There was a moment while preparing for her bat mitzvah when Rebecca Hutman feared the occasion would not live up to its importance. She wasn’t settled at a shul, and the experience was feeling kind of rote.
As we assembled our sixth annual mensch list we were left to wonder, once more, how to choose from, among others, an 18-year-old volunteer cadet for the LAFD, a pediatric resident who promotes breastfeeding and a woman so generous toward the homeless that she offered a young man shelter in her own home. We are inspired by all these stories.
It’s time for the Jewish Journal’s annual “Mensch” issue, and we need your help. We are looking for people in the Los Angeles area who give of their time and energy to work for the welfare of others in the Jewish community and get little or no recognition for it. Our mensches are unsung heroes who don’t get paid (or don’t get paid near enough) for their charitable work, whose lives are the embodiment of menschlikeit, tzedaka and gemilut hasadim. This isn’t about giving money, but about giving talent, compassion and time.
When Melissa Marantz Nealy died in 2005, her close-knit family was devastated. At 28, Nealy had been diagnosed only a year earlier with a neurodegenerative muscular disorder.
In 2008, Adam Irving, a filmmaker and photographer, left his doctoral program in media studies at the University of Texas to make the transition from theory to practice. He landed in Hollywood with the dream of making films, but soon after his arrival found himself feeling unfulfilled by the vanity within the entertainment industry.
“Is everybody happy today?” Shana Passman cheerfully asked a table of Holocaust survivors eating lunch at Hollywood Temple Beth El at the annual Chanukah party of Café Europa, a social club for Holocaust Survivors run by the Jewish Family Service (JFS).
“Is Rabbi T a crime-fighting rabbi?” That’s what a student asked Pressman Academy Rav Beit Sefer (head school rabbi) Chaim Tureff at a recent question-and-answer session.
Gabriella Axelrad, a luminous 13-year-old with a striking smile, had been on the final stretch of a family bike ride in Grand Teton National Park when a white van appeared out of nowhere and knocked the last breath out of her lithe dancer’s body.
