The city’s top Jewish lay leaders, professionals, rabbis, heads of organizations, and political leaders packed into the Cotsen Auditorium at the Skirball Cultural Center on Dec. 2 to give a giant group hug to John Fishel, who this month ends a nearly 18-year tenure as president and CEO of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.
Tribute dinner chair Terri Smooke opened the evening, welcoming Fishel, his wife Karen and their 22-year-old daughter Jessica, as well as some of the many VIPs in attendance, among them County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Consul General of Israel Jacob Dayan, Councilmembers Wendy Gruel and Paul Koretz, State Assemblymember Michael Feuer, Beverly Hills Mayor Nancy Krasne, Jewish Federations of North America President Jerry Silverman and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Executive Director Michael Novick.
The event raised $400,000 for the newly established John Fishel Scholarship Fund for Community Service. While details have not yet been worked out, Fishel hopes the fund will go toward supporting young adults who wish to embark nationally or internationally on social service projects, such as connecting with Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union or Argentina, helping cities rebound after natural disasters or building infrastructure in developing countries. The fund plays to Fishel’s dual passions for developing young leaders and international social justice.
Valley Beth Shalom’s Rabbi Harold Schulweis highlighted those drives in his opening benediction, which focused on Fishel’s trip last month to Congo with Jewish World Watch. Jessica Fishel set a tone of warmth for the evening in her tribute to her father’s idealism and commitment. She credits him with inspiring her current work at Beit T’Shuvah, a home for recovering addicts, and Vista Del Mar, which serves at-risk youth.
Carol Koransky, Federation vice president and director of the Valley Alliance, called Fishel a dedicated and compassionate leader who won the respect and affection of his staff. Consul General Dayan credited Fishel for his work in developing the Los Angeles-Tel Aviv partnership, which has become a nationwide model for fostering personal connections between Americans and Israelis.
In a video tribute, lay leaders voiced their appreciation for Fishel’s work in developing the KOREH L.A. literacy program. They commended his cool in the many crises that hit during his tenure, including the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the 1999 shooting at the North Valley JCC, Hurricane Katrina and crises in Israel.
All of the chairmen who served with Fishel were present: Stanley Gold, Michael Koss, Harriet Hochman, Jake Farber, Todd Morgan, Lionel Bell, Herb Gelfand, Irwin Field and Terry Bell (in reverse chronological order), as well as dinner vice chair Laurel Warner and tribute journal chair Nancy Bell.
Fishel himself thanked his staff, lay leaders and family, and offered four telling images he collected in the last three months.
He described a trip to the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland, where he and a group of American Jews, many of them children of survivors, grappled with memory and reconciliation. He painted a picture of a school in Tel Aviv, where many children of foreign workers — most of them not Jewish — seek a more dignified life in the Jewish state. And he spoke with emotion of his recent trip to Congo, where he heard firsthand the horrors of people who are suffering through that country’s genocide.
His final image was of the lobby at 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Federation headquarters, where non-Jews and Jews of all kinds enter for hope, encouragement and to work to make the world a better place.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he concluded, “these images are a microcosm of the world I have inhabited here in Los Angeles and throughout the globe in the last 17 and a half years, and I want to thank each and every one of you for offering me that privilege.”
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