, the CEO of JWI, and the JWI team launched I Believe Israeli Women, a joint initiative of JWI and Seed the Dream, which has grown into an international movement.
Gringlas and Jacobs led a delegation of 23 women, who work in various professions related to combating gender-based violence, to Israel for three days in May to show their support to survivors there. Gringlas said the group spent the first day bearing witness to the sites of the Oct. 7 attack and speaking to first responders, the second day learning about the hospitals and rape crisis centers and the third day as a “call to action” day, figuring out how to amplify and engage Israeli survivors’ voices.
During the trip, she addressed the Israeli Knesset in an international panel on gender-based violence as a weapon of war. That was the launch of I Believe Israeli Women, an experience that was especially meaningful to Gringlas as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors.
At the Dec. 15 conference, Gringlas spoke in a breakout session about using one’s voice to stand up for survivors and victims of Oct. 7.
Jacobs said Gringlas was selected as a 2024 JWI honoree for her exemplary philanthropic work and dedication to community service.
“It’s her intelligence, which is humbling in how clearly she sees things, her strategic mind — she really knows how to get to the core of it — and her warmth and thoughtfulness,” Jacobs told the Jewish Exponent. “[Her experience as a developmental psychologist] comes through in the way she speaks [from] the heart.”
Her identity as a second-generation Holocaust survivor informed Gringlas’ goals in her mission-driven work as well. Under her leadership, Seed the Dream has grown to help develop Israel education for schools and colleges, expand access to high-quality elementary education in Israel, improve Holocaust education, support Holocaust survivors and empower women and survivors of sexual violence.
Part of her work is broadening Holocaust education to include contemporary antisemitism, as anti-Jewish discrimination didn’t end in 1945, Gringlas said.
“All of our programs were addressing not just about the Holocaust and how it happened, which are critical, but what happened afterwards and what continues to happen,” Gringlas said. “We’ve seen in the past 14 months a tremendous surge in antisemitism around the world.”
Although antisemitism has risen in recent years, Gringlas saw the importance of Holocaust education and started this programming alongside Seed the Dream’s inception 13 years ago. She invested in Bearing Witness through the Anti-Defamation League, which provided Holocaust education to Catholic schools.
“[Holocaust education] need[s] to be part of everyone’s education to understand how [it happened] and to understand the world’s response, what happened in the silence,” Gringlas said. “I always say that the Holocaust didn’t happen because of Hitler.”
Another of her goals is engagement with Israel by connecting young people to Israel and enhancing their trips to Israel. She said Seed the Dream works to support Hillel and Chabad organizations on college campuses, which is important to Gringlas on a personal level.
“My parents, and my father especially, always told us about the importance of Israel,” Gringlas said. “The place is our homeland. The idea [is] he didn’t have a place to go [during the Holocaust], and how many hundreds and thousands, maybe millions, of people would have been saved if they had a place to go.”
Her upbringing fostered a close connection to Israel, something Gringlas hopes she can instill in today’s generation of youth through education.
“Education is the base of growth and expansion of one’s sights and understanding the other,” she said. “I was kind of the ‘other’ because my parents were immigrants and I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit.”
Family, her connection with Israel and a need for education in the local community sparked the idea for a foundation, and then an international initiative dedicated to Israeli survivors of sexual violence.
“The authenticity of her ‘why’ is both inspiring and humbling and I feel truly honored to know her and that she selected us to do this [philanthropic work],” Jacobs said of Gringlas.