For my bar mitzvah in 1989, my grandparents gave me 10 shares of Disney stock. Now today, that’s a pretty dull transaction in practice – you go to a website and tippy-tap info into it and then click a button, and some digital checks whizz through the ether, moving numbers from one account to another. And then the next day, and every day thereafter, you can check your stock market app and see if the numbers were kind to you or not.
But back in the ancient and prehistoric era of stocks, shares of Disney stock came printed on beautiful cotton-blended high-quality certificate paper, suitable for framing. Not only that, but DISNEY stock certificates had little printed cartoon characters on them that looked so good, they could have been ink cells just brought over from the latest feature film. There was Mickey, and Donald, and Goofy, and Jiminny Cricket, in an envelope for me to stare at.
Many years later, when we bought our first house, we sold the stock. And of course that meant we had to turn in the certificates. What a bummer. But a good trade off - I got to walk and eat and sleep in that house - that house that those stocks helped pay for.
Goofy paid for my garage.
My grandmother asked that year ‘How’s your stock doing?’ And I felt a tiny bit sad that it no longer existed as such, and I told her ‘we used it this year to buy the house.’ And she said, ‘Good! It should make you happy.’
Normally, when people make a financial or a business investment, they hope that it will go up and value and increase their wealth or security. But starting Shoresh - a Jewish learning community and Greenfield neighborhood third space - is an investment of a different sort. It’s an investment that benefits every investor not because they’ll get rich for it, but because they’ve built something that they will be proud of.
Donations to Shoresh fund our operations. They’ll help us to buy our baking and coffee equipment. They’ll pay for our renovations and our tables and chairs. And then you, our supporters, will be able to walk into Shoresh at 4300 Murray Ave and say ‘I built this. This belongs to me, too.’ Pure pride. There’s a reason Wisconsinites passionately buy shares in the Green Bay Packers, even though it isn’t actually a sound financial investment that you can retire on. They’re proud of their team, and they want to say, genuinely, ‘I belong to this. It belongs to me.’
A community space like Shoresh is all about belonging. We want you to be a part of it.
Our kickoff fundraiser begins now. We’re trying to raise $100,000 in the next 6 days. We need your help to do it.
Please click that button above, or go to https://causematch.com/shoreshpgh2026 . Make a donation, small or large. For the next six days, all donations will be matched 1:1 - that means that if we can raise $50,000, it’ll actually be $100,000.
Thanks for reading our substack full of stories the past few months as we began building this amazing dream. And hopefully with your help, there will be many more stories to come as this community learning space and coffee shop becomes a reality.
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