Jonathan Boyer may be the Happy Minyan’s unsung hero, though he’s more than happy to sing the shul’s praises. The Shlomo Carlebach-inspired synagogue was launched some 17 years ago to answer the need for an aufruf for a friend of Boyer’s who was unaffiliated at the time.
As a third-year pediatric resident at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles who works an average of 80 hours per week, Dr. Jonathan Goldfinger could use a break, you would think. Too bad there’s so much else that needs to be done — fighting obesity, lowering the risk of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and reducing the rate of infection for babies, for example.
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.
Izzie Levinson, 16, grew up in a family that is devoted to community service: Her father, David Levinson, is the founder of Big Sunday, an extensive regional volunteer program that grew out of a Mitzvah Day project.
Getting old, as Bette Davis famously said, is not for sissies. And developing a terminal illness, as Davis later learned, is no picnic either. Yet while most of us fear sickness, aging and the end of life, hospice volunteer Michael Curtis finds solace and purpose — pleasure, even — in being with the elderly as they face death.
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.
For the sake of his career, Jack Voorzanger worked to leave the horrors he endured during the Holocaust behind, but through his volunteer work at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he has demonstrated his commitment to “never forgetting.” He spends 15 hours each week digitizing the family photo collections of victims and survivors.
Southern California’s Iranian Jewish community has long been divided over a host of social and religious issues, often discouraging hopes among the elders for community continuity. Eman Esmailzadeh, a 27-year-old engineer and community activist, is one of a small number of young people who are now focused on reuniting this immigrant community, in part by encouraging teenagers to identify with their Judaism.
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