‘How grateful I am,’ Tara Feiner says of her 11 years in Dayton

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

It was Tara Feiner’s brother, Josh Laster, who urged her to apply for the job — his job.

Josh had been executive director of Congregation Beth El in Voorhees, N.J. for a decade. This summer, he accepted the executive director position with Congregation Rodeph Shalom, just across the bridge in Philadelphia.

Beth El, he said, would be a perfect fit for Tara.

After more than a decade as executive director of Dayton’s Jewish Family Services and an active congregant, board member, and officer with Beth Abraham Synagogue, Tara returns to the Philadelphia area and her family in September.

Her last day with JFS, an agency of Dayton’s Jewish Federation, is Aug. 29. Tara’s husband, clinical and consulting psychologist Adam Feiner, will follow her in the coming weeks.

“This is a great opportunity,” Tara says. “But in the moment here and now, it’s hard to say goodbye. Dayton — and Jewish Dayton — has become our home. And has become our family.”

The day she and Adam moved to Dayton in 2014 fell on her father’s yahrzeit, the date of his death on the Jewish calendar.

“And so we stumbled into Beth Abraham in our jeans and flip-flops, still unpacking boxes, to say Kaddish for my Dad, and never left.”

With a master’s degree in education and a principal’s certificate from her work with the School District of Philadelphia, Tara didn’t see Jewish communal work in her future when she arrived in Dayton.

Jewish Federation CEO Cathy Gardner did.

“I have a passion for it,” Tara says. “I just loved it. Cathy gave me that start. Coming into JFS, my background was in education and strategic planning, writing grants. I did a lot of volunteer work earlier in my career at the Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Philly. And I relied heavily on Jewish Family and Children’s Services for the care of grandmothers that my brother and I were responsible for.”

During her tenure in Dayton, Tara earned her executive master’s degree in Jewish professional studies from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.

She was also a member of the Leadership Dayton Class of ’23, served on the board of Hillel Academy Jewish day school for more than eight years, and on the South Community Behavioral Health Board for the last two years.

With JFS, Tara, along with Social Worker Kate Scarpero, Administrative Assistant Jacquelyn Archie, and transportation staff Vincent Gist and Nate Lyons, manage and provide services to between 125 and 140 clients a year.

“I’m usually the first person somebody in the Jewish community calls,” Tara says. “They’ll start with me with whatever’s going on and I’ll do the warm handoff to Kate so that they are with the right person to get them to what they need to be connected with. I know they’re in good hands. I’ve become close to so many clients and members of the community and partners. What JFS does well is we care deeply about our clients, and we know them well. And we know their patterns.”

Like the time a client who used JFS transportation, for example, wasn’t ready for her ride; she didn’t come to the door as usual.

“But what’s not unusual, sometimes people miss their appointments because, given the nature of our clients, they’ll be in the hospital and forget to call and cancel the ride. We called the hospitals to see if she was there. Nothing.”

JFS then called the client’s emergency contact, who had a key to her home. With JFS’s social worker at the time, the emergency contact entered the client’s home.

“It turns out this person had a fall. She was lucid, but had been down quite some time, unable to get up. And she couldn’t reach her phone, and she couldn’t reach her button. She survived and thrived.”

Check-ins are also a key aspect of JFS’s holiday gift bag distribution. Those who receive bags at Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, and Purim are Jews who live in independent, assisted living, skilled nursing, or memory care facilities.

“If they’re not in a facility, that’s a case management determination if they’re truly isolated,” Tara says.

Over the last two or three years, she notes, JFS has seen more case management clients in need of wrap-around services to stay on track, and ongoing advocacy.

“We have seen a significant increase in high-need clients who are really struggling with housing,” she says. “Particularly seniors with making ends meet, typically those on fixed incomes or on Medicaid. We’ve seen an increase in some of our clients who don’t keep their IDs current.

And once you’re out of date for two years, you need extra documentation. For some of our clients who don’t have the capacity and memory, it’s very hard to get the documentation to help them stay on their benefits and in their housing.”

Tara’s work for nearly a decade with Jewish women in the Dayton Correctional Institution has been special to her on a personal level.
When one woman was about to be released, she reached out to Tara.

“She was going to be staying with family in another state, and the prison would only get her to the bus stop. She had a ticket for the airport to get to family. She had a reservation at a motel by the airport. But she had no way to get there.

“I picked her up when she was released, I took her to breakfast. And she comes out — she hadn’t flown since pre-9/11 — with clear trash bags and a box of books. We went to Goodwill, we got her a couple outfits, a rolling bag, a little purse so she would not have to go searching for her ID in her big bag. We shipped the books to her sister and then got her connected with the JFS where she was going. I took her to the library and we started a gmail account so she could have that communication.

“We called TSA because she had her ID from the prison. And I said, ‘It’s not on their list of approved IDs. I want you to know what to expect, what they’ll ask you, not because you’re a returning citizen, but because they would ask this of anybody.'”

Tara shares her happiness that Mitzvah Missions, a program she brought to JFS, has evolved and flourished since it began as a Jewish community mitzvah day, Dec. 25, 2017.

“It’s always 60 to 80 people on the 25th, making almost 200 sack lunches for St. Vincent de Paul, no-sew scarves — we’ve added hats the last two years — rag dolls, and just coming together.”

With Covid, Tara pivoted to a Drive-Thru Mitzvah Mission, collecting frozen casseroles and clothing for St. Vincent de Paul.

Now, it’s the in-person Mitzvah Mission each Dec. 25 and three drive-thrus over the year to benefit St. Vincent’s and other nonprofit community partners.

“The Dayton Jewish community really is a special Jewish community that comes together to support each other, to make people feel welcome and comfortable,” Tara says. “And not just the Dayton Jewish community, but as a whole. There’s so much collaboration between organizations that want to support one another to better support community within the social services sector. It really has been a privilege to do what I do to serve our Jewish community, to serve the Dayton community, and to work with everybody here.”

To read the complete September 2025 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.