Michael Gabai is on a quest. The owner and administrator of Ayres Residential Care Home has spent the last two weeks calling physicians, senior centers, grocery stores and pharmacies in search of flu shots for about half of the 18 residents in his facilities who have been unable to get one.
\”\’Jumor\’ is a look into our own culture through our elderly community,\” Aaron Krinsky said. \”The more homes we visited, the more we realized we were interested in the stories itself, not the comics who told them.\”
For 11 years. I begged my obstinate elderly father to allow a caregiver to help him with my ailing mother, but he adamantly insisted on taking care of her himself. Every caregiver I hired to help him said, \”Jacqueline, I just can\’t work with your father — his temper is impossible to handle. I don\’t think you\’ll be able to get him to accept help until he\’s on his knees himself.\”
When I first met Sarah, she was bent over her walker intently making her way through the gardens of the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging (JHA). While her steps were merely a shuffle, her brown eyes were lively.
I often walk through our Grancell Village and Eisenberg Village campuses to visit with our 800 residents. I frequently ask the question: \”What makes the Jewish Home Jewish?\”
Sarah had a ready answer.
For elderly people, mild disappointments and grief can set off depression. According to estimates from the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly 750,000 older Californians suffer from depression each year. Put in another way, 50 percent of all seniors will endure a depression at some point in their later years.
Depression can affect the entire family — but the family can also help intervene.
A law that was supposed to ease the burden of prescription drug costs for the elderly may force some Jewish seniors to pay more than they do now.
\”I was filming \’Funny Girl\’ with Barbra Streisand in 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, and the Arab press called me a traitor for kissing a Jewish woman,\” actor Omar Sharif reminisced.\n\n\”When I told Barbra about it,\” Sharif added, \”she said, \’You should see the letter my aunt wrote about kissing an Arab man.\’\”\n\nSharif was in town to promote \”Monsieur Ibrahim,\” the latest of his more than 70 movies and a different kind of relationship — between an elderly Muslim and an abandoned Jewish boy.
The National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) 2000-01, dubbed \”Strength, Challenge and Diversity,\” offers key findings on demographics, intermarriage, Jewish \”connections\” — that is, communal behavioral trends — and such \”special\” topics as the elderly, immigration and poverty.
Last week at the Santa Monica Farmers\’ Market, I got a taste of what it is like to be an Israeli. Going about the ordinary tasks of life one moment, standing next to a corpse the next.
Nearly 200 Jews descended on Sacramento this week to lobby California\’s most powerful politicians to protect major programs that serve the poorest and frailest Jews and other Californians from the budget ax.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.