Blowing a shofar on the field at Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, as part of the team’s Jewish Heritage Night last week was a very special experience for Rabbi Yosef Langer, executive director and founder of Chabad of San Francisco.

The ritual has gathered people “since the beginning of time, and baseball is a sport that brings all peoples together,” he told JNS on July 7. “This is the horn of freedom.”

His son, Rabbi Moshe Langer, told JNS that his father often says that leaving one’s comfort zone and doing a good deed for another lets one “tiptoe into the miraculous.” That’s just what the elder rabbi does when he blows the shofar, the son said.

“He’s going out of his comfort zone. He’s blowing the shofar. He’s dancing, and it really has a ripple effect around the world,” the son told JNS.

The elder rabbi was part of the pregame festivities before the Giants fell 9-3 to the Toronto Blue Jays, as some 32,140 looked on.

“Rally rabbi,” someone yelled at Langer as he talked to JNS, using a nickname that refers to his having been involved with the Jewish heritage event for the Giants for 25 years.

Attendees received giveaways of black jerseys that said “Giants” in Hebrew and the words “l’chaim,” or “to life,” on the back, and the number 18, which corresponds to “life” in Hebrew. Pizza slices with latke toppings were served at the stadium.

Jason Steckler, who founded the Israeli folk dance class Rikud By the Bay in 2024 with his wife Tovael Hagai, told JNS that the class performed at the event to send “a message of having a space for the Jewish community to come together, not with such a heavy heart all the time.”

“There are other outlets to celebrate your own Jewishness in whatever way that feels meaningful to you, and for us, it’s through dance,” he said.

The group performed a Hebrew song “My Israel,” which is “kind of like the Hora style, but it’s like a new, more modern music,” Hagai told JNS. It also performed a song whose title translates to “Peace Will Still Come to Us.”

Dance is a “universal language,” Hagai said. “No matter what language you speak or politics you follow or any culture, as long as you dance with us as a group, and we’re all having a good time, that’s the main thing.”

Before the game began, Theresa Viñal, in-park host for the Giants, interviewed Jon Fried, a volunteer with the Chabad Giving Kitchen, which prepares and distributes meals to people in need.

The interview blared on the stadium’s main screen.

The Giving Kitchen was listed as the “beneficiary” of Jewish Heritage Night on the Giants website.

Fried told JNS that it was “amazing” for the Giants to interview him on the field.

At the Giving Kitchen, “we feed homeless and other people who are unable to get food on their own, and also provide care packages,” he said. “We also give matzo ball soup out in the neighborhood.”

“Every week, the elderly and low-income people, we give whole meals to for Shabbat,” he said. “They get to share in your heritage a little bit, and you spread the joy and happiness in giving.”

Fried thinks that San Francisco is the “greatest city outside of Israel to be Jewish.”

“We got a Jewish mayor. We’re a city on the rebound, and I think part of it is because it’s the city of love and accepting everybody for all different faiths,” he told JNS. “I’m five generations here, but I’m going to tell you that antisemitism has no place in San Francisco.”

The team’s Jewish heritage night, and the community showing up to it, sends the message that “we don’t care about” the Jew-haters, according to Joshua Laber, a volunteer for the Young Adult Leadership Committee for Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in San Francisco.

“We are going to live our lives,” he told JNS. “We’re going to be open and honest about who we are, and we’re going to be ourselves in public.”

Every year, the committee, which plans events for young adults in the Bay Area, brings people to Jewish Heritage Night. This year, it came with about 60, which is in line with prior years, according to Laber.

“I think people appreciate that they do this,” he said of the event.

“I know a lot of other Jewish organizations are out here too,” he told JNS. “Friends who I know through Emanu-El have bought tickets through AEPi or whatever Jewish organization they’re affiliated with.”

“They make a good showing,” he said.