Third Space at Shaarei Tfiloh just entered its third year of operations, and with the new calendar year came a new leader on the staff, Senior Director of Operations Carly Schwartz.
“I’ve been a Jewish communal professional my entire life,” Schwartz said. “I’ve done everything from being a teen director to being an early childhood director to being a programming director and membership director, and now I’m the senior director of operations for Third Space.”
Schwartz has a longstanding relationship with Third Space’s rabbi, Jessy Dressin.
“Jessy and I originally worked together 11 years ago at the JCC at Greater Baltimore,” Schwartz said. “Jessy did super creative Jewish cultural programming, and I was the early childhood director, and I had really young kids at the time who were at the preschool with me. And so, essentially, any program that Jessy planned, we participated in. I not only got to know Jessy professionally through the JCC but also personally. She was very close with myself, my husband, my kids, and so we both left the JCC after several years and always stayed connected.”
Schwartz described her new role at Third Space as her “dream job.”
“When Jessy came to me with this opportunity, it was one of those, like, ‘I could never say no to it,’ not only because I love Jessy, but I also believe so deeply in all the work that she does,” said Schwartz.
“In the Jewish communal world, I feel like you do make a lot of friends over the years, and you also work with colleagues that, when that possibility you could work together again presents itself, you reach out,” added Dressin.
Schwartz’s work within the Jewish community started after graduate school, when she got her first job at the JCC MetroWest in New Jersey. There, she was hired by then-Assistant Executive Director Barak Hermann, who was named president and CEO of the JCC Association of North America in 2025.
It was also there that she met her husband and ended up moving to London for five years, where she had both of her children. Schwartz made the trip back to the United States because of her husband’s job, placing her in Baltimore in 2015, when Hermann was CEO of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore.
“I saw that Barak was the [CEO] of the JCC here, and so I called him,” she said. “And he was like, ‘I know who you are, and I know you’re going to figure it out, so let’s do it.’”
At the JCC of Greater Baltimore, Schwartz spent “a month plus interviewing with everybody on the JCC team, with parents, with staff, and ultimately ended up being the preschool director.”
Schwartz said she loves being part of Jewish spaces. “When my son first came to Third Space, we were there for a Sukkot program, and he actually looked at me and was like, ‘Mom, you should work here.’”
Dressin said that working at the JCC of Greater Baltimore together and having been mentored by Hermann have both played an important role in the development of Third Space as an institution.
“The ability for us to do this work together in a Jewish legacy institution and now to bring that to something that is effectively not a legacy institution and is in startup mode,” Dressin said. “My dream is that … [Third Space] stands on the shoulders of the generations of the rabbis who spent most of their Jewish time in the beit midrash, which is a place of learning and discussion and convincing and debate and argument.”
