June 14, 2018

I recently trespassed on David Rockefeller’s estate in Maine. I blame my father. Dad was an adventurous man who preferred the road less traveled.

His influence explains how I searched for and discovered the perfect secluded cliffside trail, which I later learned belonged to the Rockefellers.

My deceased father was there in spirit, cheering me on.

My memories of Dad inspired me to ask some well-known Angelenos to share stories about their fathers.

Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Emerita Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills
My father, Len Geller, grew up in New York. He was a very gentle soul who believed he was brought into the world to make other people’s lives easier, and that gave him comfort and purpose.  

“My father believed that if people could really listen to each other, most of the evils of the world would disappear.” — Rabbi Laura Geller

When I was a child, my parents met with their synagogue’s social action committee. I snuck downstairs to listen and heard someone say they were “selling their home as a straw.” To me, a straw was something you drank chocolate milk with. My father explained that a straw was a white person who bought a house from another white person in order to sell it to a Black person, to help integrate housing. “I thought this was a Jewish meeting,” I said. “What does that have to do with being Jewish?” My father replied, “That is what it means to be Jewish.” 

While in college, I had a conflict with my father, and he wrote to me, “There is nothing more important than our relationship. I’m coming to visit you this weekend so we can talk this problem through and resolve it.” We talked, and the crisis evaporated. I learned from my father the importance of being gentle and kind in intimate relationships. He believed that if people could really listen to each other, most of the evils of the world would disappear.

Zev Yaroslavsky, former L.A. County Supervisor
My father, David Yaroslavsky, came from Ukraine to New York and eventually to Boyle Heights, where I grew up. He taught at Hebrew High and was a founder of the Hebrew Teachers Union here. 

He was an avid reader, and not at all into sports. Nevertheless, for Father’s Day in 1959, I gave him two tickets to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game at the Coliseum. Despite the fact that Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Ted Williams were playing, my father had no interest in the game. He brought all four of his Yiddish newspapers to read. While 99,000 people were cheering the game, my father sat, his head down, reading his Yiddish newspapers. 

My father had a great influence on me. He was both ideological and pragmatic, which I’d like to think I am. We didn’t always agree on politics, and I honed my debating skills with him at the Shabbat dinner table.  

He was 70 when he died suddenly in 1973. You think they’re going to be there forever, and I thought I’d have more time with him.

Ron Meyer, vice chairman of NBC Universal

My father, Edward Meyer, grew up in Berlin. In 1938, he escaped and was penniless when he arrived in America.  

He was a great father and friend, and hard working. He sold ladies’ dresses in towns across Arizona, California and Washington, traveling five out of six weeks. We never had any money. When he was home, he wasn’t on vacation. He still worked. It was a grueling lifestyle.

After I dropped out of school at 15, I sometimes drove my father on sales trips. He could not have worked any harder than he did. When he made a commitment, he kept it. He treated people the way he wanted to be treated. I hope I learned these things from him.

My father worried about me endlessly. When I was in the Marines, he worried that I’d be shot. When I dropped out of school, he worried about how I’d make a living. He lived long enough to see me in a coat and tie, working at William Morris. He was very relieved that I was on the road to something.

Sharon Nazarian, Anti-Defamation League senior vice president, and Younes and Soraya Nazarian Family Foundation presidentMy father, Younes Nazarian, is 87. He was born in Tehran, as was I. My father experienced tremendous anti-Semitism in Iran, as a child and later as a businessman. We left in 1978, lived in Israel for six months, and moved to Los Angeles in 1979. 

My father lost his own father when he was 3 years old. He was raised by his mother, who was a feminist and not bound by the norms of Persian culture.  

He was very engaged with his children in an Iranian-Jewish culture where that was the role of only the mother. He played an important role in nurturing and shaping his two daughters and two sons, raising us to be confident and self-assured. In his successful business, he often had international visitors for dinner, and we children were invited to join them. In the Iranian culture, children were not to be heard or seen, but during my father’s conversations with his guests he would ask our opinions. This left an important mark on all of us, instilling the idea that our opinions mattered.

Knowing about the anti-Semitism that my father experienced in Iran is intimately interwoven in my career of looking at anti-Semitism in the world today. My father has been a role model for me — my North Star. I hold him and his life story as a guiding light for me.

Ellie Kahn is an oral historian and documentary filmmaker.

Last September, I was at my annual writing retreat in Albuquerque, N.M., but it was the first year the gathering overlapped with Rosh Hashanah, so I went looking for a synagogue to attend services.  

Nahalat Shalom called itself  “a spiritual and cultural center for Jewish Renewal,” and the community welcomed us with open arms. Fifteen writers from our group (some Jewish, some not) attended a moving erev Rosh Hashanah service with close to 100 local residents. 

The president of the synagogue, Emet Ma’ayan, made his way onstage and welcomed our group in front of the entire congregation with a powerful message of inclusion. “After all,” he noted, “I used to be a woman.”

I also learned that Ma’ayan, 50, founded and runs a nonprofit called Fathers Building Futures, which helps incarcerated men find jobs once they have been released from prison. Among the skills the program teaches is how to build kosher all-wooden caskets, which are then sold to local funeral homes.

After I returned to Los Angeles, Ma’ayan agreed to a telephone interview to discuss his extraordinary Jewish journey and his work with Fathers Building Futures — a fitting tribute for Father’s Day. 

Born Dina Berger in New York, Ma’ayan said that “like many lesbians, somewhere along the way I realized it wasn’t just about my sexual orientation, it was a gender issue, too.”

Ma’ayan had been in a long-term relationship with another woman for 14 years before he began transitioning five years ago. He had a stepson with her as well as twins. Their relationship broke up not long after he began transitioning. 

Taking a small amount of testosterone, he started to feel better and shortly thereafter had chest reconstruction surgery. He decided to change his name from Dina to Dean “because it was simple.”

However, right before he got to the courthouse, Ma’ayan had a revelation. “Being a Hebrew speaker, I realized ‘Din’ is a heavy name. It means judge. So at the very last minute, I changed it to Emet (truth).”

His last name, Ma’ayan (spring of water), was the name he chose with his former partner, because it was the middle name of his stepson. He legally changed his gender at the DMV when Donald Trump was elected president. “I was really scared,” he said. “I don’t think I would have done it were it not for this political climate, because that wasn’t really my philosophy. My point even now is still not to be male, it’s to just ‘be.’ ” 

Part of Ma’ayan’s “being” is rooted in Jewish tradition. Raised in a Conservative Jewish household with three older brothers and Orthodox grandparents, Ma’ayan said “becoming a lesbian wasn’t necessarily breaking any religious doctrine, it was just the typical disappointment of your parents.”

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in sociology and Judaic studies from State University in Albany N.Y., he graduated with a master’s in Jewish communal services from Brandeis University and moved to St. Louis to take his first job at Washington University as the Hillel programming director, a job he remained in for six years. 

In 1998, together with his long-term girlfriend, Ma’ayan planned to move to California. “But I saw a movie called ‘Boys on the Side,’ which takes place in New Mexico, and I said, ‘That looks awesome. Can we move out there just for one year?’ ”

That was 20 years ago. Still steeped in a strong, Jewish, halachic tradition, Ma’ayan and his partner were shomeret Shabbat and kashrut, and he had begun wearing tzitzit under his clothes. They joined Nahalat Shalom, even going as far as buying a house that was within walking distance from the shul. But after being rejected when he wanted to use the mikveh, he became disillusioned with Judaism and drifted away from the Jewish community. 

He went back to school and studied counseling and fundraising, and obtained a master’s in social work. He then began an internship at PB&J family services. He rattled off sobering information: New Mexico ranks 49th or 50th among states for child well-being, with high infant mortality rates, hunger and incidents of domestic violence. “Our addiction and poverty and incarceration rate is among the highest in the country,” Ma’ayan said. “One out of every 10 children in New Mexico has a parent who is either currently or has been incarcerated.”

As part of his internship at PB&J, his job was to work in the jails with parents. “The men were told when they got out of prison if they did not find work and/or housing within 30 days, they’d go back. We saw so many people go back,” he said.

Undaunted, Ma’ayan sat down and wrote a grant proposal, and in 2011, PB&J was awarded a three-year grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to open up Fathers Building Futures. In 2014, Ma’ayan made Fathers Building Futures his full-time business, creating a board of directors and a sustainable model.

Today, Fathers Building Futures works in four industries, creating temporary job-training programs to help people get back on their feet. The four programs are: auto detailing, “which is fancy car washing,” Ma’ayan said; mobile power washing for fleets of cars; freight and delivery; and the kosher casket building.

“I guess the Jewish community and Judaism has infused itself here [at Fathers Building Futures],” Ma’ayan said. “The curriculum on how to teach fatherhood is really how to be a mensch.”

And it’s almost as though the kosher caskets were inevitable. “When I grew up, my grandfather would take us to the cemetery,” Ma’ayan recalled. “He’d volunteer to clean up.”

“I guess the Jewish community and Judaism has infused itself at Fathers Building Futures. The curriculum on how to teach fatherhood is really how to be a mensch.” — Emet Ma’ayan

And when he was in college, Chabad would send students on Halloween to the cemetery in Albany to do shmira (guard duty), fearing the Jewish tombstones would be attacked. Ma’ayan also spent time volunteering at the chevrah kadishah.

“But the reality is I’d never been around a group of people who have been around so much death [as these fathers have],” he said. “These are young men here. They are always going to funerals. When they were in their gangs, that was a big part of it.”

Fathers Building Futures had a woodshop and Ma’ayan wanted to come up with something the inmates could learn on Day One with very little experience, but also something that wasn’t too simple. The notion of making kosher caskets, without screws or nails, made sense. Ma’ayan invited a local rabbi to talk to the men about death and dying. “It immediately resonated with them, the sacredness of it,” Ma’ayan said. 

That path saw Ma’ayan circling back to Nahalat Shalom and a man by the name of Herschel Weiss who has a woodworking studio inside the synagogue. He asked Weiss to come and create a prototype for the casket. Then, they befriended the largest funeral home in town, French Funerals and Cremations, to mentor the fathers. 

Initially, French asked the fathers to build both adult and baby caskets, but the men rebelled. “ ‘We’re not making f—ing baby caskets,’ ” Ma’ayan recalled them saying. ‘We’ve buried our own babies!’

“I thought that was so powerful,” Ma’ayan said. “That they could articulate a line when it comes to their own trauma. And that’s what this whole work is about:  unpacking your trauma.”

Milt & Edie’s Drycleaners & Tailoring Center, a family-owned dry cleaning business, has been a fixture in Burbank since 1988. In honor of Father’s Day, it is teaming with the organization Hope of the Valley to provide clothes for the homeless population of the San Fernando Valley.

As part of the “5 Garment Campaign,” when customers donate five garments to Hope of the Valley, Milt & Edie’s will take $50 off their dry cleaning bill. This isn’t the first time it has raised money for the organization. Every month, it donates abandoned clothes and for the past three years it has sponsored a major fundraiser, “Broadway to the Rescue,” featuring Broadway performers singing tunes they sang on Broadway.

Milt & Edie’s also services many of the shows filmed in the Burbank area, including “The Voice,” “Ellen” and “Criminal Minds.” 

Milt Chortkoff, who died this past December, began working in the dry cleaning business at 17, when he delivered clothes around Los Angeles for his father’s business, Hollyway Cleaners. He then consulted for Regal Cleaners in Burbank. Eventually, he purchased Regal Cleaners and renamed it Milt & Michael’s, for his son-in-law. In 2004, he changed the name to Milt & Edie’s to honor his wife. It is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and offers free popcorn, cookies and coffee to customers every day, as well as free hot dogs on weekends.

Milt’s son-in-law Michael Shader is Milt & Edie’s CEO. Together with is wife, Beth, they have been running the family business since 2014. They originally connected with Hope of the Valley when one of their long-time customers, Michael-Leon Wooley, a Broadway performer and board member at the organization, suggested a collaboration. He asked for clothing donations because he knew people often forget to pick up the clothes. The Shaders began donating clothes every month, selecting pieces that were never collected and that had been in storage for over a year. 

“My father never passed an individual asking for money without giving. He would even pay for meals for individuals in a restaurant, never wanting to be identified by the waitress.” — Michael Shader

Shader said he learned about giving back from his own dad. “My father never passed an individual asking for money without giving. He would even pay for meals for individuals in a restaurant, never wanting to be identified by the waitress. My dad would buy sneakers and give coats. He became friends with individuals living on the street.” 

Shader added he felt it was important to provide for his community through the family business. 

“The evidence of the homeless is all around us,” he said. “We have a few homeless individuals who frequent our store and come in for the coffee or hot dogs. It’s heartbreaking to see individuals struggling, and Hope of the Valley is dedicated to helping the homeless in the San Fernando Valley.”

Hope of the Valley CEO Ken Craft said, “[We’re] thrilled that Milt & Edie’s is conducting the ‘5 Garment Campaign’ for Father’s Day. All clothing donations will be used to provide essential services to the homeless in the Valley. We are so thankful for the generosity and compassion of the most iconic dry cleaners in the Valley.”

Enter the central atrium at Sinai Temple and the Alice and Nahum Lainer School on Wilshire Boulevard, and colorful stained glass “windows” now greet visitors.

The windows are actually made of paper and were designed by 48 seventh-graders from the Lainer School after conversations the children had with Holocaust survivors earlier this year. 

The students met with 21 survivors in February to hear their stories. They then created the windows based on their interpretation of the survivors’ stories. 

The program was co-created by Lainer Judaic Studies Director Irit Eliyahu, Jewish History and Rabbinics teacher Rebecca Berger, the Righteous Conversations Project, and teaching artists Ruah Edelstein and Masha Vasilkovsky. The entire project was made possible through a grant from the nonprofit organization Facing History and Ourselves.

The students spent three months working on the project and at the end of May, 16 of the survivors and the students came together again with friends and family at Sinai Temple for the unveiling of the windows.

Tiny replicas of the windows were presented to the survivors, along with pictures with their students that were taken at the original event by Righteous Conversations photographer Gina Cholick. 

“To tell a story is one thing,” Eliyahu told the Journal. “To take the story of a person and make it into an artistic exhibit is something [else].” 

“This was a window looking into somebody’s life and looking into a future,” she added. “A window is very symbolic.”

Thirteen-year-olds Joshua Roussak and Isaiah Ofek depicted the story of Frank Schiller, 92, from Schiller’s capture on his 13th birthday and his time in a ghetto, through his escape from a rail car into the forest.

“I feel like I learned bravery,” Ofek said, “because Mr. Schiller was brave enough to jump out of the rail car, being at risk of getting shot or captured by a Nazi.”

“Standing before these magnificent windows, I am struck by the power of curiosity and compassion and respect when it is expressed through the language of color, form and light.” — Samara Hutman 

“Besides risk-taking,” Roussak added, “I also learned to appreciate the great times in my life.”

Lizzy Getman and Sarah Hoorfar, both 13, met with 92-year-old Martha Sternbach. They created their window based “on one side the dark times and on one side the good times,” Getman said.

“And how she overcame [the bad times],” Hoorfar added. “She lived the hard times, so we could live the good times.”

Righteous Conversations Project Director Samara Hutman said the art exceeded her expectations. “It was not only the art but the quality of relationship that was built with deep respect and curiosity and a sense of wonder,” she said. “Standing before these magnificent windows, I am struck by the power of curiosity and compassion and respect when it is expressed through the language of color, form and light.”

Twelve-year-olds Alexis Harouni and Lauren Reoua met 87-year-old Dorothy Greenstein. One side of their window reveals a dark sky with stars to commemorate the memory of those lost in the Holocaust. The other shows  a bright flower to represent the growth of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the tragedy.

“My favorite part of this was interviewing Dorothy,” Harouni said. “It was very meaningful to be able to be the last generation to hear the stories personally and then be able to carry them on.”