Teens Pulling Their Weight on Big Sunday

You know how when you put on a new pair of socks, and they’re all soft and comfortable, you feel warm and pampered and sort of protected?

Most homeless people don’t know that feeling, and that’s something that bothered Sam Klebanow, a seventh-grader at Buckley School in Sherman Oaks.

So, for a social action project for his April 10 bar mitzvah, Sam decided to collect new socks for the homeless, and he thought the best way to gather and distribute the socks would be through Big Sunday, a citywide volunteer weekend that originated 12 years ago at Sam’s synagogue, Temple Israel of Hollywood.

More than 50,000 people are expected to volunteer to work at some 500 projects across Southern California the weekend of May 1-2. (A couple of years ago, Big Sunday became a weekend-long event but didn’t change its name.) Projects range from building houses for gibbons at a preserve in Santa Clarita to dozens of renovation and cleanup projects at schools and shelters. Volunteers will bathe basset hounds, sing for seniors, heal the bay (and the river, and the creek), cook for the needy, make quilts for wounded military personnel and take recovering addicts on a tour of the Museum of Tolerance.

Volunteers sign up through temples or churches or schools, and anyone can sign up individually at