There\’s a 7-year-old girl who attends second grade at a local Jewish day school. She\’s intelligent, but in a classroom setting, she finds it hard to focus: if a fire engine roars down the street, there goes the lesson.
Hatzolah Volunteer Emergency Medical Rescue Squad, long a fixture in New York, just went public in Los Angeles, serving a circumscribed area of the mostly Orthodox Beverly-La Brea Jewish community and becoming the only volunteer Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) corps in the city.
Long before last August, when he had his bar mitzvah at Santa Monica\’s Beth Shir Shalom, 13-year-old Alex Miller has practiced what he has been preached: charity and tikkun olam.
For him, it all began in 1996, when Miller\’s third grade class participated in Super Sunday.
\”I really enjoyed it,\” he recalls. \”Whenever a phone opened up, me and my friend would run for it.\”
During my visit to a refugee camp in Macedonia with a group of 16 American Jews last week, a waif-like girl wearing a dusty black-and-red parka stood on her toes to peer into my notebook.
\”Where\’s the jelly? I need five jellies.\”
\”Hand me 18 fruit rolls, will you?\”
\”I love your skirt, where did you get it?\”
The scene: A typical Thursday evening at Tomchei Shabbos\’ warehouse, at 353 1/2 N. La Brea Ave., where a team of fast-working, quick-talking volunteers gathers to pack overflowing food boxes for needy families in Los Angeles.
Gil Wiener, the husky soldier who dragged out the first survivor of the Nairobi bombing to be saved by the Israeli dog squad last weekend, is a 29-year-old architecture student working his way through college as a lifeguard at the Hebrew University swimming pool in Jerusalem.
Orli is the first to admit that she had everythinggoing for her while growing up in Brentwood: loving parents who tookher around the world, a top-flight Harvard education.
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