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Jewish Journal

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January 5, 2017

Betty Cohen: At 95, ‘bionic woman’ still going strong

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

Betty Cohen, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, is unsure if all the time she spends telling her story has amounted to anything. 

“Is it worth it, or do I make a fool of myself?” Cohen says at the conclusion of a recent interview in the apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard that she shares with her daughter, Hedy van der Fluit, and their two dogs, Lady and Ace.

A widow, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, Cohen was born in the Netherlands, interned at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and lost both of her parents to the crematoria. She said she last saw them on May 22, 1944, and has lots of questions for God.

“I ask Him all the time,” she said. “ ‘Why did it happen?’ ”

Cohen has regular speaking engagements at the Museum of Tolerance and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, where her video testimony is featured in the “Tree of Testimony” permanent exhibition.

But that’s not the half of what she’s up to these days. Despite her age, Cohen volunteers every Thursday at the UCLA Medical Center gift shop and has been volunteering at the medical center in some capacity for almost 30 years. It’s one way that she has kept busy, she said, ever since she stopped working for her son’s music retail business 33 years ago at the urging of her children. 

Cohen takes Uber multiple times a day to the various routine destinations in her life, including the medical center and Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown, where she studies Torah every Saturday morning with her daughter and volunteers every Sunday for the synagogue food bank. 

Her work at the hospital began with spending time with young patients. She recalls bonding with a boy with autism before she left for a visit to Holland. Upon her return, the boy was gone. He had died. 

“He was a sick boy,” she said. Afterward, she decided she did not want to volunteer with child patients anymore, so she started visiting patients just out of surgery. As she grew older, she felt the need to do simpler work, and today she helps in the gift shop. 

Among her responsibilities for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple food bank are picking up day-old bagels from Noah’s Bagels on Larchmont Boulevard — her Uber driver always waits while she retrieves them — and helping to distribute fresh vegetables, potatoes, bread and yogurt to food bank visitors. She said she is grateful to have somewhere to go every Sunday morning and enjoys her relationship with the other volunteers as well as the regular guests at the food bank.

She goes most places by Uber and sits in the front passenger seat, a chance to get to know her drivers. Just back from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where she related her survivor story to a group of 35 law enforcement officials, she said the Uber driver who brought her home was a young Israeli man who wanted to take her to Las Vegas. 

The sprightly Cohen exercises regularly at the senior center in Culver City, despite having a pacemaker, hearing aids and two new hips. She calls herself the “bionic woman” and says she talks to God every night — that she is ready to go as soon as He’ll have her.

Her daughter and roommate, who is a high school teacher, says no one is more deserving than her mother of being recognized for good deeds in the local community.

“She’s one of a kind,” she said.

Betty Cohen: At 95, ‘bionic woman’ still going strong Read More »

Neo-Nazi website: Hamas member will speak at armed march in Montana on MLK Day

Leave a Comment / United States /

A neo-Nazi website said it has filed the paperwork for an armed neo-Nazi march designed to harass the Montana Jewish community of Whitefish.

The march was moved to Jan. 16, a Monday and the national holiday day set aside to observe Martin Luther King Day this year. The march had originally been set for the day before.

Andrew Anglin, who runs the Daily Stormer website, posted a photo of the filed application on Thursday. The Whitefish City Clerk’s Office told the Forward that it had not received an application, and that what was on the website appeared not to be complete.

Anglin wrote in a post published Thursday that nationalist groups from the United Kingdom, Sweden, France and Greece will attend the march. He also confirmed that “a representative of Hamas will be in attendance, and will give a speech about the international threat of the Jews.”

He said that participants will march through the center of Whitefish, and end at Memorial Park, where several people will speak.

Whitefish is home to white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank, as well as his mother. In November, Spencer spoke at a white supremacist event in Washington, D.C., celebrating President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in which he called out “Hail Trump!” and was greeted by Nazi salutes.

The Daily Stormer published a blog post last month calling for followers to “take action” against Jews in Whitefish by writing and calling them with anti-Semitic messages. The post claimed that Jewish residents were “threatening” the business run by Spencer’s mother in the town.

The post included the names, phone numbers and addresses of Jewish Whitefish residents, as well as their photos emblazoned with yellow stars. It also showed the Twitter handle and photo of a child. Along with using a number of anti-Semitic slurs, the post warned readers against using “violence or threats of violence or anything close to that.”

“All I have asked for is an apology and a vow to stop harassing Richard Spencer’s mother in the future,” Anglin wrote Thursday, saying that his request has been refused by human rights activist Tanya Gersh and the Love Lives Here organization. Gersh is a local real estate agent.

“This is absolutely insane, and shows the mentality of Jews,” Anglin said of the lack of an apology.

“And they will rue the day, as they see two hundred skinhead Alt-Right Nazis marching with a guy from Hamas carrying machine guns through the center of their town!”

There are about 100 known Jewish households in Whitefish and nearby Kalispell, part of the Flathead Valley.

Montana lawmakers and faith leaders have issued statements in support of the Whitefish community.

Whitefish has a population of about 6,000 full-time residents and is home to a ski resort on Big Mountain called Whitefish Mountain Resort.

Neo-Nazi website: Hamas member will speak at armed march in Montana on MLK Day Read More »

Obama: Pan-Islamic wolf in progressive clothing

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The December 23, 2016 UN vote proves that President Barack Obama only paid lip service to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict during his eight years in office. Turns out that this proud progressive's real goal all along was to bring the last colonial outpost in the world to heel. 

Since it's not politically correct for a US President to call for the demise of the Jewish state, a death by a thousand UN resolutions will have to suffice.

Next stop: international sanctions against Israel.

The Obama administration's decision to abstain on UN Resolution 2334 has even outraged leading Congressional Democrats, who maintain that a two-state solution must be negotiated directly between the Israelis and Palestinians. 

However, even good liberals like Jerrold Nadler, Richard Blumenthal, Hakeem Jeffries, Adam Schiff, Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden are missing the point. The abstention wasn't merely a drastic change in tactics, meant to force Israel to accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state without direct negotiations. Rather, the UN vote was a vote for Arab rejectionism, a codification of a perpetual state of conflict between the oppressor Jews and the oppressed Muslims.

Single handedly, President Obama has sought to reverse the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that facilitated one of the great land grabs in history. As a result of this deal, Britain and France divvied up much of the post-World War I Middle East.

In the next significant example of colonial meddling in the Middle East, a Hashemite from Arabia, Prince Abdullah I, was convinced by Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill to not aid brother Faisal’s war against the new French Mandate in Syria.

In return, Abdullah I was rewarded with 75% of the new British Mandate of Palestine.

Long before the two-state solution was embraced by effete diplomats and tenured college professors, there was the 1936 British Peel Commission that would have divided the remaining 25% of Mandatory Palestine into two nations: one Arab, one Jewish.

Setting the stage for the next 80 years of Jewish compromises being met with Arab rejectionism, the expansionist minded Abdullah I spurned the deal, despite early Zionists leaders' reluctant acceptance of the Peel Commission.

United by a desire to rid the region of European Jewish interlopers, Arab leaders overcame their rivalries and joined forces to violently protest the British administration of the Palestine Mandate.

Another swipe against colonial intervention was the UN partition plan of 1947, which Zionist leaders approved and the Arab world reacted to by launching another war to make the region Judenrein.

However, desperate for international legitimacy, Israel continued to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules of statecraft, instead of annexing Judea in Samaria in 1956, 1967, or 1973.

Yet basing international relations on a playbook written at 10 Downing Street inadvertently provided fodder for Barack Obama, Security of State John Kerry and other self-described progressives, who see the world through an anti-colonialist lens. Israel's desire to simply exist among the family of nations is perceived as a continuation of arbitrarily drawn imperial borders that are to blame for all that's wrong with the Middle East today.

Based on his outsourcing of US Middle East policy to Shiite Iran and Sunni Turkey, along with his lackluster support for the Kurds, Christians and Jews in the Middle East, one can posit that Barack Obama is at peace with the idea of pan-Arabism. 

Guided by an anti-colonialist belief that rich European countries got rich by looting the indigenous populations of poor Middle Eastern countries, Obama took a small step to right this historic injustice at the United Nations, when he launched a direct assault on Israel's right to exist.

Obama: Pan-Islamic wolf in progressive clothing Read More »

The Mensch List 2016

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

For our 12th annual mensch list, we once again invited your nominations of extraordinary volunteers in our community, and the outpouring of suggestions of amazing people was overwhelming. What we offer here is just a sampling of the people who give so much to make our world a better place. If your nominees were not included this time, please remember, we’d welcome those names, and more, next year. We are inspired by all of these stories and hope their examples can serve as motivation for the rest of us.

Ethan Youssefzadeh: Filling a gap in Jewish education

Barbara Dobkin: Holding open doors to elite universities

Lindsay Schacht: Senior citizens are better together with her

Mel Wacks: A Jewish Hall of Fame — in his living room

Sara Zaghi: Helping the homeless through jean therapy

Dr. Justin Zaghi: An ounce of prevention

Bruce Rosen: Driven by a desire to combat hunger

Victoria Nodiff-Netanel: Her horses gallop to the emotional rescue

Laurie and Steve Keleman: Volunteerism, built for two

Betty Cohen: At 95, ‘bionic woman’ still going strong

The Mensch List 2016 Read More »

Wiesenthal Center’s Hier defends decision to appear at Trump inauguration

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Sitting in his office at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he’s founder and dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier pushed a stack of printouts across his desk — blessings and invocations he’s delivered on behalf of four sitting U.S. presidents.

“I’ve done invocations for President [Bill] Clinton, both Bushes, Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I wouldn’t make any exception.”

The Dec. 28 announcement that Hier would offer a benediction at the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump — the first rabbi to appear at an inauguration since Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk at Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985 — was greeted immediately with controversy: Why would the head of an organization dedicated to fighting hate bless a politician whose candidacy faced repeated accusations of ethnic and religious intolerance?

A petition on Change.org calling on Hier to back out gathered more than 2,000 signatures in three days.

“By speaking at his inauguration, especially as a hero of a half-century battling hate and intolerance, we feel you lend those elements of your ‘brand’ — if inadvertently — to help create a smokescreen for Trump,” the petition reads.

But Hier remains unfazed. For him, the decision to appear as one of six faith leaders at the Jan. 20 swearing-in — and the only non-Christian — was an easy one. The peaceful transition of power is “the trademark of democracy,” he said, and he was honored to receive the invitation. 

“Who’s sitting on the platform [at Trump’s inauguration]?” he asked. “His worst opponents, sitting in the peaceful transfer of power: Hillary and Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, President and Mrs. Obama, George W. Bush and his wife — and they say that I shouldn’t partake. Come, come! Isn’t that the height of hypocrisy?”

His appearance shouldn’t be viewed as an endorsement, Hier said. He pointed out that he criticized Trump during the campaign, for instance when the candidate suggested a registry of Muslims in the United States.

“I’ve stated my views and I was invited to give the prayer anyway,” he said.

What’s more, he said, his appearance won’t impede his willingness to criticize the Trump administration in the future, just as he has criticized past presidents. For instance, in 1985, the Wiesenthal Center was among the most vocal opponents of then-President Ronald Reagan’s decision to visit a German cemetery where Nazi troops were buried, despite Hier sharing a close personal relationship with the president. 

“The same will happen under the Trump administration,” he told the Journal. “But what we’re not going to do is play this game that only when the president of the United States is a Democrat, then everyone should go to the inauguration.”

He said he would not be swayed by critics.

“They’re entitled to their points of view,” he said. “They’re not influencing me. Marvin Hier is going to the inauguration. They’re not influencing me at all. And they need to know, tremendous amounts of people have emailed me and called me and said, ‘Don’t you dare listen to these people.’ ”

He addressed concerns about the so-called alt-right, a loose-knit group of white supremacists emboldened by the Trump campaign, saying right-wing anti-Semites have received too much attention in recent months relative to anti-Semitic criticism of Israel on the left. 

“We’re very concerned about the alt-right,” he said. “We’re also concerned about the loonies on the left that never get any play, the ones who hate Israel. … Both extremes can do great harm to the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

President Barack Obama’s decision to allow a U.N. Security Council resolution to pass condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank was the “biggest anti-Israel thing ever done,” he said, though he stopped short of labeling it anti-Semitic. 

Hier is optimistic that the next administration will represent a change in tone.

“If I were Hamas, I’d be very nervous,” he said, referring to the terrorist group that governs the Gaza Strip. “The new president is going to do the opposite of President Obama. He’s going to mention Hamas 1,000 times and forget to mention the settlements, evening the score of the way it’s been all these years.”

Hier dismissed news reports linking his inauguration appearance to $35,000 in donations made to the Simon Wiesenthal Center by the family of Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

“They’re longtime supporters of Simon Wiesenthal,” Hier said of the Kushners, whom he considers friends. “It’s got nothing to do [with the inauguration]. They were supporters before Ivanka met Jared.”

He declined to preview his remarks except to say that he would draw on an argument by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik regarding a discrepancy in Exodus. According to the Torah, God observed the Israelites’ suffering in Egypt when Moses fled after striking down a cruel slave driver, but didn’t send the prophet to their aid until 60 years later. “What’s this business of the respite of 60 years?” Hier said.

“God waits on his human partners,” he explained. “If his human partners are not willing to assume their proper role and act, He’s prepared to just wait it out — 60 years, 600 years, 6,000 years. So one of the themes will be that when a human being is born, they do not collect Social Security at birth, because the expectation is: Do something first. That’s the point.”

Wiesenthal Center’s Hier defends decision to appear at Trump inauguration Read More »

Ethan Youssefzadeh: Filling a gap in Jewish education

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

Although he graduated from YULA Boys High School five years ago, Ethan Youssefzadeh is a familiar face to current students on campus — and to teens at several other schools and synagogues on the Westside.

The 22-year-old volunteer has run popular discussion groups about Jewish theology and ritual for the past three years, trying to impart wisdom to any young Jew in his community who will listen.  And he is doing that while studying for the MCAT exams, preparing to apply to medical school.  

“I want to be a doctor just as much as I want to inspire people to be faithful to their religion,” he said. 

His “Joy of Being a Jew” (JOBAJ) program, a weekly hourlong discussion forum, is held at his alma mater, as well as Beverly Hills High School and Link Kollel and Shul in Pico-Robertson.  In all, more than 100 young Jews participate, informally discussing matters of faith. 

The class at YULA on Mondays started three years ago with about 15 students — all boys — and has more than doubled since, Youssefzadeh said. About a year ago, he began teaching the same class on Tuesdays at Beverly Hills High School, a much bigger school, and about 75 boys and girls attend, he reported. 

Meetings are held in classrooms during lunchtime. Youssefzadeh, a lifelong member of Ahavat Shalom near his home in Pico-Robertson, lectures on topics such as “Why we pray” or “Is there a God?” then opens the floor to questions. He also makes his case for why students should consider a gap year between high school and college to study at a yeshiva in Israel, like he did. 

The recent UCLA graduate feels that his program fills a hole in Jewish education. “It shouldn’t just be rabbis who are doing the teaching in the Jewish community,” he said. “I just think it should also be people like me.” 

In high school, Youssefzadeh was student council president and helped lead the cross-country team. He was someone people turned to for guidance — a leader. “That’s what people kept telling me,” he said. However, he was searching for guidance in Judaic studies, questioning aspects of his faith, the logic behind certain rituals, and found turning to rabbis difficult. 

After high school, like many of his YULA peers, he spent an unforgettable year at a yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Old City. “My whole perception of Judaism changed,” he said. “I came back inspired. I found myself.”  Youssefzadeh now prays daily and has found a “more meaningful life.” 

Yarmulke clipped atop his head, Youssefzadeh often breaks into a smile mid-sentence. Perhaps it’s no surprise his JOBAJ program is reaching significant numbers of high school students — he’s not far removed from being one of them. 

To entice participation, Youssefzadeh even supplies lunch for meetings — pizza, burgers, kosher Chinese. He estimates that he has spent about $3,000 of his own money saved up from summers as a Jewish camp counselor. 

“The big advantage I have is that I’m young and I can relate,” he said. “They open up. Some of them might be afraid to say to a teacher or a rabbi, ‘I don’t know if I believe in God.’ The kids feel very comfortable with me and they really appreciate the class.”  

Until this past summer, he balanced teaching and speaking engagements at local synagogues — largely a result of the success of JOBAJ — with the hectic schedule of a college student. Since graduating from UCLA, he has been spending more than 25 hours per week studying for the MCAT and will apply to medical schools soon.

If Youssefzadeh starts medical school, he knows he will have to back away from his religion classes for a while; he is hopeful one of the teens in his classes or a JOBAJ alum will take over. But he knows it won’t be the end. Once he finishes his medical residency, he knows he wants “to dedicate time to outreach and inspiring the Jewish future.”

Ethan Youssefzadeh: Filling a gap in Jewish education Read More »

Barbara Dobkin: Holding open doors to elite universities

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

Even for the brightest high school students in East L.A.’s low-income areas, Barbara Dobkin says, the idea of attending an Ivy League college may be akin to traveling to Mars. And yet with Dobkin’s help, students who otherwise wouldn’t have dreamed of applying to schools across the country have been accepted to elite universities — Columbia, Yale and Stanford, to name a few.

As a volunteer counselor at the nonprofit College Match, she provides free college advice to gifted, low-income high schoolers in the Los Angeles area. Her mission is getting those kids not only to aim high, but also to hit their lofty targets.

“There are such incredible benefits to one’s life from going to one of these schools. It’s an incredible experience,” she said. “But so many of these [underprivileged] kids get no help whatsoever.”

 Dobkin, 64, a retired dancer and dance teacher who lives in Westwood, first got involved with College Match 10 years ago through a friend who had started the program. She began to help  students with supplemental essays and fell in love with the work. Describing herself as a “closet writer,” Dobkin was happy to exercise her literary skills in order to make difference. 

Now Dobkin has 10 students in her ken; she meets one-on-one with each of them weekly, guiding them through the labyrinthine admissions process and finding schools that suit their academic interests. She also builds relationships with college admissions officers, who she said want to diversify their student bodies.

Even with a decade of experience, Dobkin is still astounded by the adversity her students face, and is visibly moved by their drive to overcome it. 

 “They have enormous family responsibilities: They are often the ones baby-sitting the younger kids, the ones cooking and cleaning the house until their parents come back from work.

 “The amount of grit, perseverance and commitment that these kids have is second to nobody. It’s not just smarts,” she said, her eyes welling up.

 Trying to get to the bottom of why one student was struggling with math, Dobkin learned that the girl had bounced around several schools while she and her family were living in their car. “She said, ‘I’m not special,’ ” Dobkin recalled. “I had to tell her, ‘Yes, you are! They need to know that about you.’ ”

 The connection Dobkin builds with her seniors is strong. “In a lot of ways, we become like life mentors to these kids,” she said.

She often stays in touch with her College Match students while they are in college. Some have shared with her the strange experience of being a minority in the classroom for the first time.

One former student, now a Gates Millennium Scholar at an Ivy League school, told her that a professor had asked students to share their experiences with poverty. They talked about their summer programs in Africa — none of them realizing that a classmate came from a family struggling to make ends meet. 

The impact of her work, she believes, transcends a college acceptance letter or a diploma. “If you ask most of these kids why they want to do what they’re doing, it’s so they can give their families a better life,” she said. “These kids come back to their communities and lift up the next group.”

 Dobkin, who attended Temple University, has two daughters who graduated from California Institute of the Arts and Hampshire College, and grandchildren who live in New York. When they visited for the holidays, she joked that she had to lock herself in a closet to get her college recommendations done.

 Yet Dobkin insists she’s gotten as much out of the program as she’s put into it.

 “You have to have a purpose that gets you out of bed in the morning and that matters,” she said. “And I’m really lucky that I have this, because it gives my life meaning.”

Barbara Dobkin: Holding open doors to elite universities Read More »

Lindsay Schacht: Senior citizens are better together with her

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

Lindsay Schacht was interested right away when her high school teachers announced that a group helping senior citizens was seeking volunteers. The Better Together program wanted Shalhevet High School students to visit and talk with residents of Beverly Hills Carmel North and South, two senior living homes.

Schacht, a junior at the time, and 11 other students started visiting the facilities once a week. She then began to take a leadership role with Better Together, and helped it grow. This year, the 17-year-old from Valley Village is the coordinator for the group, which now has 45 members and goes to the homes twice a week, an hour each time. Besides chatting with the seniors, they bring activities, costumes for Purim, and fun shtick for the holidays.

“The seniors show so much gratitude,” Schacht said. “They say they love our visits. We don’t just leave feeling good. We also learn so much from them. You get a real connection.”

Schacht hears touching stories from the seniors. Among them, a couple who have been married for 70 years told the volunteers about how they survived the Holocaust.

“They were best friends since the age of 5 and were separated during the war. Abe became a freedom fighter and Regina lived as a Christian in someone’s home until the war was over. After the war, the two were reunited and married almost immediately,” Schacht recounted. “Abe told us this story with such love and affection toward Regina and made sure to emphasize their luck and how much he loved her. He told us he buys her gifts all the time and loves her more and more each day.”

The seniors don’t shy away from giving advice to the students, many of whom are going to college. Schacht said, “They always tell us the biggest thing is to follow your dreams. They bring it up all the time. They say if you have a set goal in life, nothing will ever stop you.”

Before her involvement with Better Together, Schacht was a volunteer for Tomchei Shabbos, which gives to the needy of Los Angeles, and Friendship Circle, an organization that assists children with special needs. As a student at Shalhevet, she is required to fulfill 100 chesed (loving-kindness) hours before she graduates; she completed hers in the middle of junior year. Now, she participates in Better Together because she enjoys it.

Schacht always has had a connection with seniors; she said her grandmother is one of her best friends. “My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor and probably the strongest and smartest woman I know.”

To ensure that the program continues next year after she graduates and takes a gap year at the Israeli program Kivunim, Schacht is delegating some responsibilities to other Shalhevet students.

Natalie Weiss, director of admission for the school, credits Schacht for getting Better Together off the ground. “There weren’t many kids doing it. She encouraged dozens of kids to participate for the first time.”

In general, Weiss said she’s noticed that Schacht always seems affable toward others. “Lindsay is a really spirited and positive person,” she said. “She looks for ways to contribute. She’s the first person to say hi and welcome kids who are visiting the school for the day, and will offer to answer any questions they have.”

Though Schacht dedicates much of her time and energy to Better Together, she said she feels as if the elderly there give back just as much.

“I bring a lot of what I learn through the program to school. In my class, we talk about the notion that the Jews are the Chosen People. I asked the seniors what they thought about it, and they all said they were so proud to be Jewish. They were taken aback that anyone wouldn’t be. Their Jewish, national pride is something I learned from them.”

Lindsay Schacht: Senior citizens are better together with her Read More »

Mel Wacks: A Jewish Hall of Fame — in his living room

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

To reach the Jewish-American Hall of Fame, exit the 101 Freeway in Woodland Hills and find the home of Mel and Esther Wacks on a sloping street where the only noise is the rumble of the nearby highway. Ring the buzzer and ask for Mel. 

If Wacks is agreeable — and that’s a personality trait of his — he’ll conduct you through the living room, a cozy space with hardwood floors and a gabled ceiling. There, across the room from a portrait he drew of Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a trophy case of dark wood, housing a number of fine, striking medals. Each depicts a prominent event or person in the Jewish-American community. Those honored so far range from the likes of Elie Wiesel to Houdini to Barbra Streisand.

The medals in the case, along with a few others on a nearby bookshelf, are the closest to a physical location the Jewish-American Hall of Fame has. For the most part, it exists as a website, amuseum.org, where visitors can purchase copies of the medals Wacks keeps in his home, which is not generally open to the public. 

In the 47 years he’s been operating the hall, Wacks has raised $250,000 by selling the medals, all of which he’s donated to a handful of Jewish and historical causes. 

“It’s a very modest project,” he said in his living room. “It’s just been me.”

Wacks, 78, became a coin collector when he was 10 and his father handed him a leather pouch full of coins. (He still has the pouch. “Ask my wife — I never throw anything away,” he said.)

His passion hasn’t faded. During an interview, he handed this reporter a shriveled black object, vaguely round and barely discernible as a coin, which he identified as a 2,000-year-old Judean “prutah.” 

“It’s like holding history in your hands. … What could be more exciting?” he said.

“You can get this for $25!” he said of the coin. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t get this for a bar mitzvah present.” 

Wacks left a long career in electrical engineering to be a professional numismatist, or coin collector. But he was still working as an electrical engineer near Sacramento when he had a chance encounter that would lead to the creation of the Jewish-American Hall of Fame.

One day in the mid-1970s, he and Esther drove to the now-defunct Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Striking up a conversation with a museum employee, Mel mentioned that he was a coin collector. The man turned out to be Seymour Fromer, the museum director, and he brought on Wacks as the museum’s numismatic consultant.

As the 1976 bicentennial of the founding of the United States was approaching, commemorative medals were growing popular. The idea inspired Wacks to begin commissioning medals to commemorate milestones in Jewish-American history, and he’s done it every year since.

Over that span, he has given $171,000 to the Magnes Museum, which folded into UC Berkeley in 2010. In 2001, the Jewish-American Hall of Fame became a division of the American Jewish Historical Society, and much of the proceeds since have gone to that organization, along with the Virginia Holocaust Museum and the American Numismatic Society.

The medals have brought Wacks some acclaim. For instance, he’s met Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine and was honored by the hall in 1980. And when Wacks sent Ruth Bader Ginsburg a medal he had commissioned to celebrate her appointment to the Supreme Court, she wrote back to ask for extras: Her mother-in-law was in the hospital, and Ginsberg wanted one as a gift for her.

Occasionally, a group or an individual will get in touch hoping to see the museum, not knowing that it’s actually a small wooden case in the living room of the Wacks’ home. Of course, he’s generally happy to oblige.

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Sara Zaghi: Helping the homeless through jean therapy

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mensches, News, The Mensch List /

Sara Zaghi, a 19-year-old sophomore at UCLA, is committed to bettering the lives of homeless youth by providing them with something she believes everyone should have: a pair of jeans.

“Homeless teens don’t have the same clothes as everyone; they don’t fit in with everyone else. It’s not just about giving them jeans — which is important to help clothe them — but about battling these stereotypes about homelessness,” Zaghi said. “I think it’s important, a great way to give back, and I think it’s super easy, something everyone has and something everyone can do.”

January will mark six years since Zaghi started the citywide jeans collection drive as a partnership with Teens for Jeans, an initiative of the youth-oriented nonprofit dosomething.org, which says jeans are one of the most requested items among homeless youth. 

Working with 20 local businesses, 10 schools and major businesses, including Buffalo Exchange, a used clothing store chain, Zaghi has collected approximately 16,000 pairs of jeans in the past five years. She developed the idea as a freshman at Taft Charter High School in Woodland Hills, where she served on student government, edited the school newspaper and organized a fashion show.

“I was literally in, like, every club,” she said of her years at Taft.

Her focus on social change is not limited to helping the homeless. In 2014, again working with dosomething.org, she created the national campaign Shower Songs, a water conservation effort that involves compiling a five-minute playlist of songs and sharing the playlist with friends. The idea is to listen to music in the shower and reduce one’s showering time to the length of the playlist. 

“I’m, like, at 15 minutes, which is saying a lot,” she said. “I used to take really long showers.”

A resident of Tarzana and the youngest of three siblings (her brother Justin also made the Mensch List this year), Zaghi is a member of Valley Beth Shalom, where she’s become a leader in the temple’s United Synagogue Youth tikkun olam committee.

“Being involved in the Jewish community is really important to me, especially fulfilling tikkun olam,” said Zaghi, who currently is on the board of the Persian Community at Hillel at UCLA. “Our duty is to do mitzvot.”

Zaghi, who is studying communications at UCLA and hopes to work in entertainment pubic relations, interned last summer for Kris Jenner, matriarch of the Kardashian clan.

“I really look up to her,” Zaghi said of Jenner. “A lot of people think of the Kardashians in a bad light, but I truly think Kris is very smart in the way she has handled the family and their businesses in the past few years, and they really turned this one opportunity” — the reality show, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” —  “into a lifetime of success for the whole family.”

Zaghi’s family’s business, meanwhile, is Subway restaurants. Her father owns three, and Zaghi has helped out often in the stores.

“I’ve grown up with Subway,” she said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zaghi relaxes by watching “Shark Tank,” a reality show featuring entrepreneurs who pitch their ideas to successful business people.

How would she pitch her jeans drive to the panel of “sharks”?

“I would just pitch it as a very easy way to give back, and also there are a lot of opportunities for them to partner with any big businesses they have as a promotional social action campaign,” she said. “That’s the angle I would go with, especially since all the sharks have connections with clothing stores or teen brands, which could help us with the drive.”

Sara Zaghi: Helping the homeless through jean therapy Read More »