MAY 2015 l IYAR • SIVAN 5775
Lynn Schenk’s political life plus more stories from San Diego‘s seniors
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CONTENTS
May 2015
Iyar/Sivan 5775
34
COVER STORY: At 70, Lynn Schenk shows no signs of slowing down. The “mother of the high speed rail” talks past, present and future.
41
SENIORS: Teenagers at the JCC volunteer to help seniors stay connected.
55
CHARITABLE GIVING: The Jewish Community Foundation’s Teen Foundation thinks philanthropy is a skill that young people should learn.
65
THEATER: The North Coast Repertory Theatre gets downright silly in director Matthew Wiener’s “Unnecessary Farce.”
6 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Income Generation in Retirement
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: 33 SENIORS:
New dating site helps seniors get “stitched.”
38 SENIORS:
Seacrest Village’s Nellie Cohn Residence is a quiet place to call home.
39 SENIORS:
On the road with On the Go.
45 SENIORS:
A little-known Hollywood exec quietly saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust.
48 CHARITABLE GIVING:
You may be young and broke, but there are still ways for you to give. We have 30 to get you started.
50 CHARITABLE GIVING: Robin Layton’s return to Judaism.
52 CHARITABLE GIVING: Change how you think about the San Diego Food Bank.
58 CHARITABLE GIVING: Remember 2-1-1.
60 THEATER:
A darling Canadian Jew returns to San Diego for “Cinderella.”
68 BOOKS:
70
Joshua Braff shares his life as a stay-at-home-dad in new novel.
70 FOOD:
Healthy mac’n cheese? Well... sorta.
72 FAMILY:
Our conversation on retirement income can help you move from “Can I retire?” to “How can I make the most of my retirement?” While most people understand the importance of saving for retirement, the concept of retirement income planning may be less familiar. Retirement income planning is a holistic process to help address key retirement decisions, effectively manage risks, and efficiently provide ongoing income to meet both the clients’ current and long-term retirement needs. We can support you by providing the guidance needed to make better, more informed choices to help provide a retirement as flexible as you are. As experienced advisors, we take the time to understand your unique goals to help create a plan tailored for you – one that will modify and change over time.
Test your kids’ Shabbat knowledge (and your own).
Around Town 12 Mailbag 14 Our Town 16 Event Recap 74 What’s Goin’ On 80 Calendar In Every Issue 10 The Starting Line 20 Parenting 22 Israeli Lifestyle 24 Dating 26 Aging 28 Spirituality 30 Israel 76 News 79 Diversions 85 Desert Life
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PUBLISHERS • Mark Edelstein and Dr. Mark Moss EDITOR-IN-CHIEF • Natalie Jacobs CREATIVE DIRECTOR • Peter Talhamé ASSISTANT EDITOR • Tina B. Eshel ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR • Eileen Sondak ADVERTISING & OFFICE MANAGER • Ronnie Weisberg CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Tori Avey, Betsy Baranov, Linda Bennett, Abby Walker, Leah Singer, David Ebenbach, Judith Fein (Senior Travel Correspondent), Michael Fox, Jennifer Garstang, Amanda Kelly, Brie Stimson, Miki Lamm, Pat Launer, Curt Leviant, David Ogul, Pamela Price, Sharon Rosen Leib, Nikki Salvo, Andrea Simantov, Jon Schwartz CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS/ARTISTS Vincent Andrunas, Ediz Benaroya, Pepe Fainberg, Steve Greenberg, Pat Krause, Paul Ross (Senior Travel Photographer), Angela Sissa, Daisy Varley, Daniella DeVarney ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES Nancy Segal (Account Executive), Alan Moss (Palm Springs) SAN DIEGO JEWISH JOURNAL (858) 638-9818 • fax: (858) 638-9801 5665 Oberlin Drive, Suite 204 • San Diego, CA 92121 EDITORIAL: editor@sdjewishjournal.com ADVERTISING: sales@sdjewishjournal.com CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTIONS: publisher@sdjewishjournal.com ART DEPARTMENT: art@sdjewishjournal.com LISTINGS & CALENDAR: calendar@sdjewishjournal.com SDJJ is published monthly by San Diego Jewish Journal, LLC. Subscription rate is $24 for one year (12 issues). Send subscription requests to SDJJ, 5665 Oberlin Drive, Suite 204, San Diego, CA 92121. The San Diego Jewish Journal is a free and open forum for the expression of opinions. The opinions expressed herein are solely the opinion of the author and in no way reflect the opinions of the publishers, staff or advertisers. The San Diego Jewish Journal is not responsible for the accuracy of any and all information within advertisements. The San Diego Jewish Journal reserves the right to edit all submitted materials, including press releases, letters to the editor, articles and calendar listings for brevity and clarity. The Journal is not legally responsible for the accuracy of calendar or directory listings, nor is it responsible for possible postponements, cancellations or changes in venue. Manuscripts, letters, documents and photographs sent to the Journal become the physical property of the publication, which is not responsible for the return or loss of such material. All contents ©2015 by San Diego Jewish Journal. The San Diego Jewish Journal is a member of the American Jewish Press Association and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Congratulations to the 2015 Jewish American Heritage Month Local Heroes. Union Bank and KPBS are honored to recognize these two recipients who serve as a continuous source of inspiration and fill our communities with hope, dreams and possibilities.
To nominate a Local Hero, visit unionbank.com/heroes
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THE STARTING LINE by Natalie Jacobs Editor of the San Diego Jewish Journal editor@sdjewishjournal.com
A First Time for Everything
C
an you remember your first time? If you listen to KPBS radio, you’re probably familiar with the question as it’s part of the NPR Morning Edition promo campaign running right now. Sure, it’s a bit cheesy, but I suppose it grabs people’s attention. After the big reveal – that it’s about Morning Edition and not virginity – the ad proceeds to quote a man who remembers first listening to the radio program at the age of 6. He says he hasn’t stopped listening since. It just feels so good (or something like that). Since we’re taking the trip...I remember when my parents implored me to read the newspaper or at least watch the morning news instead of sitting idly on the couch gawking at music videos before school. My compromise was to read the Union Tribune’s comics section, but I’d only last a few days at a time. Eminem was at the height of MTV fame – there wasn’t much the world could do to compete. Eventually I grew up and developed an appreciation for news and the people who report it. The radio in my car has replaced the morning paper on my parents’ dining table. I’ve even considered naming a future child after a news anchor (seriously, how pretty is the name Soraya?). One thing it took me a bit longer to really understand is that organizations like NPR and so many others in literally every aspect of public and private life exist primarily on donations. It’s hard to miss that fact as an adult, because once you
enter the work world it’s like everyone is asking for donations for something. Actually, as you’ll see in our Teen Philanthropy story on page 55, even kids (at least Jewish ones) are starting in on philanthropic endeavors a lot younger these days. I heard the Morning Edition promo more than a few times while putting together the Charitable Giving stories in this issue so its meaning started to morph. Can I remember my first time... donating money? Why yes, yes I can. It was the summer of 2011. Chicago was sticky and bustling with tourists. I had a corporate job and was splitting $800/month for a two-bedroom apartment on the city’s west side. I didn’t have a car. Health insurance and a 401(k) plan were part of the benefits package offered by my employer. Life was relatively inexpensive. I selected a goal number for how much money I wanted to see in my savings account at the end of the year, and the rest was mine to use as needed. Around that time, I was looking for ways to get more involved in the greater Chicago community. As recent college grads, my bff/ roomie and I were spending way too much time together so we both set out to find our own hobbies. She found a vegetarian cooking group and a volunteer position teaching English as a second language to Spanish-speaking immigrants. I found the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP), a listener-supported Internet radio station. I became a regular listener, started attending meetings and made the monetary
contribution required to become a member. I had been comfortably in the habit of listening to the station each morning while getting ready for work, but after I got the thank-you letter, something changed. I felt more connected to the organization, invested in their success and some small part of the team. So that’s what giving feels like, huh? Philanthropy is something we tend to think is reserved for rich old folks, but it’s totally not. To prove it, we’ve put together a list (with help from community leaders who, admittedly, have a few dogs in the fight) of 30 ways that Jews under 30 can “give.” It most definitely includes things beyond dollars, but those are always nice too. Check that out, for yourself, your kids or your grandkids, on page 48. I don’t think I’m stretching it too much when I say that our Seniors supplement also offers subtle suggestions on ways to give. There’s the cover story on Lynn Schenk (page 34) and a piece on the volunteers who make Jewish Family Service’s On the Go program a success (page 39), plus much more to chew on. But before you start reading, you might want to make sure you know where your checkbook is. A
Leave a gift to your favorite nonprofit in your will or trust. This will benefit the organization without impacting your current lifestyle. Plus, your family will still benefit from your estate, no matter the The Jewish Community Foundation’s tips size of your legacy gift. Best of all, you to simplify your charitable legacy can change your mind at any time.
To learn more about creating your legacy, contact Elise S. Wald, Charitable Planning Officer at 858-279-2740 or elise@jcfsandiego.org.
What Will Your Legacy Be? 10 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
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MISSING “MAD” POINT
CORRECTIONS In the article “Eight Years and $456 Million Later,” in our April issue, hospital executive Gary Fybel’s name was spelled wrong. The SDJJ regrets this error.
Dear Editor: I always appreciate when someone tells me their professional qualifications before they give their opinion on some newsworthy issue. I appreciate it because what that person is really telling me is that they are smarter than me and what they have to say is gospel. Ms. Rogers’ opinion on immunizations [Mailbag, April 2015] are strangely the same as the actress Jenny McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, Jr., whose positions on this issue have been thoroughly debunked. Scientists (and medical doctors) overwhelmingly have made the case that the risks of not having children immunized are much greater to the child and to the outside world than the risks of getting immunized. And a dummy like me relies on the good faith opinions of the majority who study such things because I am not a scientist. If the general public is not in any danger from unimmunized children, then why make the argument in the first place? But since she has, it should be noted that there was no outbreak of any serious diseases from those kids and apparently the Central American countries they came from, as poor and corrupt as they may be, immunize their children at a slightly greater rate than the U.S. does. But what do I know? I don’t live in any of those exclusive neighborhoods referenced by Ms. Rogers whose residents apparently have eschewed vaccinations for their kids so I can’t be as nearly as smart as them, or Ms. Rogers. Rob Cohen Kensington
SURVIVORS IN MIND Send us your comments: editor@sdjewishjournal.com 5665 Oberlin Dr., Ste 204 San Diego, CA 92121 12 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Dear Editor: With Natalie Jacobs’ April “Our Darkest Hours” column in mind [The Starting Line, April. 2015], I’m still processing my first physical encounter with a Holocaust
survivor. On the evening of March 31, Doris Martin, a Polish Jew, signed copies of her book with Ralph S. Martin “Kiss Every Step: A Survivor’s Memoir from the Nazi Holocaust” before and after bearing witness to a packed upstairs room at the Escondido Public Library. My response to her repeated expressions of bafflement at her entire family of seven’s survival led to a small moment I’ll be processing the rest of my life. I also made a new friend, an 80-something Jewish lady who confessed she doesn’t believe in G-d. She was responding to my reflection that some Jews have adopted atheism in reaction to the Holocaust. I got an email from her a day or two later and we’ve been in dialogue ever since. The Torah and Prophets make it unflatteringly clear that Israel’s election at Sinai was about promises not merit. Deuteronomy 9 is perhaps the Torah’s classic statement. In Genesis, we find the promise to Abraham that “all the families of the earth,” i.e., all humanity, “shall bless themselves by you.” That promise was progressively clarified through Isaac then Jacob. So the grand divine plan is to bless all humanity through undeserving yet divinely loved Israel. In Exodus, God calls Israel his “first-born son” (cf. Hosea 11: 1). Elsewhere, he states that he scourges (whips) anyone he accepts as a son. That discipline has at times been severe, a function of his extreme parental commitment, his fiercely unwavering insistence that Israel live up to the Covenant for Israel’s and all humanity’s sake. Neglectful or absentee respecting Israel he is not, according to the Tanakh. A classic example is the first destruction of Jerusalem, including the First (Solomon’s) Temple. Even as that catastrophe, permitted as discipline for the Israelite majority’s unfaithfulness was occurring, Israel is told, in the four-chapter (30-33) Book of Consolation inside the Book of Jeremiah, that the day all of Israel ceases to exist, with not
even a saved remnant, is the day the physical creation disappears. I openly suggested to Doris Martin [she’d handed me the mic] that the miraculous survival of her entire family was testimony to G-d’s faithfulness and truthfulness, and called forth praise (my “Baruch ha Shem!”). At which point she gave me that public hug. But what about the death of so many Israelites/ Jews before, during, and after the Babylonian episode? G-d hates murder. Murder is stealing from G-d. Yet the Eternal doesn’t seem challenged by the mere fact of death, even mass death. As if, maybe, G-d knows something? The chrysalis transformation is a universal token of resurrection. Resurrection is built into the very astrophysics and geophysics of our planet. We call it spring. We get jaded to these miracles, maybe because they’re so regular, too big, or too small. The Pharisees believed resurrection is Scriptural. The Talmud agrees. The senior Intelligence and Power I’ve attempted to comprehend in this apologia’s nine preceding items would be able to archive the memories of the dead with storage to spare. In the age to come, a detailed accounting of human history, and full justice, are promised. Can we trust that? Does the 1948 miracle of Israel still exist following the miraculous Six Day War? Do we take it for granted that day will follow night? (edited) Dale Haynes Valley Center Dear Editor: There is a stratification, a hierarchy of suffering that’s troubling. Those of us who have stories of dislocation, hunger, disease, and other suffering are discredited by those who survived in concentration camps. That shuts out our stories as being “not good enough.” I’m looking forward to the day before I’m too ill and too old to be accorded an ear by my fellow Jews. Ruth L. Weiss Hohberg San Diego
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THE BEHAVIORAL HEALTH COMMITTEE OF JEWISH FAMILY SERVICE OF SAN DIEGO INVITES YOU TO OUR ANNUAL LUNCHEON IN SUPPORT OF MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS
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Greg O’Brien, an award-winning political writer and investigative reporter, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2009, after losing both his mother and grandfather to the disease. Acting on long-term memory and skill, coupled with well-developed journalistic grit, O’Brien decided to tackle his diagnosis and imminent decline by writing frankly about the journey. On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s offers an illuminating account of the strategies, faith, and humor needed to fight this disease. O’Brien writes about living with Alzheimer’s, not dying from it—and sustaining hope in the face of inevitable change. Event Generously Underwritten by Caryl Lees Witte THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPONSORSHIP
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Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 13
our
TOWN BY NATALIE JACOBS | EDITOR@SDJEWISHJOURNAL.COM | PHOTOS BY BOB ROSS
Giving Heart and Soul
On a beautiful evening in late March, more than 650 guests gathered at the Hilton La Jolla at Aventin to support and honor Jewish Family Service. Thanks to generous donors, this year’s “Heart & Soul Gala” raised more than $1.15 million, the highest amount raised at a gala in the organization’s history! Before being seated in the expansive and beautifully decorated ballroom, guests mingled in the courtyard and placed bids on rows and rows of silent auction items. A live auction kept dinner guests alert as paddles were raising from all corners of the hall – up for grabs was a trip to the Ellen Degeneres show, a Rolling Stones concert, a trip to Chile and much more. During the ceremony, JFS CEO Michael Hopkins gave a thoughtful tribute to each of the evening’s honorees – Evelyn and Ernest Rady, Ron S. Zollman and JFS’s special partnership with Susan G. Komen, San Diego. Three huge screens featured engaging videos that showed the incredible work that JFS does on a daily basis, as well as beautiful tributes to the evening’s honorees. In attendance were local government officials including Congresswoman Susan Davis, Congressman Juan Vargas, Council Member Todd Gloria and delegates from Representatives Lorena Gonzales’ and Ben Hueso’s offices.
Clockwise from top: JFS CEO Michael Hopkins and Honoree Ron Zollman • Gala Chairs and Auction Chairs Staci Tiras-Jones, KarinToranto, Heather Keith, Kira Finkenberg and Sue Monk • Malin and Roberta Burnham with Honorees Evelyn and Ernest Rady • Pauline Foster, Jeffrey Silberman and Laurayne Ratner • Marie Raftery and Robert Rubenstein.
14 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
A community is too heavy to carry alone. - Deuteronomy Rabbah 1:10
Thank You Thank you to the community for your record-setting investment in Jewish Family Service. Your support will bring hope, dignity, and security to thousands of San Diegans in search of better lives. An incredible matching gift from Evelyn & Ernest Rady will amplify our impact. Together, we are building a stronger, healthier, more resilient San Diego.
thank you to our
UNDERWRITERS and PATRONS Presenting Underwriter Anonymous Premier Underwriter Joan & Irwin Jacobs Dinner Underwriter Charitable Adult Rides & Services, Inc. Desert View Auto Auctions Geniya & Papa Doug Manchester Marie G. Raftery & Robert A. Rubenstein U.S. Bank Heart of the Family Marsha Berkson • Judy & Mike Feldman • Pauline Foster Audrey & Steven J. Levine | Latham & Watkins LLP Gary & Lisa Levine | Arthur J. Gallagher • Jennifer & Jay Levitt Maureen Raihle & John VerBockel | Merrill Lynch Private Banking Karen & Jeffrey Silberman | Carleton Management, Inc. Audrey Viterbi Smargon & Daniel Smargon • Sarah z”l & Nessim Tiano The San Diego Foundation • UC San Diego Erna z”l & Andrew Viterbi • Anonymous Heart of Gold Barbara Bloom • Barbara Bry & Neil Senturia • City National Bank • Melvin Cohn Cooley • Alberta Feurzeig • Marcia Foster Hazan & Mark Cammell Eileen & Leonard Herman • Ibis Capital • ICW Group Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego • Carol & Richard Kornfeld Sandra & Arthur Levinson • Andrea Stein & James Lewis • Ellen Marks • Jori Potiker Debbie Turner & Conrad Prebys • Marci Sinclair & Andy Ratner • Laurayne Ratner San Diego Gas & Electric • San Diego Ice Arena • Hon. Lynn Schenk Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton LLP • Susan Shmalo Elyse Sollender & Mark Lohkemper • Jan Allan Steinert & Richard C. Bosse, Jr. Karin & Tony Toranto • Emma & Leo Zuckerman Gala Patrons 2-1-1 San Diego • Marc Channick | Delphi Private Advisors • Laurie & Matthew Coleman Ellen & David Dolgen • Robin & Leo Eisenberg • Ryan Ferrel | Managed Solution April & Mathew Fink | Comfort Keepers • Kira Finkenberg • Meg & Allan Goldstein Grossmont Healthcare District • Alan Haubenstock & Brian Haubenstock • Karen Helrich & Bertram Edelstein Hughes Marino CM • Hilary & Selwyn Isakow • Ann & Richard Jaffe • Susan & David Kabakoff Kate & John Kassar • Dori & Charles Kaufman • Jennifer & Mathew Kostrinsky • Ina & Michael Levin Liber-Lincoln Wealth Management Group | Wells Fargo Advisors • Sheila & Jeffrey Lipinsky Barbara & Mathew Loonin • Jack Maizel • Marcia & Robert Malkus • Danielle & Brian Miller • Susan & Anton Monk • Susan & James Morris • Mary & Daniel Mulvihill Ohr Ami, The Jewish Hospice Program | Lightbridge Hospice and Palliative Care Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego • Lois Richmond • Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management Sheryl & William Rowling • Safdie Rabines Architects • Vera z”l & Thomas Sickinger Nanci & Ronald Slayen • Social Solutions • Jill & Mark Spitzer • Jill & Evan Stone • Sharon & David Wax Cathy & John Weil • Mary Lynn & Larry Weitzen • Bebe & Marvin Zigman • Joellyn & Ron Zollman
Celebrating the extraordinary accomplishments of the
2015 Mitzvah Honorees Ron S. Zollman Our Special Partnership with
Susan G. Komen, San Diego (Laura Farmer Sherman, Executive Director)
Evelyn & Ernest Rady gala chairs
Heather Keith Karin & Tony Toranto
auction chairs Kira Finkenberg Susan Kleiman Monk Staci Tiras-Jones
past chair advisors April & Mathew Fink Felicia Mandelbaum
View Tribute Videos & Gala Photos www.jfssd.org/gala
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 15
the SCENE BY NATALIE JACOBS l EDITOR@SDJEWISHJOURNAL.COM l PHOTOS BY SPARK PHOTOGRAPHY
Celebrating News, Around the World
On March 28, newshounds and appreciators of the first amendment gathered at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines for the KPBS Celebrates gala. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition host David Green was the special guest for the evening, which raised more than $260,000 for our local NPR station. The “around the world” theme encouraged guests to wear glittering garb from the farthest corners of the globe. The music, dance, costume and imagery of the evening took guests on a journey through Japan, India and Brazil. More than 200 guests attended the event, including PBS favorites like “Downton Abbey” stars Laura Carmichael and Lesley Nicol, Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton, “Antiques Roadshow” host Mark Walberg, and NPR White House Correspondent Scott Horsley. Local legend Ken Kramer was inducted into the Hall of Fame with a Lifetime Achievement award for his work in the community, most notably on the show “About San Diego” which premiered on KPBS in the late 1960s.
Clockwise from top: Jeri and Elliot Hirshman • Greg Laurence, Kimberly Heller Godwin (Gala Chair), Stacy Laurence, and Tom Wilcox • Judi Gerber, David Greene, and Joel Gerber • Darcie Gorman, Ceci Muntz, Steve Hart, Sue Hart, Bonnie Wren, and Chris Wren • Debbie Turner and Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo.
16 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
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www.theLisaDifference.com Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 17
be SEEN BY MIKI LAMM l PHOTOS BY EDIZ BENAROYA
Capturing Culture
On March 29, the San Diego Center for Culture’s CJC In The Mix hosted “Pop Goes Culture: Capture Culture,” a pop-up style art gallery. Following a successful first event in December, 2014, the second in the series of three focused on photographic arts showcasing Jewish culture and heritage. Designed to encourage appreciation of San Diego’s artistic community, “Pop Goes Culture” gave local artists Brad Hurvitz and Aaron Truax the opportunity to display and sell their original pieces, including some from the recent JDC Entwine: Inside Jewish Turkey trip. With each complimentary ticket, guests were given the opportunity to sample a glass of local beer from 32 North Brewing Company (the brewery also hosted the event at its Miramar brewery), as well a selection of vegetarian sliders from The Slider House Burger Co. food truck. This event provided a unique alternative to the typical lazy Sunday evening by showcasing local art, great beer, delicious food and Jewish culture. Attendee Brandon Wasserman praised the night, saying “It was a fun event in a really cool space. It was able to blend art and beer, which was a great combination. I enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with friends and meet other Jews in the community.” To find out more information about the final “Pop Goes Culture” event, or other events hosted by CJC In The Mix, visit sdcjc.org.
Top: Brad Hurvitz and Zach Warburg. Clockwise from middle: Janese Cassel, Rayna Karoll and Sami Tarson • Todd Allen, Mark Kaufman, Stacy Parselany, Kira Finkenberg, Linn Shauger, Ilene Tatro, and (front row) Alex Leverant • Lauren Fischbein, Sharon Strick, Daniella Wiseman and Joe Wiseman • Golda Akhgarnia and Jessie Bustamante.
18 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
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parenting
MUSINGS FROM MAMA by Sharon Rosen Leib srleib@roadrunner.com
Bubbe’s Long Goodbye
M
y bubbe almost made it to 103. But adding another notch to her birthday belt no longer mattered to her. She was ready to go. At 102, my bubbe kept her sharp mind and sense of humor intact until a week before she died. Her body had been failing for several years and she’d been confined to a wheelchair for the last two, reliant on her in-home caregiver to take her to the bathroom, wash and dress her. A fiercely independent woman, she barely tolerated this need to depend on someone else. And yet, until the very end, she had a hard time letting go. She loved her Rosen family to the point of deification and had an intense fear of missing out (FOMO in hipster parlance). She didn’t want to die and miss kvelling at a wedding or Bar Mitzvah, even though she had an increasingly difficult time managing these events. Her life centered on her two surviving children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren (and, before his death 13 years ago, my father as well). She was our greatest advocate. She’d been contemplating going on hospice care for a few years but wasn’t experiencing pain and didn’t have the physical symptoms to justify it. During what turned out to be the last month of her life, bubbe decided the time for hospice had come. Her desire to die with some dignity was overtaking her FOMO. No dummy, my grandmother knew hospice would give her access to morphine. Her doctor was reluctant to make the hospice referral because he wasn’t sure she’d die within six months. My persuasive physician sister talked him into it. For the past three years, bubbe openly discussed dying – living past 100 seemed absurd to her. I told her that after watching my parents and great uncle die, I no longer harbored a fear of death. Although 20 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
the body takes time to shut down (not like in the movies where a dying person utters a few words, turns her head and expires), the final hours tend to be peaceful, if somewhat drawn-out. “Grandma, you’ll see a comforting white light and the people you loved – like Grandpa Fred, Dad, and your parents . . .” “Do you really believe that baloney?” she said, interrupting me. “I’m not saying heaven exists but people around the world who’ve had near-death experiences all have similar stories of seeing the light and feeling the presence of loved ones. Maybe it’s a brain adaptation to help the body let go,” I said. “Well, seeing Fred and Sandy [her son] would sure be nice,” she said. I went up to Los Angeles on Monday of the week Bubbe died, to have lunch with her. When I arrived at her place, soup in hand, I discovered my uncle there. She’d taken a sudden, sharp turn for the worse. I sensed her spirit leaving her. “She reminds me of Shel Silverstein’s book ‘The Giving Tree.’ She’s given us her all,” I said. My uncle and I shed a few tears. Then bubbe rested her head on my shoulder. She started speaking incoherently about weddings and pre-nuptial dinners. By the time I returned to L.A. that Friday in the same week, bubbe could no longer speak. She lay in a semi-comatose state. My brother, sister, a hospice nurse and I talked to her saying she could finally let go. The nurse gave her a little morphine to ease her discomfort. Around 3 a.m., I remembered that I’d brought along “The Giving Tree” to read to her. She died five minutes after I read it aloud. Ultimately, she took pride and comfort knowing she’d been our tree of life. As Silverstein aptly wrote, “And the tree was happy.” A
Further Reading:
In The Atlantic’s April issue, writer Gideon Lichfield explores what we may see in our final moments. Is it really a white light and the spirits of everyone who’s gone before us? Find out at theatlantic.com.
The Art of David Labkovski April 12 - June 14, 2015
Photo Credit: Gina Cholick
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Pan Pacific Park
LAMOTH Docent, Connie Marco, stands with David Labkovski’s work, Untitled Landscape, on loan from The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley, CA.
100 S. The Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.651.3704 | www.lamoth.org
Open 7 days a week. Free to the public.
israeli lifestyle
LIVING ON THE FRONT PAGE by Andrea Simantov
andreasimantov@gmail.com
Surprises in Small Packages
W
ith great disappointment, it was concluded that the annual sojourn to see my daughters in Johannesburg was not financially possible this year. With respect to all aspects of erasing our hard-earned debts, the most difficult part of the process has been learning to say “No.” Still, I’m a trooper and I rarely wallow in self-pity. Unless, however, the belt-tightening results in missing out on seeing my overseas children and grandchildren. That’s when I pull out all of the “poor-me” stops and make my husband’s life a living hell. (I have a BFA in Dramatic Arts. These days, I only use it when “sorrow” is called for. Then the 22 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
performance is Oscar worthy, trust me.) With this latest round of financial disappointments, I tried to justify my sadness with an honest concern over the deliberate crashing of the Germanwings airplane in the French Alps. For a few weeks, such horror succeeded in having a calming effect on my wanderlust. Just as my moping returned full throttle, daughter number three said, “I need some mommy-time.” I was amazed. “This isn’t a discussion,” she continued. “The ticket’s bought; see you next week.” Before I could say “I left my heart in Addis Ababa,” the plane took off and I found myself
soaring the skies of Africa toward Johannesburg. Is it possible to be at the top of the world when you are, in fact, near the bottom? Indeed, yes it is when a bunch of bespectacled grandchildren come running at you as you exit Baggage Claim at Oliver Thambo International Airport. Immediately, infants wrapped in Baby Bjorns, toddlers who don’t really remember me, and the older kids in their school uniforms all start disobeying the rule of standing behind the gate by smothering me with hugs and kisses, leaping upon the luggage carrier and hanging off of my waist, shoulders and neck. A taste of Heaven at the terminal. Traveling alone this time, my only jam-packed obligations included cooking family favorites, rocking babies to sleep, sitting in the car (frequently) while mommies ran errands, reading bedtime stories, diaper changing, reminiscing, food prepping, laundry folding, group swims, pushing swings and making room in a too-bigbed for talcum-sweetened post-bath tadpoles who wanted more and a little more of that Grandma time. Some days I bemoan being too busy to think but on others, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude. Because the thoughts that consume me frequently concern the evaporation of extended families, divorce, stay-at-home-mothering versus career pursuit, struggling to make ends meet on one, two or three incomes, and, just to mix it up, the meaning of life. Being Israeli adds indescribable layers to the aforementioned concerns because threats of local and global terrorism are ever present as we negotiate our daily schedule. But here, I am reminded that every song ever sung about the skies of Africa is true. To be blessed with a gift this satisfying cannot be demanded. It is a reward – deserved or not – from G-d. It comes from an understanding that the big picture is not the only picture and that on most days, there is nothing more important than having a cup of coffee with a daughter and teaching a toddler his ABCs – even if you have to go to the bottom of the world to get it done. A
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dating
PLAYING WITH MATCHES by Jennifer Garstang jenscy@gmail.com
When to Stay, When to Walk Away
L
ast month, I decided to procrastinate on taxes by sifting through my Big Box o’ Memories. You know, that box full of stuff you think you’ll make into a scrapbook someday...until you rediscover your unfinished Bat Mitzvah scrapbook languishing in the back of the closet and realize that scrapbooking is not in your nature. Anyway, I came across a list from 2007 about my college boyfriend. I’d divided the page into two columns. The first was titled “Reasons to Stay Together,” and filled half a page. The second, “Reasons to Break Up,” filled its entire column and spilled over onto the back. Sadly, on the first try, most of us won’t find the bashert (soul mate) who will change our tax filing status to something other than “Single.” This means that, if our current relationship isn’t right for us, we’ll first need to move on in order to find something better. Knowing when to move on should be easy, right? After all, according to pop-culture, when a relationship is “right,” you’ll just “know.” So if you don’t know for sure that the relationship is “right,” it must be wrong, right? Wrong! (Wait...what?) It’s true that feeling doubts could be a sign of problems. However, there are also lots of things that can trigger doubt, which have nothing to do with the quality of your relationship – anything from fading infatuation, to a stressful job situation, to a bad night’s sleep. When my current boyfriend and I had been together about three months, I started to feel distant and worry that maybe we didn’t really have a connection. The fact that he had just gotten an amazing job offer in Seattle right before I left on a two-week family road trip, and we could only talk through occasional static-filled phone calls might have contributed a bit to my fears. But those 24 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
rational thoughts weren’t the ones speaking most vocally in my mind. Two years later, to say I’m glad I stayed in the relationship would be a massive understatement. While doubts are not necessarily a reason to move on, they also shouldn’t be ignored. When we repeatedly brush aside our worries, we can fall into what I call “Relationship Myopia,” meaning two things: 1) we become less and less able to visualize what our life would look like without our current partner, and 2) we get so used to the dynamics of the relationship that we can’t see if they’re healthy or not. In short, that dysfunctional relationship becomes just “the way things are.” The best way to tell if your doubts are real or imagined is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What are the specific things in your relationship that have caused doubt? Are there outside factors that are impacting you? When you consider your life with your partner – not just in the last few days or weeks, but as a whole – are you happy? Now, if things aren’t working, you don’t have to jump straight to breaking up, but you do have to express your feelings. It’s scary, I know. When I told my first boyfriend I wasn’t happy, he responded sincerely that we both deserved better and broke things off. It hurt, but it also freed us up to heal and move on. Ultimately, if the relationship is the right fit, then expressing those worries won’t trigger a breakup. Instead, as happened when I talked with my current boyfriend after the road trip, it will open a conversation that can bring you closer and build the foundation for a truly great relationship. A
FYI
StandWithUs is congratulating SDSU on defeating a proposed divestment referendum. The measure, which required a two-thirds majority, garnered 53 percent “yes” votes and 47 percent “no.” StandWithUs notes that only 10 percent of the SDSU population voted.
Create Createthe theFuture FutureHe HeDeserves Deserves When you include Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego When you include Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego inin your estate plan, you help usus provide exceptional care your estate plan, you help provide exceptional care inin a place ofof hope and healing. a place hope and healing. To To learn more, visitvisit www.helpsdkids.org/giftplanning, or call Elise Webster, learn more, www.helpsdkids.org/giftplanning, or call Elise Webster,
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aging
OLDER, WISER, BETTER by Jon Schwartz
jonaschwartz@hotmail.com
Staying Productive
I
’ve referenced it in this column before, but I continue to be amazed at the incredible increase in life expectancy in the past 100 years. Thanks in part to advances in birthing methods, medical technology, sanitation, and pharmaceuticals, the life expectancy for humans in developed countries has jumped from 47 years in 1900 to 78 in 2010. As a result, populations around the world are growing dense with elderly people. While this sounds exciting to me, media outlets are starting to report on the problems that these aging populations bring to their societies. It is sad to think that the relatively new ability to live a longer and much more full life might now be considered one of civilization’s greatest burdens. It would be irresponsible of me to paint a picture of an aging population that presented no challenges. What about adequate and affordable housing? Reliable transportation systems? Social supports and health care costs? Strain in these and other areas will only increase as people live longer. While I’m realistic about this reality, I am also optimistic that with great challenges lie even greater opportunities. The opportunity to tap into the talent of an abundant aging population should not be overlooked. How can we create a system where we are utilizing the unique abilities of these individuals who bear a wealth of historical knowledge? Speaking to groups of aging individuals, I often ask what they think are the benefits of getting older. People usually grumble for a bit, but after the initial shock of the question I hear some beautiful answers. There are, in fact, many benefits to aging, so take a pause from this piece and answer the question for yourself – what are the benefits of getting older? Here are just a few of the responses that I get: • Greater expertise • Additional free time • Increased wisdom • Higher sense of empathy • Deeper connections (business and personal) • More affluent 26 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Countless studies corroborate the benefits mentioned above. Harvard University was one of the first to implement a program intended to exploit these advantages. The program, Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI), started in 2009, brings together accomplished retired individuals to find solutions for local, national and global problems. The idea is for a group of seniors, who all have their own unique experience and talent, to work together on projects that span their individual talent areas. In the more than five years since the inception of ALI, the program has focused on improving child literacy, creating better access to nutritious foods for all, creating new channels for micro-loans and much more. The old adage that education occurs in youth, work occurs in midlife and leisure occurs in our final years must end in this new era of longer living. We need transform into a society where we are blending these areas and participating in healthy doses of education, work and leisure during all stages of life. The perception of aging will change as seniors begin to go back to school or take on work with other compassionate and determined individuals to continue healing the world. For my part, I am determined to bring a program like Harvard’s ALI to San Diego. We have an opportunity to tap into incredible talent here. Imagine yourself part of a group of well-intended, educated and compassionate seniors working together on a purposeful project that will benefit others. It is coming, so please start thinking of how you can contribute. History has shown that the 20th century brought with it the technology for people to live, on average, for an extra 30 years. In the 21st century, we will prove that seniors can continue to be productive and thriving with this added time. I predict that in the coming years, we will see millions upon millions of older people helping others in ways that we can now only barely imagine. Continue to dream big and the next 100 years will be even better than the last. A
On the List:
The USTA’s annual seniors tennis tourney returns to the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club May 11-17. Sign up and get details at ljbtc.com.
San Diego Jewish Academy San SanDiego DiegoJewish JewishAcademy Academy Class of 2014, By the Numbers Class Classofof2014, 2014,By Bythe theNumbers Numbers
38 38
number of students in SDJA’s number number ofofstudents studentsininSDJA’s SDJA’s class of 2014 class classofof2014 2014
202 202
number of college acceptance number number ofof college college acceptance acceptance letters received letters letters received received
100 100
percentage of the percentage percentage the the class of 2014ofof class class ofof 2014 2014 accepted to a accepted accepted toto aa 4-year college 4-year college college or4-year university oror university university
4,878,000 4,878,000 4,878,000 dollars awarded through dollars dollarsawarded awardedthrough through
71 71
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ merit scholarships $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ merit meritscholarships scholarships
Tour SDJA Today Contact us today to schedule a private tour. Tour Tour SDJA SDJA Today Today Contact Contact usus today today toto schedule schedule a private a private tour. tour. 866-765-7516 admissions@sdja.com | sdja.com 866-765-7516 866-765-7516admissions@sdja.com admissions@sdja.com | sdja.com | sdja.com
spirituality
THE ARTIST’S TORAH by David Ebenbach ebenbach@netzero.com
People of the Rulebook
F
inishing the Book of Leviticus this month, with chapters chock full of “do this” and “don’t do that,” I am reminded that we (the Jews) are famous for having a Torah that assigns us six hundred and thirteen commandments. This month I am further reminded that’s an awful lot of commandments. But we’re a funny people. Faced with a series of iron-clad (and ostensibly divine) rules, often with dire consequences laid out for disobedient people, we have habitually responded to those rules in one way: with questions. Sometimes the questions are about clarification. G-d tells Aaron to dedicate a goat to Azazel in Leviticus 16:8, for example, and rabbis and other scholars have been trying for centuries to figure out what that means. And why exactly can’t we mix wool and linen (Lev 19:19)? Other times the questions aim to push back a bit, such as in the case of the well-known eye for an eye penalty (Lev 24:20) which, despite the fact that it couldn’t be much clearer (poke out an eye, lose an eye), was reinterpreted by the sages as referring to financial reimbursements for physical injuries. Of course, push-back and outright rebellion have become standard in more recent culture. In the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Allegra Goodman, Cynthia Ozick, and Chaim Potok (not to mention in the sculptures of people like Jacques Lipchitz, which seem to fly in the face of the prohibition against graven images) we see again and again our tendency to forcefully question commandments. Of course, we know all this. It’s a point of pride among many Jews that we push back against authority, including the authority of our own tradition. We like to break rules. But we don’t 28 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
always consider the converse, which is that maybe we also like having rules to break. It’s a matter of balance. A society defined only by law and order is inevitably totalitarian, whereas there won’t be a society at all if people are driven entirely by individual momentary whims. And a person’s life, too, is ideally a mix of boundaries and freedom. That is, in fact, where creativity and growth happen – not in a world of complete restriction, and not, on the other hand, in a world that lacks organization and guidance. We need both. As Allen Shawn said of fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg, “the sources of his inspiration flowed most freely when stemmed and checked by legislation.” In other words, Schoenberg, a true artistic revolutionary, was able to do his best work when he worked creatively within or against a strict structure, a structure that challenged, informed, and steadied him. The Torah, I think, recognizes this. Immediately after we finish the rule-heavy Book of Leviticus, we start into Numbers – Bamidbar, or “In the wilderness,” in Hebrew – and the first thing that happens in Numbers is a census. In other words, we go from rules that govern us uniformly to a recognition and consideration of each Israelite as an individual. This is that balance in action. On the one hand, Judaism believes in a society held to common standards – high standards – and on the other, Judaism believes in the value and importance of the individual. This is one reason that the Torah is full of individual names, particular stories, and unique (and sometimes rebellious) contributions. These forebears are our models: people for whom structure becomes a framework, a frame in which they can find themselves. A
This
month’s Torah portions May 2: Acharei Mot/Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1-20:27) May 9: Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23) May 16: Behar/Bechukotai (Leviticus 25:1-27:34) May 23: Bamidbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20) May 30: Nasso (Numbers 4:21-7:89)
Elijah’s Restaurant and Delicatessen will be relocating May, 20, 2015 to 7061 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard San Diego, CA 92111 West Side Story Ad 14_Lobby Poster 3/19/15 5:13 PM Page 1
(Located in McGrath Shopping Center, near Souplantation and Walmart)
Come and celebrate with us with this special deal. Purchase any menu item and get another menu item of equal or lesser value free with purchase of 2 beverages*
Performed with Full Live Orchestra! JCC BOX OFFICE: (858) 362-1348 www.jcompanysd.org Thank You to our Season Sponsors: Melissa Garfield Bartell & Michael Bartell Monica Handler Penner & Amnon Gires and Family David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre • Potiker Family Arts & Culture Complex Viterbi Family Galleria • Foster-Ratner Performing Arts Education Center Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center • JACOBS FAMILY CAMPUS 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037-1348
*not valid with any other offers, promotions or discounts Exp 06/30/2015
858.455.1462
www.ElijahsRestaurant.com Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 29
ISRAEL
FEDERATION SETS HOPES HIGH WITH LATEST ENTERPRISE The Israel Initiative hits the ground running BY TINA B. ESHEL
T
here have been a lot of changes coming out of Federation these days. With their latest endeavor, The Israel Initiative, the biggest question is: can the shaky bridge between Diaspora and Israeli Jews be restored? A bit of background is in order. During Operation Protective Edge, the Jewish Federations of North America issued a request for emergency funding to help those areas and communities effected by the war. A total of $17 million was raised in that multi-national effort with 151 Jewish Federations participating. San Diego raised $3.4 million of that total (fourth in overall funds raised in the effort). It’s a feat that makes Jane Fantel, director of Israel Connections for San Diego’s Jewish Federation, proud. “During the summer’s war,” she explains, “the Federations’ role was to raise money to help with things that the Israel government doesn’t or couldn’t fund.” The financial generosity of San Diego Jews and other Israel supporters planted one of the seeds for the formation of The Israel Initiative. Though it’s still in the planning stages, the ultimate goal of the new effort is to engage the entire San Diego Jewish community and those who have a stake in Israel, to connect with global partners (like the Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the Sha’ar HaNegev region), and to enhance support, connection and appreciation of Israel outside of wartimes. Fantel, who has long a history of fundraising for Israel, knows how important it is to donors 30 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
to follow the money to its end location. She outlines the allocation of the $3.4 million raised last summer. “One million went to the national Stop the Sirens Campaign. The money went to help families, seniors and children find respite by getting them out of the south. Hospital workers and lone soldiers also needed relief and counseling during and because of the war.” The remaining $2.4 million, Fantel says, went directly to San Diego’s sister city Sha’ar HaNegev, which happens to be near the Gaza border, and is home to 6,000 residents living in 10 kibbutzim. The region continues to face economic hardship as some residents have decided not to return to the area. To help families feel safe returning to their homes in the war-torn region, San Diego Jewry is supporting construction of a state-of-the-art sports and cultural facility in Sha’ar HaNegev. To date, San Diego has contributed $2 million to this initiative through Federaton. The facility will accommodate large groups of people and allow them to enjoy athletic, civic and community events in safety. The center, funded in part by money raised during the emergency campaign, will include a movie theater, coffee shop and more. It will also convert to a shelter in the event that a war breaks out. It’s an example of the kind of success those involved in The Israel Initiative hope to see more often. Fantel is working closely with San Diego’s Federation president Michael Sonduck and the co-chairs of the newly formed steering committee, Teresa DuPuis (also Federation’s
board chair) and David Bramzon, to establish the program. This will include providing ways for people to engage more meaningfully with Israel, fostering travel opportunities (especially for teens and young adults), strengthening the partnership between San Diego and Sha’ar HaNegev, and collaborating with San Diego community partners to create and promote more Israel educational and cultural programming. “The role of the steering committee will be to first work with consultants and map Israel culture and engagement and education in San Diego,” Fantel says. “What’s going on? Who’s doing what? Is it effective? What’s not being done that should be done and whose role will it be? How do we as a community get involved and more interested in Israel?” The forthcoming efforts of The Israel Initiative will add onto Federation’s already embedded Israel programs, which, Sonduck notes have been strong for 79 years. The idea is for The Israel Initiative to kick things up a notch. “One of our initiatives is the teen initiative. And one of the things Federation is committed to is raising more money from specific donors who are specifically interested in getting teens to Israel,” Fantel says. “We’re connecting future geneartions through our Teen Travel to Israel program, which is providing needs-based scholarships to teens to connect them to the Jewish State,” Sonduck explains. “This year, [the program] is granting more than $50,000 in scholarships in an effort to connect the next generation.” Overall, the umbrella Israel Initiative plans to support more programs like that, to further strengthen Federation’s connection to Israel. “If you think of AIPAC, they have their niche,” Fantle says. “If you think of StandWithUs, they have their niche with what they do. When you think of Federation, what does Federation do in Israel? Unless you’re really involved with the work, you probably have a hard time knowing what they do, right?” Fantel believes that The Israel Initiative will change this. A To follow along as the program grows, jewishinsandiego.org.
visit
Let’s talk about something retirement communities hardly ever mention. Accreditation. Because having the confidence and peace of mind of accreditation is important. So, let’s talk. La Vida Del Mar and La Vida Real are accredited by CARF International. It’s an independent organization that sets exceedingly high standards for care and service. It’s a lot like an accreditation for a hospital or college. Or a five-star rating for a hotel. But like most things in life, you have to see it to believe it. So, let’s talk some more at a complimentary lunch and tour. Please call today to schedule.
In depen den t & A ssisted Li v ing
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SENIORS
GETTIN’ STITCHED
Online dating site offers options for seniors who find themselves in the market for love, or just friendship BY TINA B. ESHEL
W
hen I’m not writing for the San Diego Jewish Journal, I’m working as a relationship and dating mentor. Most of my clients are women in their 40s, some are in their 50s. The complications that come from finding love or just companionship in middle age and beyond are many. Some people are disappointed to find out that their new love interest has lied about a health problem. Others are reluctant to enter into a romantic partnership that may compromise the financial stability they have carved out for themselves. There’s the self-confidence-busting effects of ageism and the understandable fear of putting oneself out there when it might have been years since a last first date. Then there are the logistics of social networking. At best, the technology is daunting. At worst, the idea of finding love through the computer screen is just plain bizarre. Finding a mate by shaking your phone until it geolocates an eligible bachelor or bachelorette in your vicinity? It sounds like the stuff of science fiction but this is the reality of dating in the 21st century. A 2103 Pew Research Study found that online use among people older than 50 is growing faster than any other age group. More than 60 percent of people 50 and older are using social media. So it was only a matter of time before someone created an online dating site just for the senior set. Enter: Stitch. But be careful calling it a dating site. Their stated goal is to help “boomers and beyond” connect in more than romantic ways. From a dinner-date, to a hiking companion, to a travel partner, Stitch is an online marketplace for all sorts of companionship. Until now, Stitch has only served clients in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company was formed in 2013 as a joint U.S./Australian operation when Australian-based Tapestry. com acquired the California-based startup ConnectAround. “Both Tapestry and ConnectAround had created products to try to address social isolation for older adults, and it was this social mission that helped attract our awesome team,
all of whom care deeply about the problems we’re solving and the products we have built to address them,” Stitch writes on their website. The company knew it was catering to a community of seniors who already had familiarity with the Internet and therefore increased connectivity to loved ones, but, “social isolation was a real concern and online dating was broken,” for this age group, says Marci Rogo, co-founder and chief marketing officer. Her co-founder is “chief stitching officer” and social entrepreneur, Andrew Dowling. To date, those who have signed up for Stitch outside the Bay Area have had the option to Stitch with “Extended Distance.” More than half of Stitch’s members have the Extended Distance feature and enjoy connections for things like travel and mutual interests. Rogo reports that the popularity of the site is growing, but they have a certain number of pre-registrations they need to acquire before they can launch the full site in San Diego (and anywhere else they hope to expand into). “We’ve been building registrations in Southern California … in the past several months and are almost at the threshold where we can open,” she explains. Once San Diego gets the numbers, users will be able to look for local companionship (including romance). Rogo attributes Stitch’s success to a few key things. First, Stitch is the only site to offer two solutions to the online dating security problem. Romance scammers go after both men and women, Rogo says, and “sometimes it’s not easy to recognize them.” Stitch verifies every user’s identity and ensures that all members are in fact older than 50, making Stitch the only restricted peer-to-peer online social connection service for this age group. Stitch also realizes that most other sites focus only on love and romance, which is why Stitch emphasizes companionship. Sexual chemistry “may be relevant when you are in your 20s and 30s, but not necessarily when you are over 50,” Rogo says. “You may not want to focus on the physical. You many not want to find just one person, but multiple people for companionship.” In fact, once Stitch has confirmed that an
applicant is 50 or older, he or she is approved for the site but his or her age is never displayed to other users. Stitchers find one another based on mutual interests, level of activity and consent, Rogo explains. A millennial herself, Rogo has a deep fondness for the older generations. She believes everyone is deserving of someone’s interest, and everyone regardless of age can be hip, cool and modern. “I’m an anti-ageist,” Rogo, who changed her professional path to take on the Stitch project, explains. When asked what she wants people to know about the company, Rogo is clear. Stitch is about building a ground community for people 50 and older to meet face-to-face for real and meaningful friendships, and more if that’s what both parties decide they want together. “Ultimately, we are hoping to save lives,” Rogo says with the signature sound of a millennial at a start-up. “You can die of loneliness. You are just as likely to die of loneliness as you are from cigarettes or smoking.” At this, I pause. So often, technology stories seem to be about the latest craze and the quickest buck. Listening to what inspired Rogo and her partners to create Stitch, I can’t help but think they are putting the softer side of software into technology and social media. As someone in her middle years, I’m thinking I may just be a Stitcher myself in not too long. In the meantime, I’m going to start recommending the site to my clients. I’ll let you know if I get any good feedback. A If you are a San Diego senior who wants to get stitched, visit stitch.net to pre-register.
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 33
SENIORS
THE
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
OF A
LIFETIME Lynn Schenk has had many “firsts” from long career, but her most lasting legacy may still be in the works BY NATALIE JACOBS
34 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
“L
aw is all about politics,” Lynn Schenk says from a conference room in the glistening Carmel Valley law offices of Mintz Levin. Although the building sits on top of the busy corridor where the 5, 805 and 56 freeways intermingle, were there a window in this conference room it would look out to the Torrey Pines State Reserve with a view-line high enough above the freeways to forget they’re even rumbling below. “There’s no such thing as a law that was written, passed by a legislature, and either signed by a governor or a president, that didn’t involve politics,” Schenk continues. “The drafting of the Declaration of Independence was one of the biggest political convocations of our history. Law is the product of politics.” Schenk’s more than 40-year career in law and public service is the product of politics as well. And yes, she was once San Diego’s Congressional representative, the Chief of Staff to Governor Gray Davis, and a member of Governor Jerry Brown’s cabinet, but in this case, we’re talking politics with a lowercase “p.” “It’s not Democrat or Republican,” Schenk says. “It’s being involved in community issues.” Her whole life, Schenk couldn’t help but get involved and at age 70, she continues pushing envelopes and breaking boundaries with a matter-of-factness that leaves little up for debate. As a female born in 1945, even the decision to become a lawyer was political. “My high school counselor wanted to make sure that I took typing so when this little fantasy passes, I’ll have something that I could really do, like be a secretary,” Schenk recalls. “It was a constant that girls aren’t lawyers, girls don’t do that. Except in my home. My parents acted as ‘of course, you want to be a lawyer, you’ll be a lawyer.’” As a child in the Bronx, N.Y., Schenk read Nancy Drew books fervently. But unlike other die-hards of the day, Schenk didn’t want to be Nancy Drew when she grew up – she wanted to be like Drew’s father, a lawyer. “Once I got it in my head, it never left,” she says. Her parents, Hungarian immigrants and Holocaust survivors who were both raised in the Orthodox tradition, expected Schenk and her brother Fred to do well in school, “but they didn’t hover,” Schenk says.
She studied at the Beth Jacob School for Girls in the East Bronx before her family reloacted to Los Angeles when Schenk was 14. After undergraduate study at UCLA, Schenk became one of the first women admitted to the University of San Diego law school. From there, she went on to be the first female lawyer hired by San Diego Gas & Electric; one of a small group of women to open the first Women’s Bank in California; California’s first female secretary of the department of business, transportation and housing; and the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives from San Diego. “If there was a barrier, I wanted to bring it down for myself and for others – it wasn’t so I would be a footnote in history,” she explains with a slight eye-roll. “It was, well, there’s a job to be done. And I looked around and I went, well, I guess I have to do it, for myself and for others who would come after me.” During her first year as a licensed lawyer working in the Attorney General’s office, Schenk met Judith McConnell when she was with CalTrans (McConnell is currently the Administrative Presiding Justice for the 4th District Court of Appeals). Both women found themselves working for the government fresh out of law school because private companies were not in the habit of hiring women. The California Bar Association itself was not particularly welcoming to young female lawyers either, which Schenk and McConnell quickly learned when they attempted to get involved beyond basic membership. Together along with other female lawyer associates, the two went on to form the California Women Lawyers Club in 1974 to “advance the cause of women, whatever the injustice may be,” Schenk says. Today, the club boasts more than 1,000 members, mostly women lawyers but some men are also involved. With that problem solved, Schenk moved on to injustices within the banking system in the late 1970s. At the time, women weren’t able to get bank loans on their own, unless they were in proximity to a women’s bank. The problem was, there were only eight of these banks sprinkled throughout the United States. An article in the Christian Science Monitor from November of 1980 says that women’s banks were created because “women are newer in the financial world and therefore less experienced, they need special attention.” However, Schenk, who founded The
PHOTO BY MELISSA JACOBS
L-R: Wendy Behan, Lynn Schenk and San Diego Court of Appeals judge Judith McConnell celebrate the success of the California Women Lawyers Club with an archive copy of the first newspaper article written about the pioneering organization at a meeting in 2014. Women’s Bank of San Diego in 1976 along with Dr. Anita Figueredo (San Diego’s first female surgeon) and a few other women from different professional backgrounds, says her coalition started the bank – through work put in on evenings and weekends between full-time jobs – because women were being stunted by the status quo. “If you were going to start a business and you went to your bank,” she says, “you couldn’t get a loan without a male co-signer.” The assinitity of this rule became clear to Schenk when she heard the story of an unmarried woman with no siblings who was seeking a line of credit to start her own law firm. The only man in the woman’s life was her sick father, for whom she was the caretaker. The bankers told the woman that her ailing father’s signature would suffice for the loan, since the only requirement was that the signer be a male. “That’s why we decided to start a bank where women would be looked at for their creditworthiness, not their sex,” Schenk says. When banks realized that their business could
grow by 50 percent simply from opening their doors to this “new” market, women’s divisions started cropping up within national bank chains. They were ultimately rolled into the regular business of the bank and The Women’s Bank of San Diego was eventually sold. In this phase in her career, Schenk has taken to integrating corporate boards, moreso because she “doesn’t believe in retirement” than because she is actively working to decrease the gender gap. But there definitely is one here too. A 2014 study by the workforce research group Catalyst found that women make up 19.2 percent of S&P 500 company boards. There has been a concerted effort to change that and Schenk, as a longstanding member of both the Sempra Energy and Biogen IDEC boards of directors, is part of that change. With all of that, it is possible that Schenk’s most lasting legacy will have nothing to do with gender politics. “I’m considered the mother of high-speed rail in California,” she says with pride. In a press release announcing her re-
appointment to the California High Speed Rail Authority Board in 2012, Board Chairman Dan Richards wrote, “It was Lynn Schenk who originally proposed the high-speed rail network in the 1980s.” She has been on the High-Speed Rail Authority Board since 2003. “I brought the idea to Governor Jerry Brown,” Schenk says, “he loved it, he’s been a supporter ever since. “When I was in Congress,” she continues, “I wrote the bill that President Clinton signed that has the first five high-speed rail corridors in the country, including one in California.” More than three decades later, and with the project finally underway in California, Schenk still finds herself arguing her case. In a Letter to the Editor written in response to a U-T op-ed about the high-speed rail project, Schenk derides the paper’s “ideological bias and misinformation” while offering insight into her motivations for nursing this high-speed baby through many long years of infancy. “What’s really scary,” Schenk writes in the March 20, 2015, Letter, is “adding 12 million Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 35
PHOTOS COURTESY LYNN SCHENK
Lynn Schenk signs railroad tracks at the groundbreaking ceremony for California’s high-speed rail, on Jan. 6, 2015. people to California’s current population of 38 million by the year 2050 and not investing in more efficient and cleaner modes of transportation to move people around the state. No one will be laughing as daily commutes get even longer and the air we breathe dirtier.” When completed, in 2029, the so-called Bullet Train will run from San Francisco to Los Angeles at estimated speeds of 200 miles per hour, making the trip less than three hours long, according to the High-Speed Rail Authority website. The idea is to build out the system from there, extending the line up to Sacramento and down to San Diego for a total of 800 miles and 24 stations spread throughout the state. While it has always been controversial, debate and outrage around the project – spanning from concerns about the construction timeline and federal grant deadlines, to discomfort with the price tag and the requisite imminent domain seizure of farmland – has reignited now 36 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
that construction broke ground in Fresno in January (two years behind the High-Speed Rail Authority’s intended start date, according to the Los Angeles Times). On ground-breaking day - the day after Schenk’s 70th birthday, the online newsmagazine Salon described the California high-speed rail project as “the most ambitious infrastructure project of the century.” Back in 2014, Schenk took a cautious tone with the U-T. “First things first,” she said in regards to the question of whether the San Diego extension will ever actually happen. “You’ve got to plan the route. This has to be done very carefully. … You’ve got to do this step-by-step. You can’t do it in a panic. If you rush, you could make a mistake for a generation.” Although it is still more than another 10 years from its projected completion date, for all the discussion, it seems unlikely that the project
will be derailed at this point. And for her more than 30 years of advocating the high-speed but slow-moving project, Schenk will continue to work on it, patient but diligent, until there’s no movement left in her. “I have lots of energy, I have lots of interests,” she says. “I think that the concept of retirement has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. … In terms of the individual, you can’t play golf for 30 years. Can you play bridge for 30 years? You gotta have a life of purpose and meaning until the day you die. If G-d gives you the health to do that, you have a responsibility to stay active and to continue contributing.” Who knows, maybe she’ll celebrate her 80th birthday and four decades of work with a three-hour train ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A
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SENIORS
OPTING FOR THE SCENIC ROUTE
Seacrest Village’s Poway location offers peace and quiet in a community-oriented atmosphere
PHOTOS COURTESY SEACREST
BY NATALIE JACOBS
A
t the foot of a mountain deep into Poway rests the Seacrest Village Nellie Cohn residence. The property was purchased by San Diego’s only Jewish retirement community in 1996 and is currently home to 53 fully independent senior residents. Sit in the lobby of the peaceful community just before lunchtime and you’ll be greeted by a low hum of voices and a parade of walkers in every imaginable color. In the middle of one April day, I find residents greeting employees with comfortable familiarity as they mill about the foyer. An enthusiastic driver confirms with one resident that he’ll be giving her a reminder call before her scheduled doctor appointments, and a maintenance manager patiently explains that he’ll be tending to another resident’s needs shortly. While Nellie Cohn, the namesake of this location, never actually lived here, her son, a Poway resident, made a generous contribution to the facility in her honor and her picture hangs prominently in the lobby. As with the Encinitas campus of Seacrest Village, the Nellie Cohn facility prides itself on the longevity of both its employees and residents. The current longest living resident of this location settled here in 38 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
2002. Unlike Encinitas where assisted living and memory care is available, this Poway location offers only i n d e p e n d e nt living options. This means that residents Alissa Messian must be fully self-sufficient. However, three meals a day, weekly housekeeping and transportation are all included in the rent, which is offered month-tomonth (whereas other retirement communities require buy-in). Since residents are expected at dinner, they are asked to notify the front desk if they plan to miss it. Staff then makes sure that everyone is accounted for each day. If someone was expected at dinner but isn’t seen in the dining hall, a staff member will go to the resident’s room to make sure everything is ok. So, while the facility is for independent living, no one is ever left completely alone.
This is true of socializing too. The benefit of a home like this is that it prevents against isolation. Here in Poway, residents are given every opportunity to stay active and engaged. There is a quarter-mile walking path around the perimeter of the building and residents are encouraged to walk at least once a day. In fact, they’re incentivized to do it. Residents track their walking activity in a log and at the end of each month, numbers are tallied and rewards are given for the most prolific walkers in the group. According to Alissa Messian, Seacrest administrator for this location, and Marcia Stein, marketing associate, the walking competition is getting pretty fierce. Residents are also invited to take place in exercise classes, weekly lunch outings, seasonal celebrations and the observance of Jewish holidays. Since so much happens here throughout the year, Stein started making a yearbook for the residents to capture their memories. Messian took on the administrator role in September, 2014, when Phyllis Levin retired after 16 years in the position. Messian comes to Seacrest Villages from Jewish Family Service, where she was working with the On the Go program. “It’s a warm family atmosphere here,” Messian says. “For people making a transition to retirement community living, it’s an easier transition I feel because of that warmth both from the residents that live here and with the staff.” Stein, who previously worked as an accountant in a home for developmentally delayed adults, will soon celebrate her five-year anniversary with Seacrest Village. She came to the organization by way of family members who were living at the Nellie Cohn residence. “We are very community oriented, with the Jewish community,” Messian says. This extends to Jewish Family Service, Brandeis, Hadassah, and local synagogues. “We look at ourselves as not just a retirement community for our people but for North County Inland. A Learn more about the Seacrest Village Nellie Cohn Residence at seacrestvillage.org/live-with-us/ rancho-bernardo.
SENIORS
EVERY RIDE NEEDS A DRIVER For seniors who no longer drive, On the Go is a true life-saver BY NATALIE JACOBS
PHOTO BY NATALIE JACOBS
L-R: On the Go volunteer driver Pat with Geyna, a resident of the Seacrest Village Nellie Cohn Residence who is unable to drive because of a broken back.
O
n a sun-drenched Monday afternoon in April, my grandmother and I walk into the lobby of the Seacrest Village Nellie Cohn Residence. “Is that my ride?” a woman asks, mostly to herself as she peeks out the automatic doors. “No, it isn’t a convertible,” she quickly concludes. I ask her if she is waiting for Pat, the On the Go Rides & Smiles volunteer driver who my grandmother and I are to ride along with today. She isn’t, but a woman seated at the couch introduces herself to us. Rides & Smiles is something of a nickname for Jewish Family Service’s On the Go transportation offerings. It pairs volunteer drivers with seniors who need rides to places things like doctor appointments. “I’m riding with Pat, I’m Geyna,” the tall, bespectacled woman says as she reaches for her bag and lifts herself off the couch. Outside, Pat is waiting with the doors open to her Chevy Equinox and, as promised, a smile on her face. “It feels like it’s been so long since I’ve seen you,” Geyna says from the front passenger seat once we’re on the road.
She remembers a time not too long ago when the two were seeing each other every day. Geyna was undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer and Pat made herself available to both pick her up and drop her off each day for weeks. Oftentimes, one Rides & Smiles volunteer will drive a person to an appointment and another will pick her up. But for these treatments, which only lasted about 30 minutes at a hospital in Escondido, Pat preferred to do both legs of the trip with Geyna (as she does with all of her Rides). “I would not have made it through cancer treatment without On the Go,” Geyna says firmly. “That’s the truth.” She still has a driver’s license, but driving has been painful since her back was broken in a car accident a few years ago. That’s when she moved into Seacrest Village. After her car sat in the parking lot undriven for a year, she decided to sell it. Transportation is included in the Seacrest Village rent package, but with cancer treatment last year and now increasingly uncomfortable back pain, Geyna needs rides beyond the Tuesdays and Thursdays that are provided by her independent living facility.
“What if you didn’t have these for a week?” Pat asks, holding up her car keys. I invited my grandma to join me on this ridealong because she had asked me about Jewish Family Services’ On the Go program not long after she decided to stop driving. I told her what I knew at the time – that On the Go offers transportation for older adults and that they do planned outings to different cultural events around town. When this story came along and the details of On the Go and their Rides & Smiles program became more clear to me, I invited my grandma to come for the afternoon so she could see for herself how it might work. It does take a certain kind of driver-passenger relationship to make the whole thing go smoothly. In our case, the doctor appointment was just literally around the corner, but in other cases, as Pat mentioned in the waiting room at Pomerado Hospital, the drive itself can be 20 or 30 minutes. “You chit-chat during the drive,” she says, “and oftentimes you realize that whatever your problems are, they really aren’t much compared to what someone else is going through.” Between the x-ray appointment and the actual doctor visit, Geyna joins us back in the lobby. “I have a broken 4th vertebrae,” she says. “I’m not having surgery.” The two talk together about what the options might be. “I try to put myself in somebody’s moccasins,” Pat, who has been volunteering with programs similar to Rides & Smiles for eight years, says. She’s a retired school teacher who has an ingrained sense of tikkun olam, although as a Christian she simply refers to her commitment to volunteering as “giving.” “This is so flexible, so there’s really no excuse.” In a given month, Rides & Smiles provides an average of 2,300 rides in three service areas (Northern San Diego, Eastern San Diego, and North County Inland). “Every ride needs a driver,” Pat says. A Rides are provided 7 a.m.-7 p.m., seven days a week on a donation basis depending on the distance of the ride. There is a $20 enrollment fee for On the Go. To learn more about JFS, On the Go and Rides & Smiles, visit jfssd.org/onthego. Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 39
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SENIORS
BONDED BY TECHNOLOGY
Local program helps seniors learn the technological ropes with help from teen tutors BY TINA B. ESHEL
PHOTOS COURTESY JCC
Ryan Batten shows Suzanne Miller how her iPhone can do more than just make calls.
S
o you’ve got a fancy smart phone but using it makes you feel anything but smart. Who can you turn to when you’re not sure how to turn the thing on or which windows to click to get the the email message? Your first choice is probably a teenaged grandchild. The millennials will know what ot do. But what about the times when they’re busy with school or sports or Twitter? At the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, Jacobs Family Campus, the seniors department has been developing a squad of tech-savvy teens to take care of this problem for San Diego’s seniors. The program, run by Melanie Rubin, matches San Diego seniors with teens from the JCC Teen Department’s Teen Leadership Council (TLC) for free technology tutoring sessions. To date, 64 “Senior Buddies” as the teens call them, have been paired with 30 TLC teens to get
questions answered like, “how do I take a photo with my phone and send it to my daughter?” or “how do I turn the flashlight feature on and off?” Other teens find themselves walking through the process of syncing email between devices and giving Facetime user tutorials. Shannon Saffer, co-executive of the Tikkun Olam committee for the Teen Leadership Council at the JCC, has made it her personal goal to find unique ways to reach out to the Jewish community in San Diego. “I really wanted to create opportunities for the council members with the hopes of inspiring them to find their own ways to help the community. When I heard about this program, I was immediately excited and intrigued,” she says. “I saw an opportunity to make an immediate impact and jumped at the chance to leave a legacy at the JCC before graduating.”
She has found the program to be more rewarding than she originally anticipated. “I loved how kind and patient [all the seniors] were,” she says. “I also found it funny (and this happened to me twice) when I would be helping a buddy, and then I figured out that I was helping some of my close friends’ grandparents. I really felt like this program allowed me to branch out into the community and connect with people that I definitely wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise.” Teens receive community service credit for these hour-long sessions. Both teens and seniors find common ground through the technology they explore together. Helene Baron, one of the seniors, says the teens are terrific. “What I love about this program as a senior, who didn’t know a lot about the cell phones, is Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 41
Lawrence Zynda gets smarter than his smartphone under the tutelage of Shannon Saffer. that in 10 minutes, these teenagers taught me five things! I learned how to put an app on my phone, how to work the camera and how to make a movie. They put the flashlight on my phone. I learned how to use the memo pad… and they showed me the calendar. I was just blown away…three little pushes of the button. The kids were terrific. They really are smart. I am learning as fast as I can to keep up with these teens.” The idea for the Technology Tutoring program came when the JCC Senior Department received a grant from the Jewish Women’s Foundation to find ways to encourage isolated, older Jewish women to get connected with the Jewish community and their families, as well as participate in intergenerational programming. To enhance the program, the JCC hosted a complimentary screening of the documentary, 42 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
“Cyber-Seniors,” for an audience of 100 teens, parents and seniors. After the screening, audience members interacted with the film’s producer through Skype – the first Skype experience for many of the seniors. Because of the success of the program and her positive experience, Saffer thinks other teens should considering volunteering. “I definitely would recommend this program to my friends! I had so much fun, and at the same time I knew that I was making a difference. Sometimes when I do community service work, it can be difficult to see the immediate impact of your actions. However, with this program you are working one-on-one to teach someone very important lessons. By teaching our buddies how to use technology, we are helping them reconnect with the world.” The Teen Technology Tutoring session is an
ongoing program at the JCC. Seniors can sign up for as many one-hour sessions as they feel they need, and sessions will continue through the summer with teens from Camp Jaycee’s Counselor-in-Training program. In addition to the tutoring by teens, the JCC Senior Department offers monthly technology classes for older adults on various topics like “Get Smarter Than Your Smartphone,” “Google: It’s More Than Just a Search Engine,” and “What You Can Do on Your Computer.” A If you are senior looking for technology support, contact Melanie Rubin, JCC Director of Senior & Adult Programs at (858) 362-1141. For teens, contact Karen Flexer-Friedenberg, JCC Teen Director at (858) 362-1331.
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 43
44 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
SENIORS
THE ALMOST-LOST HISTORY OF A HOLOCAUST HERO At the age of 65, California resident Sandy Einstein learned how a Hollywood mogul saved his father’s life
PHOTOS COURTESY SANDY EINSTEIN
BY NATALIE JACOBS
On a beautiful day sometime in 1939, Sandy Einstein’s immigrant father Hermann rides through Beverly Hills.
S
andy Einstein wanted to blend into his white Anglo-Saxon Protestant neighborhood in Fullerton, Calif. The year was 1955, Einstein was 10, and the Christian, limited-government advocacy group John Birch Society was very active in the area. “All my friends were not Jewish,” Einstein recalls. “My father had an accent, dressed European. I really was not proud of my heritage. I wanted to assimilate and be like the other kids.” His father, Hermann, was from Germany, near the town of Laupheim in the southern part of the country. He was able to leave Germany in 1938, just ahead of the Nazi takeover, thanks to Universal Studios’ top executive, Carl Laemmle (pronounced “Lem-lee”). It was this discovery, at the age of 65, that prompted Sandy Einstein to take interest in his family’s immigrant history. “[Growing up,] I really didn’t have an interest
in knowing about my father’s past. Now that I’m doing all this research, I have a regret that I didn’t ask him more. I realize how great of a person he was,” Einstein says over the phone from his home in Walnut Creek, Calif., in the Bay area. Einstein started his genealogical journey in 2010. Something had reminded him of a box he saved when his mother passed away in 1982. Einstein remembers looking through the box at the time, where he found his mother’s handwritten will, some bank statements, and 50 letters written in German. As anyone who has gone through the process of sorting documents and belongings after someone’s passing knows, the sheer number of items that make up a life is overwhelming, so it’s not unusual that this box got set aside for years. Something – Einstein can’t remember what, exactly – triggered in Einstein a memory of the box and its letters,
in November of 2010. He looked through the letters more carefully this time, still unable to really retain any of the information except the proper nouns. But something felt important about them. On Dec. 21, 2010, Einstein came across an essay by a German historian named Udo Bayer. In it, Bayer discussed Carl Laemmle, (who was best known in his lifetime for the movies “Phantom of the Opera,” the original “Frankenstein,” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”) and his “affidavits.” Einstein recognized the name Laemmle from the letters in his mother’s box. From there, be began putting the pieces together. “[My father] never spoke much about his past,” Einstein says. “If I would have asked and probed him, I’m sure he would have, but I never did care that much.” When he realized his father’s life was saved Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 45
by the relatively un-remembered Hollywood executive, Einstein’s perspective changed dramatically. He got the letters translated and found one that put his father in direct contact with Carl Laemmle in 1929. It is presumed that the two met while Hermann was working as a Hebrew teacher and cantor in Laupheim, Laemmle’s beloved hometown. The letter included in Einstein’s box from 1929 was from Laemmle inviting his father to a party for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (a German general and later airplane manufacturer). Einstein found proof that his father did in fact attend the party with Laemmle, but there is no record of correspondence after that until 1937. At that time, Hermann initiated a letter from Dresden to Laemmle telling the mogul that he was ready to come to America with him. Laemmle was accustomed to spending time in Laupheim annually, but after his studio released “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in 1930, he no longer felt safe there (since the movie was so badly received by Joseph Goebel and the then-fledgling Nazi party). When he received Hermann’s request to take him from Germany, Laemmle was staying at a resort outside of Germany. The two arrived in New York together in February of 1938 and Hermann lived with Laemmle and his family in Beverly Hills for 19 months, until Laemmle passed away in 1939. It is estimated that Carl Laemmle rescued more than 300 Jews from the Holocaust by providing jobs or promise of financial support in order to meet the U.S. government’s strict “Affidavit to Support” program, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Eastern European immigration policy. With some, like Einstein’s father, Laemmle maintained personal relationships before and after the refugee’s immigration. There are other Hollywood executives who are credited with helping Jews escape the Holocaust, and some who are rebuked for not having taken a more active role. But Carl Laemmle’s involvement is largely unknown, according to Einstein’s research. After he uncovered Laemmle’s story, Einstein began polling Jewish historians to see if they were as in-the-dark as he was. “Debra Lipstadt ... the head of Jewish Studies at Emory University,” Einstein says, “she’s a noted Holocaust historian, she helped found the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. She never heard of Laemmle’s affidavits. Nor did Peter Black, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When I made contact with them, I really felt that people were not aware of this.”
46 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Hermann Einstein
With that information, Einstein, himself an entertainment executive (he managed the rock band Journey from 1979-1986), morphed his genealogical research into a history lesson. “I knew my father’s sister was killed by Nazis. But I didn’t find out a lot about my family’s history, my father’s history, because there wasn’t anything really,” Einstein says. “Basically when I found out about my father’s history and this thing in Laupheim, that interested me enough where I didn’t go into all his brothers and sisters and this and that. That wasn’t my interest. My interest was and is now the relationship he had with Laemmle and Laemmle’s humanitarian deeds.” Einstein shared his discovery with the journalist Neal Gabler and encouraged the writer to pitch the story to The New York Times. Gabler’s story “Laemmle’s List: A Mogul’s Heroism” was published by the Times in April, 2014. From the article, Einstein was contacted by Ken Guggenheim, senior writer for the Associated Press, who said his grandfather was also one of Laemmle’s affidavits. Einstein has also been in contact with two other relatives of affidavits. Now he’s working to produce a documentary that will chronicle Laemmle’s life and the 300 people he rescued from the Nazis. “I’m not an authority on the other execs, but Laemmle is very special because he cared,” Einstein says. Like himself as a young boy in the ’40s and ’50s, “most of the other Hollywood moguls wanted to assimilate.” A
Horst Cahn: The Last Survivor?
Cardiff-by-the-Sea resident Horst Cahn was born in 1925 in Essen, Germany. By the time he was 17, the Nazis had killed his sister and both parents. He would survive three years in Auschwitz and a death march that killed almost 4,000 people. Approaching 90 years old, Cahn calls himself a “fossil” and is fairly certain that he is the last living survivor of the 100 who made it through that terrifying trek. Cahn’s story is one of triumph and he attributes his survival to his mischievous spirit. “I always had to use my head a little and try to trick somebody else in order to stay alive,” Cahn told the Del Mar Times in a 2014 interview. “He volunteered to work as an electrician and when part of his job involved changing dead light bulbs, he would screw the dead ones into other sockets so he would be sure to have a job to do the next day,” the article notes. Today, Cahn is known for his love of telling his story to large groups. But he also liked to write about it. If you don’t have a chance to hear him speak live, you can read “Loss, Liberty and Love: My Journey from Essen to Auschwitz to the United States,” available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
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Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 47 SW_CGACowan_SDJJ_3.6x10.indd 1
4/13/15 3:05 PM
CHARITABLE GIVING
30 Ways
for Jews Under 30 to Give
1
NextGen – The Federation’s young adult group is having their first fundraising gala this month. You goin’? See page 80 for details on the event.
2
ADL Glass Leadership Institute – Interested in human rights? Our local ADL chapter has a great group of young people involved in this program. We’ve heard the D.C. trip is lots of fun too.
3
Giving isn’t always about money. Jewish Community Foundation Philanthropy Officer Darren Schwartz is keen on saying it’s more about “time, talent and treasure,” which leaves the door open for all kinds of charitable activities. In the charitable giving community, conversations are usually focused on older and wealthier donors but we think it’s time to expand this dialog to include young San Diego Jews too. Here is a quick list of 30 ways for Jews under 30 to incorporate charitable giving into their lives in a realistic and fun way (in no particular order).
6
BY NATALIE JACOBS AND TINA B. ESHEL
JServe at the JCC – This annual day of giving is an incredible gathering of teens from all over San Diego County. While many nonprofits take part, there are also the educational aspects for teens to gain deeper understanding of tikkun olam and tzedakah.
7
Good Deeds Day – Mark your 2016 calendar for Good Deeds Day on April 16. Various local organizations will have activities planned. This could be a great opportunity to try out a new organization or giving method to see how you like it.
8
JCF Teen Philanthropy – Flip to page 55 to learn about the Jewish Community Foundation’s Teen Philanthropy program and how that might be a good way to give.
JFS Operation Curb Appeal – Are you good with a hammer? Put those skills to use for a local senior. This annual program is part of the Jewish Family Service young adult group, Emerging Leaders, which also hosts various fundraising events throughout the year (where free drinks and networking are standard).
Become a patient advocate – The San Diego Patient Advocacy program was started by Senator Marty Block and taken up by JFS this year. This program teaches participants how to be an advocate for patients in mental hospitals who are unable to attend certification hearings.
JFS Jewish BigPALS – commit to a kid in need, and see how you’re the one who’s really changed.
4
Become a CASA – Voices for Children offers volunteer opportunities as Court Appointed Special Advocates for foster children. These advocates serve as personal references in court for one or more foster children who are often shuttled from home to home, unable to establish lasting relationships with adults who can speak on their behalf.
48 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
9
10
Do you have a job with a large company? Ask your employer if they have (or would be interested in starting) a gift-matching program, or if they’re able to become a corporate sponsor.
11
21
Start a giving circle – Got friends? Check out AmplifierGiving. org or GivingCirclesFund.org to see about how to start a giving circle, where friends and family can pool their money and talents into real good deeds.
Join a professional organization. Not only is this a great networking opportunity, but organizations often partner with nonprofits for fundraising and team-building events throughout the year.
13 23
Mitzvah Makers at JFS – this program gives increased meaning to the Bar/Bat Mitzvah process. It’s not just about the party ya’ll.
12
Join a committee – Yom Limmud, Book Fair or Film Festival are all worthy pursuits of the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture. If you think it’s just for retirees, think again.
Browse HandsOnSanDiego.org – this is like a job board, but for volunteer opportunities all around town.
14
Here’s a cool way for teens to pump up their college applications and do a good deed: volunteer to teach seniors how to use technology. This intergenerational program is hosted by the JCC Senior Department and is getting rave reviews from all generations. Turn to page 41 for more details.
Open a donor advised fund at the Jewish Community Foundation – This may sound like a hefty investment, but actually $1,800 will get you on your way. You don’t have to give it all away in one year, and you don’t have to maintain that balance either. While the money sits, there is an opportunity for it to grow. That opportunity doesn’t exist anywhere else, because JCF offers investment pools.
25
16
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Join the Friendship Circle – this is a great way for teens to get involved while making a new, potentially life-long friend.
Don’t forget about your alma mater. You may have been ignoring their calls for years, but they did help you get where you are today. Oftentimes, universities are overjoyed at alumni donations of as little as $100. Feeling extra generous? Support a San Diego university, even if you didn’t go there.
Donate your car to a worthy cause. Been driving the same clunker since high school? Instead of getting a low trade-in offer at the dealership or coordinating a million emails and texts from a Craigslist post, donate your car to a local organization. KPBS is always in the market for an extra set of wheels.
15
22
26
Become an Assistant Teaching Artist at ARTS (A Reason to Survive). If you have some artistic talent, then use it to help kids who come from foster homes or difficult family situations. Check out ARTS in National City.
Donate your gently used women’s business attire to the San Diego Center for Justice. It will go to women (most involved are victims of domestic violence) who need to look more professional as they go on job interviews. Buffalo Exchange won’t take enough of your clothes to make it worth the trip anyway.
Achieve Kavanah – This one’s for high-schoolers and Camp Mountain Chai alum – a five-week leadership program to work with a community in need in the United States. Worth a look.
Join Young Judea and Taglit-Birthright. It’s not just about the free trip or the possible romance with a hot Israeli...or maybe it is. Either way, you’re going to have a good time while finding out just how much Israel means to you.
17
Become a KPBS member – Even if you only listen to our local public radio station on occasion, it’s still important that we have a viable nonpartisan reporting outfit here. You can become a KPBS member for only $120 a year, and if you time it right, you could get some pretty sweet thank-you gifts (remember when Ira Glass was in town?).
18
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19
Attend a gala (other than the NextGen one) – You know you’ve heard about your parents going to these. The truth is, you’re a hot commodity as a young person and many nonprofits will offer special rates to see your pretty young face at their fancy party. Think of it as a great opportunity to buy a new dress or practice tying a tie. You should also know, there’s usually an open bar.
20
Spend some time on crowd funding sites – Ok, most of the campaigns are not for nonprofits, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some worthy causes to support. Consider using the rewards as birthday or holiday presents in order to encourage friends and family to give too.
27
If you speak basic Hebrew and can coach kids in soccer or baseball, consider volunteering as a coach for Tarbuton. If you don’t speak Hebrew, you can still coach for your local little leagues.
29
Want to get dirty? Sign up as a farm volunteer at the Leichtag Ranch in Encinitas, the place where being Jewish and living sustainably is on the cutting edge of cool.
Finally, consider challenging yourself to donate $18 dollars per month for one year to the philanthropy of your choice.
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 49
CHARITABLE GIVING
FINDING JUDAISM AT THE CORE Early childhood education and the pride of giving back BY ABBY WALKER
Robin Layton has had a 30-year career with San Diego’s Educational Enrichment Systems.
T
hirty years ago, Robin Layton began her career with San Diego’s Educational Enrichment Systems, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income families send their children to preschool. The organization offers scholarships and tuition assistance based on income to enroll children between the ages of 18 months and five years in affordable, quality early education programs. Throughout the years, Layton has seen a vast improvement in public opinion around the education of preschoolers. When she started working in 1985, many people viewed early education as unnecessary or just a fancy name for childcare. “I’m most proud of the gains that we’ve made in the awareness of early education,” Layton says. “Quality preschool now isn’t a want-to-have but a have-to-have.” Throughout the past three decades, views have shifted for a variety of reasons but the end result is people are now recognizing the many benefits of preschool. 50 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
“Research consistently shows us that children who attend preschool perform better in school and are more likely to graduate high school and move on to higher education,” Layton explains. “They are less likely to become involved with gangs, crime and drugs later in life.” The San Diego Educational Enrichment Systems (SDEES), which began in 1979, now offers 22 preschools throughout San Diego County and helps 1,100 children get a better start in school. There are SDEES preschools in Chula Vista, Linda Vista, San Marcos and Vista. Some offer full day care while others are parttime. In addition to providing quality, affordable early education programs, it also helps families to become self-sufficient. Layton’s desire to work in early childhood education and help others stems directly from her own childhood development. Her father, a teacher, and her mother, a social worker, laid the foundation for Layton to go on to expand education opportunities for all. “Giving back and teaching were part of who
we were as a family,” Layton says. “As I got older, I wanted to make real change. After studying in college, I was drawn to the fact that I could affect more change if I were able to get to the child before they entered kindergarten.” Shortly after graduating from San Diego State University, Layton was hired by SDEES as a site director for one of what were then only three locations. She quickly moved up through the ranks of the organization and became the executive director within months. She has been with the organization ever since. Although Layton’s family was technically Jewish, she says they didn’t actively practice Judaism. “We lived on a block where there was one other Jewish family and while [my parents] carried their Jewish values with them, they didn’t teach us about Judaism,” she says. “We had Hanukkah and Passover but nothing else.” Instead, Layton came to Judaism as an adult. She became a member of Temple Beth Israel 17 years ago when she got married. Her family, including twin 15-year-olds, are very involved in the temple. “Even though I wasn’t taught in the same way that my children are taught at Beth Israel, the [Jewish] values were still there,” Layton says. These core Jewish values are part of what Layton believes makes her work with SDEES so meaningful. “I’m helping, advocating and it’s a belief system that’s part of my core,” Layton says. “I can’t imagine working any place else where I wasn’t helping the community. “Even though we’re not a Jewish organization,” Layton adds, “we’re such a socially-minded place where the Jewish community can get involved and it’s a way to help give back to your community that has so many returns later on.” While San Diego Educational Enrichment Systems receives most of its funding through the California Department of Education, it also relies on donations from the community. “Of course, Educational Enrichment Systems serves families and receives support from people of all backgrounds,” Layton says. “As a person of Jewish faith, I am proud to see the strong support from the Jewish community.” A Learn more about San Diego Education Enrichment Systems at educ-enrichment.org.
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Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 51
CHARITABLE GIVING
FEEDING SAN DIEGO ONE POUND AT A TIME It’s time to upgrade what you think about food banks
PHOTO COURTESY SAN DIEGO FOOD BANK
BY AMANDA KELLY
On an unsually cold day for San Diego, residents line up at one of the Food Bank’s 177 distribution centers.
O
n any given weekday, the Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank bustles with activity as staff prepare the 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Miramar for delivery and pickups. Food pantries, churches, soup kitchens, low-income daycare centers and other food assistance organizations depend on these daily distributions to feed the nearly one in six San Diego residents who face food insecurity. Without the food bank and its 330 partner organizations, roughly 370,000 of San Diego’s 3.3 million people would go hungry throughout the County. Established in 1977, the San Diego Food Bank has served many different people in the community. President and CEO James Floros tells his staff to use him as the poster child for misperceptions about what this food bank does. “People think our service population is primarily the homeless and that is not the case at all,” he says. “We serve the working poor, lowincome active-duty military, seniors on a fixedincome and children living in poverty.” When I visit, the cement floor beneath the pantry’s four large garage doors is bare – all the food is prepared in the morning and ships from the premises long before close of business each day. Floros knows this operation like the back of his hand. He describes himself as a career nonprofit guy (later, and with the same sincerity, he adds that he’s also a lifelong Packers fan). 52 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Floros was born and raised in Wisconsin before he moved to San Diego to attend college. “I walk through here six or eight times a day and there will be a big stockpile of food,” Floros says. “I will come back in the afternoon and it’s gone. When you’re feeding that many people, it is a very active environment.” In the back corner of the Miramar warehouse, near the six-foot-high stacks of Del Monte green beans, are rows of 30-pound boxes that Floros. He explains that these have been packaged by volunteers to be distributed to fixed-income seniors in the County. Last year, the Food Bank’s senior initiative fed 8,400 fixed-income seniors. Most of these individuals live at or above the federal poverty level and rely almost entirely on the food they receive from the Food Bank. After paying for medications, rent and utilities, many do not have enough funds left over to buy food. Every month, the food bank also provides food assistance to more than 28,000 veterans, activeduty military personnel and their dependents. San Diego’s high cost of living coupled with higher unemployment rates among military spouses (due to frequent relocation) all contribute to the need for support from food assistance programs in these lower income military families. Another focus of programing at the San Diego Food Bank is nutrition. It’s not enough to simply feed people – the Food Bank is aware that the kind of food they provide really matters. Between
2013 and 2014, the food bank distributed 22 million pounds of food throughout the County. Of that 22 million pounds, 37 percent was fresh produce. “Nutrition-related disease is linked to poverty,” Floros says. “When people have less resources they cannot afford fresh produce.” The food bank employs one full-time registered dietician and strives to educate clients on proper nutrition at all of its 177 distribution sites. “If you buy into the concept that education is a major vehicle to ending the cycle of poverty, education starts with childhood nutrition,” Floros says. Many misperceptions about food banks rest on a clear stereotyping of the populations served. Floros simply wishes everyone had a better understanding of the real people the Food Bank serves. “The people we serve are people you see every day,” he says. “These individuals and families are working hard to be productive members of society and they just need that extra hand up to make it through hardship.” A To find out ways that you can help support the San Diego Food Bank’s programs and provide assistance to people in need, or to read about hunger-related issues in the community, visit sandiegofoodbank. org.
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CHARITABLE GIVING
LEARNING THE VALUE OF A DOLLAR, OR 20,000 The Teen Foundation is redefining leadership and teaching new lessons in charitable giving BY NATALIE JACOBS
PHOTOS COURTESY JEWISH COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
Members of JCF’s Teen Foundation program pose with their nonprofit potential grantees after a long meeting of speed-pitching. Group leader Darren Schwartz stands at the back left.
W
ould you trust a teenager with $5,000? How about $20,000? Maybe it depends on what you’re expecting the teenager to do with the money. At the Jewish Community Foundation, 27 teens from throughout San Diego County have been working together since September to raise money while they learn about the grant-making process. Their work will culminate in a handful of grants made to nonprofit organizations that will eagerly put the money to good and specific use. The JCF’s Teen Foundation is completing its first full year under an international program of the Jewish Teen Funder’s Network (JTFN) created to
enhance tzedakah for young people. On May 20, the Teen Foundation will award its checks. When they first started meeting with JCF Philanthropy Officer Darren Schwartz, who is running the Teen Foundation, the members were asked to research organizations that would fit the group’s mission statement – to advance human rights for women and children. The rules are: grantees must include a Jewish organization and an Israeli organization (though the Israeli organization doesn’t necessarily need to serve Jews). After gathering the teen’s suggestions, Schwartz met with his colleagues at JCF and came up with a list of more than 30 organizations,
which was then paired down to 11. Throughout the course of the program, the teens have been learning the ins and outs of each organization, along with the fundamentals of good grantmaking (things like how to understand financial statements, what kinds of volunteer base and community partnerships make for a viable organization, and how to understand what the Teen Foundation grant money would be used to accomplish). On their second-to-last meeting in March (the group met monthly starting in September), the teens were able to come face-to-face with the majority of their potential grantees in a setting Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 55
During this monthly meeting, teens met one-on-one with their potential grantees to learn about the nonprofits and ask questions before making final funding decisions.
modeled after a speed-dating event. In groups of three to four, the teens spent eight minutes with each organization. First, the organization representative introduced him/herself and gave an overview of the nonprofit’s work for three minutes. Then, the teens were given five minutes to ask questions. While it was obvious that each kid had a pre-determined question (it was not clear who came up with the question, though), they were able to glean some interesting details that presumably factored into their grantmaking decisions. Some wrote notes about the responses, others just nodded politely while the organization representative addressed things like goal-setting, volunteer numbers, fundraising practices, acquisition of board members and budget balancing. Represented in the granting pool was a spectrum of organizations that work within the framework of human rights for women and children. They’re very grown-up issues – from rape and domestic violence addressed by Hadassah and Casa Amparo, to homelessness, drug abuse and neglect of foster children addressed by Promises2Kids and Voices for Children. The speed-dating session is a lesson in active listening, critical thinking and developing thick skin. And the organizations, for the most part, seemed able to look past the awkwardness of youth in order to speak about their work in a professional and not obviously dumbed-down manner. And why should they look at these kids with anything but professionalism? There is real money on the table. The Teen Foundation can give as much money as they can afford. The only requirement is that the grants be at least $1,800 but no more than 56 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
$5,000. But granting money requires having some in the first place. To get the kids going, JCF put in $5,000. Schwartz was able to secure another $5,000 from a private donor but the group has made a goal to grant about $20,000 so they’ve had to raise the rest themselves. “It’s difficult for teens to understand what $20,000 is, what $10,000 is, but it’s very easy for them to understand what $50 of their own allowance is,” Schwartz says. “What I’m trying to get them to understand is the responsibility that they’ve been given to allocate these funds. It’s not easy money, it’s not money that came out of nowhere. It’s money that came out of other people’s pockets that have entrusted them.” And that’s perhaps a distinguishing feature of this youth fundraising experiment. It’s really not about the feel-good part of giving back to the community. It’s about the responsibility to make thoughtful decisions when placed in a position of privilege. “They have a requirement to give of their own money,” Schwartz explains. “They’ve set their own goals ... but there’s no making sure each kid puts in $180 or something like that.” After the organizations gave their pitches and answered the teens’ questions, they left and the teens were invited to bring their chairs into a circle in the reconfigured JCF conference room. It was time to reflect and decompress. Schwartz asked about their fundraising progress and hands sat restlessly in laps. He asked if there were any concerns that anyone wanted to address. A couple of hands lifted slowly into the air. One girl said she had been following the pitching advice from previous meetings – she was giving what she considered a good quick overview
of the Foundation and what they’re hoping to accomplish. But the people to whom she was pitching often didn’t realize she was asking them for money. She figured that might be because she was having trouble transitioning into the “ask” portion of the conversation. Schwartz moved on to the next hand. This girl had concerns about bombarding her network with requests for money. She’s a member of a few different groups that require her to fundraise and just a week prior, she sent out an email to everyone she knew, asking for money to support a different cause. She was concerned that it would be inappropriate to return within such a short time frame with a similar request. “It’s similar with adults,” Schwartz says to me over the phone a couple weeks after the meeting. “What I’ve told them and what I’ve told their parents, it’s not about the dollars you raise, what I want you to focus on the most is the leadership skills behind fundraising.” In this instance, the definition of leadership must also include “overcoming pride and maintaining confidence when dealing with uncomfortable situations.” It’s certainly not a bad skill to learn. A In mid-April, the Teen Foundation announced their grantees. The group was able to raise $25,000 and will make awards to the following organizations: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (FSU), Casa de Amparo, Hadassah (Israel), Promises2Kids, The San Diego LGBT Center, Voices for Children, and Yemin Orde (Israel). Teen Foundation grants will be award at an event this month. Read more at jcfsandiego.org.
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Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 57
CHARITABLE GIVING
WHAT’S THE 2-1-1?
San Diego County’s information and referral line thrives under community partnerships BY NATALIE JACOBS
PHOTOS COURTESY 2-1-1
2-1-1’s call center operators are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to direct residents to thousands of services.
S
usan G. Komen, Jewish Family Service, the Leichtag Foundation and Covered California are among the partners of San Diego County’s 2-1-1 information line. These organizations either serve as resources for 2-1-1 to share with their caller network, or as funders that support the call center’s work. The regional information hotline offers resources in three tiers: general assistance, health and other applications, and peer-to-peer support. At each level, calls can last upwards of 30 minutes and everyone who dials in gets a follow-up call from a real person making sure he or she was able to utilize all of the information received from the original 2-1-1 operator. You’ll find 2-1-1s across the country, and most are affiliated with the United Way. But the San Diego organization is a free-standing nonprofit. “If you’ve seen one 2-1-1, you’ve really only seen one 2-1-1,” says Bill York, executive vice president. The basic model is for 2-1-1 to serve as a call center to disseminate information and referrals to residents of a certain zip code. There are about 200 2-1-1s in the United States. San Diego’s works a bit differently than most, because of the partnerships they maintain. In the case of Susan G. Komen, 2-1-1 received a grant to direct women to breast health resources and information. When the San Diego outpost of the breast cancer organization wanted to create
58 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
a hotline for breast health resources, they worked with 2-1-1 to develop a program instead of building and maintaining their own call center. Now, when a person calls 2-1-1, the operator works an opt-in question into the conversation – something like “Are you interested in learning about where you can get a free breast cancer screening in your area?” If the person says yes, the operator connects her to the breast health resource experts within 2-1-1 for more information. “We don’t want to overwhelm people,” York says as he’s describing all of the things that 2-1-1 can do for San Diego County residents. He says lots of people think of the information line as a disaster helpline because of their crisis work during wildfires dating back to 2006. In the last big fire of May 2014, 2-1-1 received 33,000 calls in four days. On a regular day, they’re averaging 1,100 calls. Beyond their disaster support work, 2-1-1 is directing people to the more than 6,000 different services available throughout the county. Operators are trained in the specifics of CalFresh and they work with qualified callers to register them in the nutrition assistance program, thus eliminating the need to navigate the maze of government bureaucracy alone. This is the type of service that 2-1-1 has been doing since it got the dialing code back in 2005. Last year, the organization applied that structure to a partnership with Covered
California. When York found out that California’s health exchange was looking for enrollment support from California agencies and nonprofits, he applied thinking “we could do this work.” And they did. To comply with the requirements of the partnership, 2-1-1 brought on a new team of certified enrollment counselors who could directly register individuals for healthcare (including Medi-Cal). To date, the San Diego 2-1-1 team is one of only two of Covered California’s partnerships that were successful at this endeavor. On a recent tour of the call center in Kearny Mesa, York and I stop at an operator’s desk. She’s just finishing up a call. “What did the caller need?” York asks after quietly pointing out a few of the windows open on her computer screen. “Rental assistance, but we didn’t have any programs,” the operator responds, slightly disappointed. “We rarely have the rental assistance program,” York explains to me. It’s a city program that is only open for a month or so at a time. It’s someone’s job at 2-1-1 to update the database every time the city or an affiliated organization opens and closes any of the 6,000-plus programs. But all you really need to know about 2-1-1 is the number and that if they can’t answer your question, they’ll make sure to point you toward someone who can. A
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Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 59
THEATER
“CINDERELLA” CHORINE LEADS A MAGICAL LIFE “Golden Meadow,” by Ned Mueller
“Lovin La Jolla,” by Joan LaRue
Alexandra Frohlinger comes to Broadway San Diego for the national tour of “Cinderella”
“Sycamore in Autumn,” by Edgar Payne
BY PAT LAUNER
PHOTO BY CAROL ROSEGG
The Cast of the national tour of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s “Cinderella.” Alexandra Frohlinger, who will appeaer in the San Diego production, is wearing the orange dress.
S
ometimes dreams do come true. Cinderella gets to go to the ball….and a young Jewish woman from Winnipeg gets to travel around America, singing and dancing her way through that classic fairy tale story. The amazing part is, Alexandra Frohlinger didn’t have any help from birds or mice or fairy godmothers. She knew what she wanted from a very young age – and she went for it. Now she’s performing around the country in the first national tour of the Tony Awardwinning Broadway musical from the creators of “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” Jewish Canadian roots From preschool through 12th grade, Alexandra attended Ramah Hebrew School, “the biggest Jewish School in Winnipeg,” a city of about 770,000. Her family attended a conservative 60 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
synagogue. By the time it came time for her Bat Mitzvah, she was already well accustomed to performing in front of a large audience, having made her stage debut at age 4, with the Karpat Hungarian Dance Troupe (her father was born in Hungary). Her first musical was a production of “Oliver” at the Rady Jewish Community Center in Winnipeg. She played the title role. “I’ve been singing, acting and dancing all my life,” says the effervescent 26 year-old. “I’ve always been very petite, and though I studied at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School from the age of 5, I knew that my body type would prevent me from becoming a ballerina.” Luckily, at the ballet school, she wasn’t limited to ballet; she also took tap, jazz and musical theater dance classes. “There was a really rich cultural community in Winnipeg,” she says by phone from Los Angeles, where “Cinderella” was staged before its San Diego performances (running at the
Civic Theatre from May 5-10). “When I was growing up, I saw performances by many local and touring companies that were nationally and internationally renowned. I was always captivated by telling stories through song and dance.” Her father, a lawyer, and her mother, a Winnipeg-born judge, have always been supportive of her career choices. And those choices have paid off. Frohlinger has spent a good portion of her young life on tour with Broadway musical productions. First, she played the androgynous Anybodys for two years in the national tour of “West Side Story” (which took her to Japan, and also to San Diego in 2011). She made her On-Broadway debut in 2013 in “Soul Doctor,” which starred San Diegan Eric Anderson as Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994), the Hasidic composer/teacher/performer known as “the singing Rabbi.” The charismatic holy man,
who had performed with stars like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead, used song and celebrity to spread the Torah to a broader, younger audience. “I was in the show for three months, including previews,” Alexandra says of the short-lived musical that did better Off-Broadway than On. “It really brought me back to my roots. It was kind of about where I’m from. I knew the music. And there was a Winnipeg connection. Shlomo’s daughter was involved in the production, and we had mutual connections.” Frohlinger obtained her B.F.A. at the Boston Conservatory of Music, which has, she says, “a stellar reputation for musical theater. I chose it because I thought I’d fit in there, and I could not have picked a better place for myself. “I’ve spent most of my 20s on tour,” she says. “And I love it! It’s a great way to see the country and meet lots of people. And this is the time for me to do it. Also, being in a show for a long time, it’s a great way to keep things fresh. Everything around the show is constantly changing, so you have to be on your toes all the time. “Being on tour, and packing light – we get one suitcase and a trunk – makes you realize how much we all hoard,” she laughs. She only admits to one weakness in that domain: “I probably have more pairs of shoes than I should have.” Theater folks are known for becoming like family even in local productions, but when you’re on tour with the same group for years, that effect is heightened. “I always have a very special connection with the people I tour with. It’s like family in many ways, but also like high school or college. A lot of us are in our 20s, and we’re growing up and changing together. Mostly, everyone lives in New York, so even after the tour ends, we see each other.” She doesn’t get to see her family as often as she’d like. Holidays are particularly difficult; last month, Frohlinger was able to arrange a Passover celebration with relatives in L.A. Sometimes, her parents, and even her 90-yearold grandfather, take road trips to see her perform. Her sister, who’s attending college in North Carolina, joins Alexandra during school breaks. They were together in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. Back to San Diego – in a dress When she returns to San Diego, which she adored, Frohlinger is looking forward to “hanging out in the Gaslamp, and running
Alexandra Frohlinger
into that man with the parrot I kept seeing downtown!” The Zoo is on her repeat-visit list, too. And visiting a friend from high school, who lives near the beach. Looking back on her professional life thus far, Frohlinger notes that her first role of Oliver presaged her career arc. “I’ve played a lot of young boys,” she says. “I get a lot of pants roles, because I’m so small. That’s why it’s so nice being in ‘Cinderella.’ I get to wear a big, beautiful dress!” She performs in all the dance numbers in the show, as well as the all-female song, “What’s the Matter with the Man?” That song contains her favorite moment in the show. “It’s absolutely silly,” she admits. “We throw paper, but I pretend it’s glitter, and live my musical theater glitter-throwing dreams! “I love the show,” she says of “Cinderella.” “It’s updated, contemporary, with a little plot twist. It’s such a pleasure to do a light-hearted show about love and happiness and kindness.” The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical has had a long history, and a circuitous path to Broadway. It was originally written for television, and when Julie Andrews starred in 1957, the broadcast reportedly drew 100 million viewers. In 1965, the show was refashioned for tv again, with Lesley Ann Warren in the lead. The 1997 tv version featured the R&B singer Brandy. When the musical finally opened on Broadway, in 2013, it was called “Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” with a book rewrite and update by acclaimed playwright Douglas Carter Beane. The show retained most of the original score, including the lovely love song, “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” (or are you beautiful because I love you?).” Another romantic number is “Ten Minutes Ago.” There is, of course, Cinderella’s dreamy “In My Own Little Corner” and the charming “It’s Possible,” sung by the woman who starts out as a woodland beggar and turns into a Fairy Godmother. Other songs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalog have been added. The plot has been tweaked to conform with the modern conception of a Princess, who has to exhibit self-esteem and self-empowerment. This Cinderella is no victimized wallflower. She takes charge of her destiny. In fact, she doesn’t leave her famous glass slipper behind; she hands it to the Prince! This is, of course, The Year of Cinderella, what with the new Disney movie, starring “Downton Abbey’s” Lily James, directed by Kenneth Branagh. But the concomitance probably helps the touring production, which has gotten favorable reviews throughout its run. Charles McNulty, of the Los Angeles Times, praised the “sumptuous score,” and the “lovely voice” of star Paige Faure, who “makes you care again about her perilous journey … Goodness in her hands turns out to be a charm as potent as a Fairy Godmother makeover.” She has excellent chemistry with Andy Huntington Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 61
PHOTO BY CAROL ROSEGG
Andy Jones and Paige Faure meet at the ball in the national tour of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s “Cinderella.” Alexandra Frohlinger dances in the background.
Jones as Prince Topher, who isn’t a self-involved narcissist like the one in “Into the Woods.” He makes a self-discovery journey of his own, with Ella’s help. And many have praised the powerhouse voice of Kecia Lewis as the beggar/ godmother. Still, it’s the magical makeover moment that has everyone electrified (“Miraculous!” crowed the Hollywood Reporter), a tribute to William Ivey Long’s stunning costumes. Of the show’s nine Tony Award nominations, costumes was the only winner. But back to road-warrior Alexandra Frohlinger. She says she’s “very grateful for the perspective touring has given me at such a young age. It’s easier to have a relaxed and broader world view.” She’s kept working since she started out, and she’s never been forced to take a waitressing job. During the inevitable work dry-spells, she teaches dance, judges dance competitions, and maintains confidence that “something else will always come along.” She doesn’t mind being part
62 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
of the ensemble (“I’m happy to work!”), though she admits that, “at some point, I’d love to have a major role.” Still, she’s happy where she is, acknowledging that “it’s a lot of responsibility to be a principal performer. This way, I can watch a lot of other people and learn from them.” As for advice to aspiring actors, she says: “Make sure you really want to do it, because it’s a really hard path. You have to want it to the exclusion of everything else, and you have to pursue it with relentless passion, drive and energy.” And, she adds, it’s important “not to care what other people think. Be true to yourself. It’s hard sometimes, but try not to listen to the voices.” The caveat to the singularity of focus and unremitting dedication to the craft is, “Find balance in your life. Don’t make your entire life revolve around theater. Too many artists have their whole sense of self wrapped around their pursuit of success. I’ve been told many times: ‘Don’t love something that can’t love you back.’”
Frohlinger’s offstage activities include playing the ukulele (“a tiny girl playing a tiny guitar”), doing yoga, reading voraciously and listening to public radio. “This is such a tumultuous career,” she concludes, “you have to find your own stability. I will continue to follow the work. Probably tour a lot. Touring gives you a different perspective on people and the passage of time. I don’t always know what day or city or season it is. Sometimes I think, ‘It’s a two-show day; it must be the weekend.’ Time goes fast on tour. But you appreciate it, too.” A lot of wisdom from such a diminutive young source. A The first national tour of “Cinderella,” runs May 5-10, in the Civic Theatre downtown. Tickets ($30-$155) are available at 619-570-1100, or broadwaysd.com.
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THEATER
REINVIGORATING A CLASSIC GENRE
The North Coast Rep continues it’s run of “Unnecessary Farce,” directed by Matthew Wiener BY BRIE STIMSON
PHOTOS BY AARON RUMLEY
Top to bottom: Christopher Williams, Jacque Wilke, Jessica John Gercke and David McBean.
T
raditional comedy is designed to make us think, to teach us a lesson, to say something redeeming or true about life. A farce, however, “is just there to make us laugh,” says Matthew Wiener. That’s the goal with the North Coast Rep’s “Unnecessary Farce,” which he directed. The show premiered on April 18 at the theater in Solana Beach. Wiener describes the play basically as “a lot of mistaken identities and a lot of outrageous situations and a lot of problems that can be solved very quickly, and it’s basically a wonderfully entertaining evening at the theater.” The plot of this thoroughly modern dose of ridiculousness follows two cops trying to solve an embezzlement case. They set up a sting in a hotel with a video camera and try to get the mayor to confess. “From there, hyjincks ensue,” Wiener explains with total sincerity. “It is a contemporary farce,
which is kind of unusual. Not too many people write these nowadays.” Farce in its most-known form began in 15th century France, although elements of the genre can be found in ancient Greek and Roman theater. Farce continued to be popular through the 19th and into the 20th century in music halls, vaudeville, and boulevard entertainments around the globe. But as Wiener says, not too many shows are written in the style today. For Wiener, laughter is big business. The director relocated to Phoenix about 20 years ago and started his own theater company there not too long after he arrived. The director met North Coast Rep’s artistic director David Ellenstein years ago when Ellenstein was working as an actor. Working with Ellenstein was a big draw for bringing the play to San Diego. Throughout the course of their years-long
working relationship, Wiener has worked on several other NCR productions, including farces “Perfect Wedding” and “Lend me a Tenor.” In turn, Ellenstein has directed several plays at Wiener’s Phoenix outfit. “I love making audiences laugh,” Wiener says when asked of his motivations for reviving the genre. Wiener grew up in New York City. Only a second generation American, all four of his grandparents were from Europe and Wiener grew up Jewishly. “I was raised in as much of a Jewish upbringing as I was in kind of like a Jewish immigrant experience.” He had a Jewish education, became Bar Mitzvah, and went to a Jewish high school. Although he was raised in the Conservative tradition, his family did not keep kosher. “I totally can identify as being a Jewish man in Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 65
L-R: Christopher Williams, Jacque Wilke and David McBean.
America but I don’t know that I can separate that from being an artist or being a director, so I think they’re all together part and parcel of what makes us who we are.” His grandparents all lived in Brooklyn. “My parents were very brave,” he says with a laugh. “They moved out to Queens.” He says growing up as a Jew has informed his life in a more cultural than religious way. “I think a part of [my upbringing] has expressed itself through being involved in arts and culture and I think part of that is being involved in the nonprofit world and the whole idea of providing service and giving back and philanthropy.” He can also relate his career back to his family. “I think theater at heart is just storytelling and my family certainly was into storytelling.” Like many people in the theater, Wiener started out as a performer. “I was a singer, actor, dancer, but I just wasn’t very good at it,” he openly admits. So he began to work behind the scenes first as a stage manager, and then a sound designer. “I just kept moving to a place where I could tell a bigger part of the story and directing seemed to be what I was drawn to.” He eventually studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. “The script has a very high value for me,” 66 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Wiener says of his directing style. “I’m very text oriented. He says he takes his cues from the script itself and the playwright instead of “mak[ing] it up.” He then works with the designers to create the visual environment and the actors to create the action environment. Sometimes, however, the most important piece is the viewer. “I’m constantly aware of the audience. I mean that’s kind of your job as the director…watching it as if for the first time…watching the audience’s eyes.” As far as his Jewish upbringing influencing his career choices, “I think I often see plays or view plays through a prism that has been created by my Jewish upbringing. I certainly have worked on shows by Jewish authors. I think I find a common tone or a common sound or viewpoint of the world.” Although his childhood has greatly influenced his life culturally, Wiener says his involvement in religious aspects of Judaism today is “very limited.” He is in an interfaith marriage and his children are being raised both Jewish and Catholic. “So they’re kind of being raised confused I think.” Although he says Judaism does not feature as prominently into his life as it once did, “it is still a part of how I identify myself.
“I just think that going to the theater and participating in the cultural life of our community is something that I learned or picked up from, if not from being Jewish then certainly from being part of the Jewish community in a city like New York in the 1960s and ’70s, and that was something that was important to me then and it’s important to me now, and I hope that the Jewish community supports our [play] as they do around the world.” However he feels about his faith, his passion for the theater and his work, most recently that of “Unnecessary Farce,” is unequivocal. “I think that audiences should come and see the show. I think it is marvelously entertaining and I think we have some of the best performers from the San Diego area. I think there’s some wonderful artists here that if your readers come to see this they should be prepared to laugh til it hurts and they will have a wonderfully fun escapist grand evening at the theatre…That’s kind of the goal with farce is just to create pleasure.” A “Unnecessary Farce” runs through May 10 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach. Tickets are $35. Purchase at northcoastrep.org.
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BOOKS
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF Writer Joshua Braff chronicles family transitions in new novel “The Daddy Diaries” BY NATALIE JACOBS
A
quick Google search of the phrase “stay-at-home dad” will turn up a strangely academic Wikipedia page, two articles in The New York Times, two features from The Atlantic, an entry in Slate’s “Best Laid Plans” series, an op-ed in TIME, and a slideshow from Parents magazine. The oldest article of this set of first-page Google results is from December 2013. Research has shown that the number of stay-at-home dads has been on the rise since the late 1970s, with the biggest jump occurring from 2000-2009 (the Pew Research study, released in 2013, only covered through 2009). There are plenty of reasons men want to stay at home while their wives serve as the family breadwinner, and everyone has an opinion (especially online). If stay-at-home dads are now having their day in the media sun, then writer Joshua Braff was a stay-at-home dad well before it was en vogue. Shortly after he completed an MFA program in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California, he and his wife welcomed their first child. At the time, Braff a couple of short stories published in literary magazines and he was gestating his first novel. His wife was the CEO of a start-up in Silicon Valley. “I was a stay-at-home dad since before it was seemingly invented,” Braff, who’s eldest, a boy, is now 14, says. The Braffs also have a daughter 68 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
who is 11. “I cannot turn the tv on now without seeing suit-and-tie dads or dads with Baby Bjorns.” When his son was six-months old, after his
wife returned to work from maternity leave, Braff began working on his first novel, “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green.” “I was empowered by being a father and forming my own family,” the contemplative man says over the phone. “Then I went and wrote about my childhood.” Braff, who is the elder brother of actor/writer/director Zach Braff, gave his first novel a young narrator – a boy from a strict Orthodox home in New Jersey. The boy struggles with Hebrew school when it takes the place of football practice and a tyrannical father prone to outbursts of violent rage. “As a writer,” Braff says, “it’s fun to riff and not worry too much. ‘Jacob Green,’ I remember thinking of it as a patchwork where I could make the chapters as short as I want or I could make the chapters complete ping-pong dialog, or maybe I’ll just use a quote or a definition from the dictionary. It was being free and breaking from the rules. ... I thought ‘I’m going to go riff’ and I found myself writing a very personal tale.” Though the book is billed as fiction, Braff readily admits that there are a lot of parallels between Jacob Green and the young Joshua Braff. With his second book, “Peep Show,” the lines between himself and his characters were a little less precise, but the book was still personal in a lot of ways. “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green” came out in 2004, followed by “Peep Show” in 2010. This month, Braff will release his third
A STAY-AT-HOME DAD book, “The Daddy Diaries.” Around the time that “Peep Show” came out, the economic crash was in full swing and Braff’s wife Jill found herself ousted from the tech company she had helped create. “We had one of those discussions about what we should do, which often involves one of us getting work and making ends meet,” Braff says. The family was living in Oakland and Jill was offered a job as an executive at the Home Shopping Network in St. Petersburg, Fl. So the family of four – the two kids entering 5th and 2nd grades – moved across the country. “I wrote about my marriage and my wife’s life as a busy executive,” Braff says of the beginnings of “The Daddy Diaries.” In the novel, the main character, Jay, begins his life in Florida by opening a new notebook, “#79,” and jotting notes about what a pelican on the beach might be thinking. “I wrote about the intricacies of raising children, alone at some times,” Braff says about his real-life journaling, “and coming to a place where I didn’t have friends and where I was ruminating and observing, as I do in my work.”Such a transition is ripe for a writer whose work comes from deep contemplation about the complexities of his real life.
Maybe a stay-at-home mother would find herself in similar situations, but having a male perspective changes everything. In Florida, there was the new physical environment, but also the people. And then, of course, the kids. In the novel, those constraints manifest as a house located on a street built below sea level (therefore prone to flooding); self-indulgent golfers and a Florida beach babe with lots of money and a husband who’s out of the picture; and a son who won’t say more than two words to his father. “The Daddy Diaries” chronicles this time period in thoughtful though sparse detail. The Braff family’s time in Florida lasted three years but it seems to span less than a year in Joshua’s fictionalized account. “My form is take the truth and then I can turn right or left whenever I want to, or name anybody anything I want to. That is a very freeing form in contrast to nonfiction.” Perhaps because the book is labeled a novel, Braff is comfortable getting into the very personal details of a life uprooted. The book is at its best when the reader is invited into the most difficult parts of this father’s life – from a regrettable outburst of harsh words spewed at his depressed son to a compromising situation with a naked woman in a bathroom overlooking the ocean. Even the mundane events of the school drop-off and pick-up routine are sociologically interesting. Maybe a stay-at-home mother would find herself in similar situations, but having a male perspective changes everything. The mom decides she wants another baby, the father silently wonders if he’s up for the
burping and the diapers and the late nights. The wife struggles with corporate dynamics and a rigorous travel schedule, the husband grapples with creative motivation and pride in his work. While Braff and his “Daddy Diaries” are very honest about the father’s struggles, he never asks for sympathy. “That’s how we can say yes to so many things,” the mother says in a tender scene where she explains to her daughter over the phone why she will be traveling for a few more days. The father is there to embrace the daughter’s disappointment and check for monsters under her bed. As the title suggests, “The Daddy Diaries” follows the form of a diary, so nothing is dwelled upon. Things happen, the family has issues, but they survive. The reader gets only the bits that the character has time to write down, but the candor makes the reader feel equipped to adequately fill in the blanks. “The Daddy Diaries” will be released on May 5. Later this month, Braff will be presenting his book to the Jewish Book Council in New York. Delegates from the San Diego Jewish Book Fair attend this event annually to learn about new books and authors to bring to San Diego during the annual Book Fair in November. A For more information on Joshua Braff and to order “The Daddy Diaries,” visit joshuabraff.com.
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 69
in the kitchen WITH
TORI AVEY
GREEK YOGURT MACARONI AND CHEESE
T Tori Avey is an awardwinning food writer, recipe developer, and the creator of the popular cooking website toriavey.com. She writes about food history for PBS Food and Parade. com. Follow Tori on Facebook by searching for “Tori Avey” and on Twitter: @toriavey.
70 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
he Jewish holiday of Shavuot marks the end of the seven-week Counting of the Omer – the period between Passover and the day G-d delivered the Torah to Moses and the ancient Israelites on Mt. Sinai. It took Moses and the Israelites seven weeks of trekking through the desert to reach Mount Sinai. Shavuot literally translates to “weeks” in Hebrew, emphasizing the conclusion of this long journey. The timing of the holiday suggests that Shavuot may have been an ancient agricultural festival that took on special significance when the events at Mount Sinai occurred. Because of this, Jews will often “bring the outdoors indoors” by decorating the house and synagogue with flowers and greenery. Many Jews also celebrate the holiday by staying up all night on Erev Shavuot to study and symbolically prepare for receiving the wisdom of the Torah. This event is called Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (the Shavuot night watch). One of my favorite parts of Shavuot is the reading of the Book of Ruth. The story of Ruth has special significance to me and other Jews-by-choice – it is the story of the first conversion to Judaism. A famine forces Elimelech and his wife Naomi to flee from their Israelite home to the foreign country of Moab. Soon Elimelech dies, and Naomi is widowed in Moab. She continues living there with her two sons, who eventually marry two Moabite girls – Orpah and Ruth. Tragically, both sons also die, leaving Naomi to live with her two widowed daughters-in-law in a strange land. Naomi decides to leave Moab and journey to Bethlehem to live amongst the Israelites again. She encourages both Orpah and Ruth to return to their parents and remarry in Moab. Orpah reluctantly agrees, but Ruth refuses – out of love, she chooses instead to stay with her mother-in-law and embrace Judaism. This could not have been an easy choice, for Ruth had to leave behind everything she knew in order to stay with Naomi. Her kindness and obedience to G-d are eventually rewarded in Bethlehem, where she marries a wealthy farm owner named Boaz. Together they have a son named Obed, who becomes the grandfather of King David. Christian readers will know that the Gospels trace the ancestry of Jesus to King David – so from a Christian perspective, Ruth’s choice to stay with Naomi and embrace Judaism also makes her a part of this important lineage. Ruth made famous the phrase, “For wherever you
go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your G-d will be my G-d.” The story of Ruth teaches us that unconditional love often requires sacrifice. Ruth makes a difficult choice, and her kindness is rewarded in the end. Shavuot, like most Jewish holidays, has a food component. On Shavuot we celebrate with dairy foods. It is a vegetarian holiday for kosher Jews, because the laws of kashrut forbid mixing milk products with meat. There could be a number of reasons for the association of dairy with Shavuot. There is a verse in the Song of Solomon (4:11) which says that the Torah is like “milk and honey under your tongue,” which might indicate a connection between the Torah-centric holiday and dairy foods. Some also believe that because the Israelites had not yet received the kosher laws, they had prepared foods on the first Shavuot that did not follow kashrut. When they received the Torah, they read the new laws of kashrut and realized their meat dishes were not kosher, in accordance with G-d’s will – so they opted to eat dairy dishes only. I’ve also read that the Hebrew word chalav (milk) has a numerical value of 40, which corresponds with the number of days Moses spent on Mount Sinai receiving the Torah. Still others say that Shavuot occurs during the fertile spring period, when animal mothers produce lots of fresh milk. I like this explanation, as it ties in with my own preference for seasonal cooking. Whatever the reason, a dairy holiday is a fantastic excuse to make one of my favorite indulgences – macaroni and cheese! Cheese, butter, cream, pasta… these are things my dreams are made of. In fact, I love them so much that I’m tempted to indulge in macaroni and cheese on a daily basis, not just on Shavuot. However much my tastebuds would love that, I do not get enough exercise to justify that! So I developed this lighter Greek Yogurt Macaroni and Cheese recipe, which combines sharp cheddar and Greek yogurt to create a lighter yet very flavorful cheddar sauce. While it’s not exactly health food, it is much healthier than a full-fat macaroni and cheese recipe. It’s so creamy and delectable, you won’t miss the extra fat from those ultra-rich recipes made with heavy cream and four different cheeses. This version is healthier, a little easier on the stomach and oh-so-tasty. You’ll love it, promise!
PHOTOS BY TORI AVEY
GREEK YOGURT MACARONI AND CHEESE 1 lb elbow macaroni 2 tbsp unsalted butter 2 tbsp flour 1 ¼ tsp salt (if salt sensitive use less and salt to taste after cooking) ¼ tsp black pepper 2 cups lowfat milk 1 ½ cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese ¾ cup Greek yogurt (nonfat or lowfat) 2 tbsp breadcrumbs 1/8 tsp smoked paprika You will also need: Large pot, colander, 2 qt gratin dish or 8x8 baking dish Servings: 8-9 side servings, 6 entrée servings Total Time: 45 minutes Kosher Key: Dairy
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
Stir in the elbow macaroni. Boil until just tender (don’t overcook it). Drain the pasta in a colander and spray cool water over it to keep it from sticking together. In a large pot, melt butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour, salt, and black pepper. Stir to form a thick paste. Slowly whisk in the milk, ¼ cup at a time. Heat the milk mixture over medium heat for a few minutes, whisking frequently, until it thickens and begins to bubble around the edges. Do not let the sauce boil. Whisk in grated cheddar cheese. Stir until cheese is melted and a thick sauce forms. Stir in the Greek yogurt until smooth. Stir the cooked macaroni into the sauce, making sure all the pasta is evenly coated by sauce. Pour macaroni with cheese sauce into a greased 2 qt gratin or 8x8 baking dish, spreading out into an even layer and scraping all remaining sauce from the pot over the top of the pasta. Mix together the breadcrumbs and smoked paprika and evenly sprinkle over the top of the pasta. Place in the oven and bake at 450 degrees F for 15 minutes until the top and breadcrumbs are golden brown to your liking. Serve hot. For a spicy twist, substitute cayenne pepper for black pepper. A
IKWTA
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 71
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Brought to you by:
© 2015 The Famous Abba
www.thefamousabba.com
F
Find the bold italic words on this sheet. The unused letters spell a secret message!
HaShem gives special laws to the priests and extra laws to the High Priest about the Temple service. The priests are to be holy. A priest that has a blemish may not perform his service and a priest may only marry certain people. If a person becomes spiritually unclean he can not eat meat from offerings or the priestly gifts. A person who accidentally ate the priestly gifts must add a fifth and repay it to a priest. All vow and peace offerings must be blemish free. An ox, sheep, or goat cannot be offered until its 8th day and an animal and its offspring cannot be slaughtered on the same day. A Jew is not to desecrate HaShem’s name!!! HaShem details all the times of holiness as well as the mitzvot associated with each time. The Torah details the lighting of the menorah and the lechem h'panim. The parsha ends with a story of a Jew who cursed HaShem’s name and was punished.
NGSI
QRESAU
20 IYAR 5775 PARSHA EMOR
(scramble) ACBKL
BARLEY HOLY TEMPLE
gematria
80
70
60
קמ ÷ב
50
40
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20
10
9
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DHAE
XBSOE
SHEAF
51 DAYS
ש -ק
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Visit www.thefamousabba.com/chinuch-podcasts for this week’s Chinuch Podcast! Hear from a new speaker each week.
400 300 200 100 90
ת א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
א +ד
Rosh Hashana is also known as _______ זכרון.
ל – כד
• HaShem teaching Moshe all the holy days (23:1). • The omer offering being brought to the Holy Temple (23:10).
Act out these scenes with friends and family.
PARSHA SKIT ideas
7 WEEKS R' SHIMON BAR YOCHAI
Which one is different? (Hint: The Counting of the Omer)
spot the difference
(Hint: Tefillin)
ECPBI
WORD CMRLESAB
• Your baseball coach put you up last in the lineup. • Shabbat learning in your shul was canceled.
Can you judge these situations favorably?
YOU BE THE JUDGE
SUPER SHABBat SHEET
historical timeline ___ Gemara ___ Megillah Esther
Number the following items in the order in which they were written.
___ Mishna ___ Ten Commandments
good trait OF THE MONTH
3 4
CROSSWORD
Silence: If someone else is speaking, it is best to remain silent and listen until it is your turn to speak.
1
5 7
ACROSS 2. ( אשם22:16) 4. ( שמן24:2) 6. ( חדש23:33) 7. ( שור22:27) 8. ( שש23:3) DOWN 1. ( מום21:18) 3. ( ספר23:15) 5. ( קדש21:7)
Complete the crossword by translating each Hebrew word into English. Use the parsha reference for help.
2 6 8
shabbAT
• When is it okay to fast on Shabbat? • Is it permissible to set a mousetrap on Shabbat morning?
blessings
What is the blessing a person recites before and after eating the following items: - salt bagel - a fig from Cuba - chocolate cake - green bean
CANDLELIGHTING IN JERUSALEM: 6:44 P.M.
72 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 73
WHAT’S
GOIN’
D
ON?
Merry Month of May
by eileen sondak • nsondak@gmail.com
DM
ay should be a very merry month indeed for San Diego’s theater-goers. “Cinderella” makes a San Diego appearance that will delight audiences of all ages. The Old Globe will present the West Coast premiere of “Rich Girl” on one stage and George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” on another. The La Jolla Playhouse will launch its season with the world premiere of “Come from Away.” Cygnet Theatre takes black comedy to
74 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
Malashock Dance with join forces with SACRA/PROFANA for a three-day engagement at UCSD's Forum Theatre, May 15-17. the limit with “The Whale.” The San Diego Symphony completes its winter season with an eclectic mix. San Diego Repertory Theatre will bring the music of Harry Nilsson to the Lyceum Stage. The Welk revives “Cabaret.” And dance buffs can celebrate the Malandain Ballet’s production of “Romeo et Juliette” and City Ballet”s “Don Quixote.” Broadway-San Diego is back at the Civic Theatre with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
enchanting “Cinderella,” the Tony Awardwinning musical that brings to life the beloved fairytale, running May 5-10. The La Jolla Playhouse is ready to kick off its season with “Come From Away,” a new rockinfused musical comedy headed for the Potiker Theatre. The show was inspired by the events resulting from the grounding of all flights after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Written and composed by Canadian husband-and-wife team David
PHOTO BY YARO JANE PHOTOGRAPHY
D
Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's "Arms and the Man," directed by Jessica Stone, will play at the Globe May 9-June 21.
PHOTOS COURTESY OLD GLOBE
D
the four-piece program. “Stephen Hough Plays Beethoven” is coming to Symphony Hall May 22-24, with Maestro Ling conducting. La Jolla Music Society is featuring the San Diego debut of Malandain Ballet Biarritz, dancing “Romeo et Juliette” on May 3 at the Civic Theatre. Violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt are appearing at Sherwood Auditorium on May 9. Their four-piece program includes Brahms’ Sonata for Violin and Piano, No. 3. The Music Society’s Jazz Series will showcase jazz legends Arturo Sandoval, along with Poncho Sanchez and his Latin Jazz Band on May 16 at the Balboa Theatre. The Lamb’s Players’ production of “Freud’s Last Session” pits Freud against C.S. Lewis in an exhilarating conversation that is both funny and profound. You can catch the show at the Lamb’s Coronado home through May 17. Happily, the Lamb’s production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at the Horton Grand Theatre was extended through May 31. The Welk Theatre will take audiences back to the Berlin of the 1920s with “Cabaret,” a magnificent musical that reminds us of the insidious reign of the Nazi regime – and the escape many Germans found in seedy night clubs like the Kit Kat. This musical masterpiece will be running at the Welk May 1 through July 26, and it’s well worth seeing. “Welk Illusions” continues on select Wednesdays through Dec. 30. J*Company is staging “West Side Story,” the musical masterpiece based on “Romeo and Juliet.” The show, directed by Joey Landwehr, will be ensconced at the La Jolla JCC May 8-17. The Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla will unveil two exhibitions on May 9. “Sarah Cain: Blue in Your Body, Red in the Air” (the artist’s first solo show), and “Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman” (1993-2013) – a mid-career survey of Eisenman’s work that will remain through Sept. 6. The Museum’s downtown location features “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” through June 28. The San Diego History Center’s latest exhibition is “Ingenius! The World of Dr. Seuss.” This show, featuring artwork by Theodor Geisel, will be on view throughout 2015. The History Center is also focusing on “Presidio to Pacific Powerhouse: How the Military Shaped San Diego.” It will be on display throughout the year as well. “Placed Promises” is a permanent exhibition chronicling the history of the San Diego region. A
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Hein and Irene Sankoff, this highly-anticipated world premiere will run May 29 through July 5. Also playing at the Playhouse, at the UCSD Forum Theatre in the dance category this month is the world premiere of Snakeskin. A collaboration between Malashock Dance and the SACRA/PROFANA company, the show will perform May 15-17. The Old Globe’s White Theatre will wind down its absurdist comedy, “Buyer and Cellar” on May 3, but it will be followed on May 9 (on the Main Stage) by the classic romantic comedy “Arms and the Man.” George Bernard Shaw penned this witty tale of love and war, and it should be a must-see for avid theater-goers. It will run through June 14. The White Theatre will unveil Victoria Stewart’s modern retelling of a stage-and-screen classic (“The Heiress”) on May 23. “Rich Girl” – originally based on the Henry James novel, “Washington Square,” is a moving and funny play that will keep audiences entertained through June 21. Cygnet is exploring the decidedly dark comedy in “The Whale,” May 14-June 14. The show snared critical acclaim during its OffBroadway run for its no-holds-barred humor in dealing with a morbidly obese recluse and his last chance at redemption. North Coast Rep’s staging of “Unnecessary Farce,” a relentlessly funny play about an embezzling mayor, his female accountant, undercover cops, and a nefarious hit man, continues through May 10. The madcap comedy
takes its cues from classic French farces – with innuendo and fast-paced escapades. San Diego Rep is featuring a brand new work at the Lyceum Space though May 10. “Uncanny Valley” sounds a lot like sci-fi, but it could be a window into the near future. The story revolves around a neuroscientist (played by Rosina Reynolds) and her quest to create a nonbiological being. San Diego Rep’s Lyceum Stage is gearing up for the world premiere of “Everybody’s Talkin’” – a musical review featuring the music of Harry Nilsson. Nilsson is considered “the most famously anonymous composer and performer of our time.” Rep favorites Steve Gunderson and Javier Velasco created the show, which is slated to remain at the Lyceum May 23-June 21. San Diego Musical Theatre is staging one of the best known movie musicals in history – “Singin’ in the Rain.” The show will be ensconced at the Spreckels Theatre May 22June 7. City Ballet will show off its full-length production of “Don Quixote” May 8-10. Danced to a live orchestra, this story-ballet (choreographed by Elizabeth Wistrich, after Marius Petipa) is set along the lush musical lines of a Minkus score. The San Diego Symphony will play on May 1-3 with “Carmina Burana,” a concert featuring Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as well as Orff ’s masterwork. Ken-David Masur will conduct – with Conrad Tao on the keyboard and the San Diego Master Chorale performing “Carmina Burana.” Murry Sidlin will conduct the Symphony and the Master Chorale in a moving performance on May 7. Presented by the Anti-Defamation League, the concert is titled “Defiant Requiem.” It uses “Voices from the past” as “lessons for the future” to create a world without hate. “Le Ombre,” with Bill Conti conducting, is slated for May 8-9 at Symphony Hall. This cast of world-class performers tantalizes audiences with their stunning special effects and mindblowing live elements. The Family Festival Series continues on May 10 with “Girl Power!” honoring women in music. This Mother’s Day treat also includes pre-concert activities for the youngsters. Violinist Ray Chen and pianist Julio Elizald will perform on May 14 as part of the Chamber Music Series. The program will include Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major. Jahja Ling will be back on the podium May 15-17 to lead the orchestra in “A Spanish Rhapsody.” Chen will be the guest artist for
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 75
N news
Mission Trails Presents Bird Photography Exhibit
The Mission Trails Regional Park Foundation is currently hosting an art exhibition featuring the photography of Blake Shaw. Shaw is a contributor to Bird Watcher’s Digest, Living Bird Magazine, and the Audubon Field Guide and website. He is one of fourteen photographers chosen for the San Diego Natural History Museum 2015 Birds of the World exhibition. This is Shaw’s third solo show at the Mission Trails art gallery. The exhibit is on display through May 22.
North Embarcadero Holds Ongoing Fundraiser
Radys Commit $100 Million to UCSD
Evelyn and Ernest Rady last month announced a donation of $100 million to the UC San Diego Rady School of Management. The money is intended to be used to recruit and retain faculty, and fund strategic priorities at the school. This is in addition of the Rady’s contribution of $30 million in 2004. “The transformational support from Evelyn and Ernest Rady is the largest single commitment in history to a business school of Rady’s size and youth,” said Dean Robert S. Sullivan. The Radys, two of San Diego’s most prominent philanthropists, said the school has had a magnificent first 10 years. “Dean Sullivan and other leaders within the community held a vision of a business school in a symbiotic relationship with the innovative culture of our region. The school is already exceeding expectations and there is so much more to come,” Ernest Rady said in a statement. The Rady School of Management will also be the site for the Cal-Israel Innovation Expo on May 10. The Expo connects students with international and local companies including leading Israeli companies which will showcase their products. Contact Yoram Dahan for more on the Expo at (310) 926-0000.
The North Embarcadero redevelopment project, which celebrated phase 1 completion on Nov. 15, 2014, is raising funds through a naming campaign for individuals and businesses to sponsor engraved pavers, tables, benches and signage along the socalled Port Walk. The area along the San Diego Bay now features a linear park, a promenade for pedestrian and bicycle use, a public plaza and shade pavilions designed by architect Pae White. Learn more about the project and the naming campaign at sdportwalk.org.
JFS Awarded Grant from Susan G. Komen
Cancer fighters Tanya Williams (L) and Wendy Shurelds were helped by the Susan G. Komen program during their breast cancer treatment.
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In April, Susan G. Komen San Diego granted $1.1 million to breast cancer research and local breast health services. Jewish Family Services was awarded $160,000 for their Breast Cancer Financial Case Management and Assistance Program. According to the Komen Foundation, “breast cancer risk is slightly higher among Jewish women than among other women. This increased risk is likely due to the high prevalence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations in Jewish women.” The grant money will fund free diagnostic mammograms, screenings and surgeries, and will provide financial aid for living expenses, meal deliveries, education, research and more for qualified men and women. Seventy-five percent of every dollar raised by Komen stays in San Diego County; the remaining 25 percent helps fund international breast cancer research. For a full list of the grantees, visit komensandiego.org.
N news
Council on Literacy to Host “Eat. Drink. Read.” Fundraiser
For the sixth year in a row, the San Diego Council on Literacy will host the “Eat. Drink. Read” fundraiser. This year, the event takes place on May 13 at Chef Brian Malarky’s Green Acre Restaurant in UTC. Featuring 15 chefs and more than 30 tasting stations, the event asks local chefs to create unique dishes based on a book of their choosing. The event will raise funds to support 28 literacty programs throughout San Diego County, as part of the Council’s 20/20 literacy campaign. Purchase tickets at eatdrinkread. com. Chef Brian Malarky
StandWithUs to Host Film Screening
Shoah Foundation Adding Testimonies
The USC Shoah Foundation is adding testimonies of Jewish people who lived in North Africa and the Middle East during the World War II era. The project, lead by Jackie Gmach, is working to add 50 testimonies to the visual history archive. So far, phase 1 has been completed with seven recordings and phase 2 has begun to add another 20 to the archive. “While these witnesses were not caught up in the Final Solution,” the Foundation said in a statement, “they were living in hostile environments which were impacted by Nazi policy or anti-Semitism.” Testimonies in this effort so far include Albert Memmi who lived in Tunis throughout WWII, Eva Boukris Weisel who’s family was protected by an Arab Muslim during the war, Ruth Pearl of Iraqi descent, and Claude CohenTannoudji from Algeria. The USC Shoah Foundation currently has more than 53,000 testimonies in its archive. This program is being supported by the San Diego Friends of the USC Shoah Foundation. To learn more, visit sfi.usc.edu.
On Thursday, May 21, StandWithUs will present a screening of Academy Award-nominated Director Josh Aronson’s film, “Orchestra of Exiles.” The film tells the story of Bronislaw Huberman, a celebrated Polish violinist who helped rescue some of the world’s greatest musicians from Nazi Germany. Bronislaw’s actions led to the creation of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which would later become the Israeli Philharmonic. Director Aronson will answer questions after the screening. Tickets can be purchased at standwithus. c o m / p p s c / o rch e s t ra o f ex i l e s _ sandiego_2015.asp.
Dr. Albert Ray to Speak on “Sex and the Torah” at Beth Israel
The Men’s Club of Beth Israel of San Diego will bring Dr. Albert Ray to speak at the May 20 Dinner Forum for a presentation called, “Sex and the Torah, for Adult Audiences.” Dr. Ray, a member of Temple Beth Israel, received his medical degree in 1976 and has been a family physician with Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in San Diego since 1978. Ray is the author of many articles on prevention, health promotion, patient education, obesity and tobacco cessation. He was California Family Physician of the Year in 2002 and voted “Top Doctor” in Family Medicine by San Diego Magazine. The program is open to all. Cost is $14 with advance R.S.V.P. or $17 at the door. A deli dinner will be served. Register at cbisd.org/event/mcforum-may.
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N news
Chesed Home Seeking Housing Applicants
Chesed Home, a licensed board and care facility for adults with mental illness, has an opening for one qualified resident. Due to the success of residents graduating to independent living, a room has become available in the home located in Poway. This home for adults with mental illness, primarily schizophrenia, is based on a “social model” rather than a “treatment model,” and the operators of the facility note that the ideal candidate must meet specific criteria for approval. Contact Program Director Shelle Wisdom-Lazar at (760) 7434673 or President Fern Siegel at president@hopevillagesandiego. com. To learn more about the facility, visit chesedhome.org.
Renown Cancer Researcher to Give Lecture at JCC
ADL Audit Finds Anti-Semitic Incidents on the Rise
Though the amount of anti-Semitic violence remains low in the United States, according to an Anti-Defamation League audit, 2014 was a more violent year for Jews. Per the report, the total number of anti-Semitic incidents increased by 21 percent year over year, to 912. The ADL has been tracking these incidents since 1979. “While the overall number of anti-Semitic incidents remains lower than we have seen historically, the fact remains that 2014 was a particularly violent year for Jews both overseas and in the United States. The fatal shootings at a Jewish community center building and senior residence in Overland Park, Kan., by a white supremacist whose goal was to ‘kill Jews’ and other violent episodes were tragic reminders that lethal anti-Semitism continues to pose a threat to American Jews and larger society as well,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. The audit has also identified new trends in anti-Semitic incidents, including the phenomenon of hacking attacks on community and synagogue websites by overseas hackers, which increased in 2014.
Suzanne Bourgeois Cohn, founder of the Regulatory Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, will give a lecture at the Jewish Community Center entitled “Genesis of the Salk Institute: the Role of Jewish immigrants,” as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series on May 18 at 7 p.m. Born in Brussels, Belgium, Bourgeois worked her way to the Sorbonne Institute of Paris where she met and eventually married Melvin Cohn. The two went on to become founding researchers are the Salk Institute. Recently, Bourgeois published a book chronicling the Salk Institute and its arrival in San Diego. Tickets are free but reservations are required. Visit tickets.lfjcc.org to register.
Tarbuton Set to Launch Digital Pen-Pal Program
Tarbuton, San Diego’s Israel Cultural Center, is taking pen pals “digital” with the creation of an online platform that will allow Jewish children in Israel and San Diego to connect in a safe alternative to conventional social networks. Ten San Diego teen interns will serve as online managers and 120 San Diego children in 4th through 7th grades from specific local schools will be able to participate. Fluency in Hebrew will not be required. This pilot program is currently free and will run through June 15 with the option for families and teens to continue through summer. To sign up, or to learn more about this and other Tarbuton programs, visit tarbuton.wordpress.com.
78 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
DIVERSIONS By Natalie Jacobs
“Jews Vs. Aliens” Short story anthology compiled by an Israeli and a Brit.
“The Farewell Party” and “Seeking Peace Finding Hope” The San Diego Jewish Film Festival is back for a special advance double feature on May 13 at 6 p.m. in the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre (JCC La Jolla campus). “The Farewell Pary” finds a group of friends gathered in a Jerusalem retirement home to take care of a mutual friend. It’s a dark comedy that promises to “tickle your funny bone and touch your heart.” The evening’s companion film, “Seeking Peace Finding Hope” is “a moving and uplifting documentary that...brings together Jewish and Palestinian teens to form meaningful connections to narrow the gap between the two cultures,” according to SDJFF director Craig Prater. Also coming up from the SDJFF is another screening on June 3 of “A Story of Love and Equality.” Tickets on sale at the JCC box office, (858) 362-1348.
“The Americans” This critically acclaimed spy drama has been greenlighted by FX for a fourth season, to air in early 2016. Created by former CIA agent Joe Weisberg and taking place toward the end of the Cold War, the show follows two Russian KGB spies who are arranged into marriage and sent off to Virginia to live as Americans. If this is the first you’re hearing of the series, you can catch up on Hulu Plus or Amazon.
“Undateable” When I first heard the name of this show, I groaned thinking it was another reality series. I’m happy to report it’s a comedy show! The story line is familiar – friends spend lots of time hanging out in an empty bar while they poke fun at each other in a loving way. But the cast is rather diverse (featuring a Jewish hearthtrob, a blonde, a brunette and a chubby black guy) and it takes place in Detroit. So that’s different. at each other in a loving way.
“Words Without Music” The new memoir from renown composer Philip Glass.
“Holy Cow” Actor David Ducovny takes on “Animal Farm.” Hilarious.
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 79
TAKE NOTE MAY 1-31
by tina b. eshel
BEST BETS
Mark your calendar. We’re breaking things down for young partiers, moms, and families this month. First, the smoking hot events for Jews in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: NextGen is hosting their first gala called “World of Good,” dessert and wine Fundraiser on May 9, 8-11:30 p.m. at Liberty Station. Danny Fleischer is your go-to for this night-on-thetown. Reach him at danf@jewishfederationsandiego.org to buy your ticket. On May 19 from 7-9 p.m., head up to the Leichtag Ranch for Torah on Tap! – Special Homebrew Edition. You will have a chance to sample beer made by other NextGeners in their homebrew workshop entitled, “Fermentation, Change and Booze.” Contact Josh Cohen at josh@ncsy.org to register for this free event. Finally, Hotel Palomar is the site for this year’s Party on the Roof slated for June 3, 6-9 p.m. Email Nicole Sloane to register at nicoles@jewishfederationsandiego.org. Now to Mother’s Day. Stories of Jewish mothers will come to life on May 11 at 7 p.m. in a heartfelt post-Mother’s Day Celebration, Remembering Mama: Celebrating Jewish Mothers, co-hosted by WriteOutLoud!, a spoken word performance company hailed as “theatre for the mind.” The next evening, May 12 at 7 p.m., enjoy Jewish Poets, Jewish Voices. Featured poets will read during the first hour, followed by an open mic. Both events will be held at the Astor Judaica Library at the JCC. For more information, contact Susan Hagler at 858-362-1150. Moms and dads can enjoy a trio of family friendly events this month. First up, Friendship Circle and Chabad of Poway invite the local community, including families with young children and children with special needs, to a traditional Family Shabbat Dinner. Dinner is May 15 from 6-9 p.m. at Chabad of Poway, 16934 Chabad Way. Make your reservations with Monica Kohan 858-487-4879. Bring your little leaguers and budding sports fans to watch the Padres play the Nationals at the Jewish Community Day at Petco Park on May 17 from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fun includes special pricing, pre-game socializing, kosher hot dog lunch and post-game field access. Tickets at sandiego.padres.mlb.com/sd/ticketing/groups/jcd.jsp. A
80 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
NEXTGEN DESSERT AND WINE FUNDRAISER May 9, 8-11:30 p.m. Liberty Station jewishinsandiego.org/ nextgen-san-diego
REMEMBERING MAMA: CELEBRATING JEWISH MOTHERS May 11, 7 p.m. Astor Judiaca Library at the JCC sdcjc.org/ajl
JEWISH COMMUNITY DAY AT PETCO PARK May 17, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Petco Park sandiego.padres.mlb.com/ sd/ticketing/groups/jcd.jsp
TORAH ON TAP! – SPECIAL HEBREW EDITION May 19, 7-9 p.m. Leichtag Ranch, Encinitas leichtag.org
SAN DIEGO JEWISH
SENIOR EVENTS MAY 1-31
Lawrence Family JCC 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla Contact Melanie Rubin to R.S.V.P. (858) 362-1141 Mah Jongg for Beginners Wednesdays, May 20-June 3, 9:30 a.m. Learn to play this popular ancient Chinese tile game that involves skill, strategy, calculation, and a little luck with instructor Rita Kahn. Cost for 3 classes: $48 JCC members/$60 nonmembers. Plus $9 for 2015 Mah Jongg card or $10 for large print card. Beau Jest Sunday, May 31, 1 p.m. This funny, sweet, and moving comedy says a lot about families of any ethnic persuasion. Cost: $31 JCC members/$38 nonmembers (includes ticket and bus from JCC) Film Fans & Favorites Mondays, 1:30 p.m. except May 25 Cost: $2 JCC members/$3 nonmembers Oceanside Senior Center 455 Country Club Lane, Oceanside Call Josephine at (760) 295-2564 North County Jewish Seniors Club Third Thursday of each month, 12:30 p.m. Join us to hear speakers and/or entertainment at our monthly meetings. Light refreshments served. Visitors welcome. Veterans Association of North County 1617 Mission Avenue, Oceanside CA 92058 Contact Marc Poland (858) 232-1645 Jewish War Veterans meetings Second Sunday of each month, noon. San Diego North County Post 385. Seacrest Village 211 Saxony Road, Encinitas Call Jon Schwartz at (760) 516-2001 Monthly Senior Dance First Friday of every month, 1 p.m. Refreshments and appetizers from our kosher kitchen will be provided. Free and open to the public. JFS University City Older Adult Center 9001 Towne Centre Drive, La Jolla Call Aviva Saad for details or to R.S.V.P. (858) 550-5998 Mother’s Day Celebration Thursday, May 7 10 a.m. Entertainment by Phil Gates. Lunch available at noon with reservations. Memories in the Making; An Alzheimer’s Association Art Class Monday, May 11, 10:30 a.m. Individuals with Alzheimer’s or related dementia are invited to attend along with an adult caregiver or family member. Volunteer and Donor Appreciation Luncheon Tuesday, May 28, noon Join UCOAC to thank their volunteers and donors. Entertainment by Musicstation. Cost: $10 for lunch, reservations required.
TOUR THE LEICHTAG RANCH
JFS North County Clubs, contact Jodi Rudick (858) 674-1123 Wednesday, May 13, 9 a.m. Enjoy a presentation and walking tour of this beautiful agricultural property in Encinitas. On the Go excursions A program of Jewish Family Service, On the Go provides transportation to events throughout the county for homebound seniors. For information, please call Aurelio Pacheco at (858) 637-7320. West Side Story, J*Company Theatre Sunday, May 10, 2015 noon Cost: $33 due by May 4. The Queen Mary, Long Beach, CA May 21, 2015 9:00 a.m. Cost: $79, due by May 15. Irvine Spectrum Shopping Trip Cost: $40, due by May 15. JFS No. County Inland Center 15905 Pomerado Road, Poway Contact Jodi Rudick (858) 674-1123 for details. Most Activities are free to members, and lunch is $7 with reservations. Fitness Fusion and Staying Fit with Dannyl Monroe Mondays at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. VIP Tour at the Leichtag Ranch Wednesday, May 13 at 9 a.m. Learn about the history of the land, the Leichtag Foundation and its diverse initiatives. Lunch will be provided by Seacrest Village. Cost: $18. JFS Coastal Club at Temple Solel 3575 Manchester Ave., Cardiff by the Sea Contact Jodi Rudick (858) 674-1123 for details. R.S.V.P. for lunch by Monday at 12:30 p.m. All activities are free and lunch is $7. VIP Tour at the Leichtag Ranch Wednesday, May 13 at 9 a.m. California Women’s Museum virtual tour May 19, 11 a.m. Take a virtual tour of the Women’s Museum of California through stories and photographs. Followed by lunch and a movie. JFS College Avenue Center 4855 College Ave., San Diego Call Sara Diaz (858) 637-3270 for details or to R.S.V.P. Mother’s Day Celebration with “Sisterhood Theatre” Friday, May 8 at 12:45 p.m. Trojans, Worms and Viruses; Keeping your Computer Safe Wednesday, May 27, 12:30 p.m A guide to staying safe when browsing, shopping, and communicating online. Instructor: April Merritt. This class is free! A
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 81
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One Polish Violinist. Seventy Jewish musicians. Together they fought the Nazis with the only weapon they had: Music. Featuring Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Joshua Bell and others, Orchestra of Exiles reveals the dramatic story of Bronislaw Huberman, the celebrated Polish violinist who rescued some of the world’s greatest musicians from Nazi Germany and then creaed one of the world’s greatest orchestras, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which would become the Israeli Philharmonic. Academy Award-nominated director Josh Aaronson will join us for a Q & A following the screening. Please register at www.standwithus.com/orchestraofexilessd or Call 858.598.8220
Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 83
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ALL SERVICES ALREADY HELD Pavel Kanevsky - San Diego 12/27/1929 -2/01/2015 Survivors: Daughter, Irina Kanevsky; Son, Vladimir Kanevsky; two Grandchildren and four Great-Grandchildren. Lynne Cole - San Diego 10/09/1928 - 2/02/2015 Survivors: Daughter, Lucy Reed. Milton Levant - Santee 6/29/1943 - 2/03/2015 Survivors: Wife, Marilyn Levant; Daughter, Carla Corder: and thre Grandchildren. Jerome Jaffe - San Diego 4/28/1937 - 2/03/2015 Survivors: Wife, Ellen Jaffe; Sons, Jason and Ian Jaffe; and five Grandchildren. Nadezhda Abramovich - San Diego 84 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
7/27/1924 - 2/04/2015 Survivors: Daughter, Tania Reif; Son, Ilya Petrov; and two Grandchildren. Norma Podell - Carlsbad 12/07/1926 - 2/06/2015 Survivors: Daughters, Robin and Lisa Podell and Judy Milavetz; Son, David Podell; and eight Grandchildren and two 2 GreatGrandchildren. Lucille Fink - San Diego 3/31/1923 - 2/05/2015 Survivors: Sons, Lloyd and William Fink. Seymour Zeenkov - La Mesa 4/05/1924 - 2/06/2015 Survivors: Wife, Joan Zeenkov; Daughter, Carol Zeenkov; and Son Joseph Zeenkov. Benjamin Bellman - San Diego 10/20/1919 - 2/06/2015 Survivors: Daughters, Barbara
and Jean Bellman and Sheryll Bellman-Rott; seven Grandchildren and 12 Great Grandchildren. Deborah “ Debbie” Castle - San Diego 4/18/1955 - 2/06/2015 Survivors: Husband, Brian Castle. Marc Rose - San Diego 9/17/1938 - 2/07/2015 Survivors: Wife, Ruthlee Rose; Daughter, Melissa Rose; and Son, Michael Rose. Agatha Aronson - Coronado 2/03/1929 - 2/08/2015 Survivors: Sons, Arthur and Robert Aronson; and two Grandchildren. Robert Kritzik - San Diego 7/17/1927 - 2/08/2015 Survivors: Daughter, Joan Coplia; Sons, Thomas, Bruce and Doug Kritzik; five Grand-children and one Great-Grandchild.
Leon Shedroff - San Diego 5/04/1924 - 2/09/2015 Survivors: Wife, Sylvia Shedroff; and Daughter, Sharon Shedroff. Bluma Lotrowski - Encinitas 12/28/1915 - 2/10/2015 Survivors: Daughters, Toby Fleischman and Jeanette; and five Grandchildren. Khaya Kaganovskaya - San Diego 7/31/1918 - 2/10/2015 Survivors: Son, Leonid Rubinstein; and one Grandson. Survivors: Daughter, Rosalie Kitaen. Erna Viterbi - Rancho Santa Fe 01/20/1934 - 2/17/2015 Survivors: Husband, Andrew Viterbi; Daughter, Audrey Viterbi; Son, Alan Viterbi; and five Grandchildren.
desert life
PALM SPRINGS by Pamela Price
pamprice57@gmail.com
PHOTO COURTESY FESTIVAL OF THE DESERT
Barrett Wissman Brings Music and More to the Coachella Valley
Justin Kauflin and AlfredoRodríguez serenade the Coachella Valley at the first Festival of the Desert in March. INSET: Barrett Wissman.
T
here’s a new face in the desert this season and it belongs to Barrett Wissman. The business visionary brought his cultural agenda to the Coachella Valley for the first (and hopefully annual) Festival of the Desert, held on March 18 at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens. Wissman, who in his day job is Chairman of IMG Artists in Beverly Hills, Calif., served as co-founder and director of the one-day festival. Called “The Medici of the 21st century” by Gulf Elite, Wissman sees “innovation in differentiation.” This year’s Festival began with a concert entitled “The Genius of the Émigré Composer,” an exploration of the work of a variety of great émigré composers of the 20th centuries. The piece also explored their influence on the American musical tradition that they worked within. Guests were then invited to have lunch in the gardens, amidst the blossoming desert landscape.
Later in the evening, a gala reception and concert began around 9 p.m. with a meet-andgreet with Renee Fleming (she arrived, glowing, after an evening concert at the McCallum Theatre down the road, with Philippe Jordan, the Festival’s music director). Cat Cora, the first female Iron Chef (on the Food Network program of the same name) was the event’s culinary curator. During Wissman’s speech, he was careful to thank generous benefactors Gregory and Regina Weingarten and the Annenberg Foundation, Harold Matzner, and Eva Stern for their support of the Festival. The multi-talented Wissman has a wide range of interests. When he’s not mangaing individual artists and bands, or world-wide tours, he’s involved in philanthropic endeavors, finance projects and classical music. It was this love for classical music that brought him to create a new festival for the desert.
He also maintains a connection to his Jewish heritage through a personal relationship with a special kind of rabbi, a Holocaust refugee working in conjunction with the Pope in Italy. “I have worked on projects throughout the years with Rabbi Jack Bemporad,” Wissman says. “[He is] a scholar, theologian, and interfaith dialog advocate. The Rabbi serves as Executive Director of the nonprofit Center for Interreligious Understanding and the John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue in Rome. The aim is to bring people together of all religious faiths to promote honest dialogue ... and mutual respect.” With the Festival of the Desert, Wissman continues to blend music, culture and cuisine to forge new paths for festivals around the world. We’ll be on the lookout for the Festival of the Desert to return to the Coachella Valley next year. A Iyar • Sivan 5775 l SDJewishJournal.com 85
MAY 8 - MAY 31 | LA JOLLA | RANCHO SANTA FE | CARLSBAD Friday, May 8 & Saturday, May 9
Anne-Marie McDermott, Pedja Muzijevic, Anton Nel, Stephen Prutsman Four-Piano Spectacular!
Saturday, May 16 & Sunday, May 17 Sheryl Staples, violin; Cynthia Phelps, viola Carter Brey, cello; Shai Wosner, piano
Saturday, May 30 & Sunday, May 31
Anne-Marie McDermott, Curator
Steven Copes & Alexander Kerr, violins Hsin-Yun Huang, viola; Efe Baltacigil, cello Jon Kimura Parker, piano
619/466-8742 mainlymozart.org
86 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
George Bernard Shaw’s Most Romantic Comedy!
ARMS AND THE MAN
By
George Bernard Shaw
Directed by
Jessica Stone
The beautiful Raina Petkoff is about to marry the heroic soldier Sergius. But the battlefield sweeps into her boudoir when an enemy soldier takes refuge under her bed. Soon she will have to decide between her romantic ideals and the surprising sensations of new love. Arms and the Man, one of the wittiest and most charming plays of the English stage, mixes smarts and silliness in a wonderfully entertaining tale of love and war.
May 9 - June 14
Wrenn Schmidt
Zach Appelman
Enver Gjokaj
(“The Americans,” “Boardwalk Empire”) as Raina Petkoff
(“Homeland,” Broadway’s War Horse) as Captain Bluntschli
(“Agent Carter,” “Dollhouse”) as Major Sergius Saranoff
(619) 23-GLOBE
Four-time Academy Award Nominee
Marsha Mason
as Catherine Petkoff
(234-5623)
Conrad John Schuck (Broadway’s Annie, Nice Work If You Can Get It) as Major Paul Petkoff
www.TheOldGlobe.org
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Th e 2 2 n d
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2015
eg o Je h Art w is
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-featuring-
l Lipinsk nua y
jfest
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The 22nd Annual Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival
An
Hershey Felder’s
GREAT AMERICAN Songbook Sing-Along One Night Only!
at the Balboa Theatre | Thursday May 21, 7:30pm
Hershey Felder will perform American classics with his signature style while the audience gets to take part.
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
CAN’T GET ENOUGH? JOIN US FOR JFEST!
WINNER OF THE 2015 SAN DIEGO THEATRE CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BEST SOLO PERFORMANCE
The 22nd Annual Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival “A Wandering Feast” SUNDAY, MAY 31 AT 7:30PM IN THE LYCEUM SPACE
JULY 8 - 26, 2015 ON THE LYCEUM STAGE
“Gridlock” PERFORMED BY TEATRO PUNTO Y COMA BY SALOMON MAYA DIRECTED BY PEPE STEPENSKY SATURDAY, JUNE 6 AT 8:45PM IN THE LYCEUM SPACE 14th Annual Klezmer Summit “L’Dor V’Dor” MONDAY, JUNE 8 AT 7:30PM ON THE LYCEUM STAGE
88 SDJewishJournal.com l May 2015
tickets: SDREP.ORG | 619.514.1000
6th Annual Women of Valor BY TODD SALOVEY, LEAH SALOVEY, ALI VITERBI, REBECCA MYERS, AND SARAH PRICE KEATING DIRECTED BY TODD SALOVEY THURSDAY, JUNE 11 AT 7:30PM IN THE LYCEUM SPACE 5th Annual Klezmer Summit North County SUNDAY, JUNE 7 AT 2:00PM AT THE AVO PLAYHOUSE
For a full North County lineup visit SDREP.ORG