The Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. (formerly the Washington DCJCC) is an American Jewish Community Center located in the historic district of Dupont Circle.

Venue: Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C.
Address: 1529 16th St NW, Washington, DC 20036
Town: Washington, D.C., US

The Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. (formerly the Washington DCJCC) is an American Jewish Community Center located in the historic district of Dupont Circle. It serves the Washington, D.C. area through religious, cultural, educational, social, and sport center programs open to the public, although many programs are strongly linked to Jewish culture, both in the United States and in Israel. It is part of the JCC Association (JCCA), the umbrella organization for the Jewish Community Center movement, which includes more than 350 JCCs, YM-YWHAs, and camp sites in the U.S. and Canada, in addition to 180 local JCCs in the Former Soviet Union, 70 in Latin America, 50 in Europe, and close to 500 smaller centers in Israel. Among the many notable programs sponsored by the EDCJCC are Theater J, a theater group that has hosted world premieres of plays by noted Jewish playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein, Richard Greenberg, and Ariel Dorfman; the Washington Jewish Music Festival; the Jewish Literary Festival; and the Washington Jewish Film Festival, that includes screenings both at the Center itself, and at other Washington, DC, institutions, including a number of foreign embassies representing nations that produced the films. The EDCJCC also houses the Hyman S. and Freda Bernstein Library, which includes a Jewish Heritage Video Collection, a children's reading collection, and a collection of genealogy books and materials. It is a constituent organization of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, serving Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Although the first recorded Jew settled in Washington, DC, in 1795, the first large immigration of Jews to the nation's capital took place with the arrival of a number of German Jews, in the 1840s. In 1852, twenty-one Washingtonian Jews established the Washington Hebrew Congregation, and in 1863, after an Act of Congress that certified the Jewish community's right to own property, they purcha