From the cheerful campus of Milken Community High School, Los Angeles’ Skid Row can seem worlds away. But the realities of homelessness and squalor plaguing L.A. city streets were brought home for student Lindsy Seidel last year on a “life-changing” visit.
To look at the logo for Big Sunday — a child’s handprint with a heart-shaped center — is to see Charlie Hess’ artful presentation of the community service weekend’s raison d’etre: to lend a helping hand. Since Hess created that logo nine years ago, pro bono, he has continued to lend his hand in many ways, most notably by creating every graphic image for the annual event. This makes Hess one of the key behind-the-scenes people who’ve helped Big Sunday grow from a one-day event with a handful of projects and participants to a weekend-long event, with 50,000 volunteers pitching in at 500 nonprofits, schools and other agencies across Southern California last May.
“For me, the hook was working with kids,” Nick Melvoin responded when asked why he decided to volunteer for Camp Harmony.
“Ask me anything you want,” says Dorothy Greenstein as she leads a group of children through the Museum of Tolerance.
While visiting Israel with The Jewish Federation’s Real Estate and Construction Division last November, Bryan Berkett snuck away from the group to check on a little project he had going.
Nearly two decades ago, many Iranian Jewish families in Southern California would not have dared to publicly acknowledge having children with mental disabilities, let alone bring those children out of their homes. A community-wide social stigma existed, and parents whose children had special needs feared they would be looked down upon and that their other healthy children would not be able to find spouses within the community. Then, 15 years ago, Manijeh N. Nehorai, an Iranian Jewish social worker, quietly became the first person in the community to begin chipping away at this taboo through her volunteer efforts.
Rabbi Yona Landau is sitting in his insurance office in the Beverly-La Brea area, not selling insurance. Landau and one of his two employees spend nearly all of their time running Touch of Kindness, a social service agency Landau helped found in 1977.
It was 2006. Alisa Malki (at left in photo) was hanging out in Caryn Roth’s UCLA dorm room when she told her friend about a nonprofit organization called Challah for Hunger she’d heard about on National Public Radio.
Each year, when we set out our criteria for our annual pantheon of L.A.’s top mensches, we try to find nominees whose good works are, for the most part, unsung.
The Jewish Journal created this list as a response to all those lists extolling fame, money, power and hotness. We honor these special ten because they are just people — menschen, to use the proper Yiddish plural — who understand the power and possibility of just one person.\n\nMeet Gabriel Halimi, Kim Krowne, Manijeh Youabian, Andrew Wolfberg, Susan Corwin, Ari Moss, Richard Braun, Bracha Yael, Jack Matloff and Neil Sheff
