THE JEWISH LISTS:
Jewish Chicagoans of the Year 2006
JAN FAIBISOFF: The good doctor
Some people, it seems, are born knowing exactly where they want to go in life.
For Jan Faibisoff, the journey revealed itself as he traveled. Where it ended up marked the intersection between medicine and Judaism.
He grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., with "the usual Jewish education you get out in the boonies," he says. In high school, he studied Russian, a language he felt connected to because one set of grandparents came from that country. He continued studying it at Cornell University, where he majored in classics-Greek and Latin. There, through the Hillel, he began to connect more deeply with Judaism.
After college, "I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself," Faibisoff reports, so he came to study at the University of Chicago. It was during the Vietnam War, and he expressed his sense of moral indignation by becoming a conscientious objector. Eventually, he drifted toward a job as a hospital clerk and stayed three years.
"At that point, I realized I better do something and I hit on medicine," Faibisoff says. That was the decision that would come to define his life. "A professor impressed upon us that medicine was going to take over and demand everything from us, and that's exactly what happened," he says.
Now Faibisoff has a longtime gastroenterolgy practice and is on the staff at Rush North Shore Medical Center, but he does so much more than that. He began seeing Russian patients-and brushing up on his Russian language skills-when the first Soviet Jewish immigrants arrived in Chicago in the late '70s. Now half of his patients are Russians who, even though most speak English, feel more comfortable communicating with a doctor in their native language.
"When I started studying Russian, I had no idea what I was going to do with it," he says. "It was one of these coincidences that makes you think there's something behind it."
Faibisoff also volunteers his services at the Ark, runs a program of Jewish genetic disease testing for high school students, and heads another one that immunizes teens going to Israel against infectious hepatitis. He also has a rich family life: He and his wife Susie are the parents of four and grandparents of eight. His son is a neurologist, now in the Air Force, one daughter is a teacher and another is in nursing school. Another daughter, a nurse, has made aliyah with her family.
The State of Israel also played an important part in Faibisoff's spiritual development. He and his wife first visited there in 1983, staying and working for a month under a program called Project 1000 after hearing ecstatic descriptions from friends who had done the same. That trip "increased our appreciation for Israel, for Yiddishkeit, for our Jewish heritage," Faibisoff reports.
As a result, they moved to West Rogers Park, where Faibisoff's path toward increased Jewish observance continued. "Being an Orthodox Jew is as demanding as medicine is," he says, noting that, despite frequent headlines on the subject, there is little conflict between religious and medical ethics.
"The obligation of comforting, of doing what you can to preserve life, to restore people to health to the extent that we can-those are not at all in conflict with Orthodox Judaism," he says. When ethical issues, such as end-of-life questions, do arise, "people talk to their rabbi about them," he says. "Doctors are mostly preoccupied with bread-and-butter issues-are people taking their meds on time and so forth."
On a personal level, "the major conflict is making sure I get home in time for Shabbos. You're so busy taking care of people, your own personal life tends to suffer." For him to get home by 9 p.m. is "unheard of"-usually it's more like midnight or 1 or 2 a.m., he says.
Does he have a message for the Jewish community? Yes-and it's a surprisingly down-to-earth one. "Get a colonoscopy," he advises. "The colon cancer risk is higher in the Jewish community, and the preparation is no worse than Yom Kippur."
A home for the homeless
On Tuesday nights, Teri Gaby hosts up to 65 guests. But this is no ordinary social occasion: The guests are all homeless men.
Gaby is the coordinator of the PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter) program at her synagogue, Temple Anshe Sholom A Beth Torah in Olympia Fields, and a one-woman social activism committee in Chicago's southern suburbs, where she carries on a pioneering tradition (her grandfather, who moved to Chicago Heights around 1910, was one of the first Jews in the area).
PADS, Gaby explains, is a faith-based shelter program. Each night of the week, several area churches open their doors to the homeless. Tuesday nights from October to April that duty falls to Anshe Sholom, which houses anywhere from 50 to 65 men in its classrooms and youth hall. Women and children stay at a church down the street. Aside from a night's lodging, the men receive a hot dinner and breakfast and a bag lunch when they leave the next day.
Gaby oversees an army of volunteers-some 200 from a 400-family congregation-and takes care of a multitude of details, from buying and preparing food to dropping off and picking up laundry to facilitating paperwork to helping give the breathalyzer tests that each man must take before being allowed in the shelter. (If they don't pass, "we let them hang around outside and make another attempt later," she explains.)
As if this weren't enough to keep her busy, Gaby also serves on the board of the Anita M. Stone Jewish Community Center, belongs to her temple's religious school committee, and works in her parents' scrap recycling business, while raising daughter Amanda, 18. The household also includes two Maltese, Candy and Sugar.
The south suburban area has been home for Gaby since she was born. She grew up at Temple Anshe Shalom, then left the area to go to college in St. Louis. After earning a master's degree in counseling, she worked as a high school math teacher and guidance counselor for 15 years.
In the late '80s, "I decided to become a single mom by choice, and I thought it was important to raise my daughter near her grandparents and aunts and uncles," she says. Amanda was born in 1988 and Gaby moved back to the south suburbs shortly afterwards, where she joined the family business part time so she would have more time to devote to parenting.
The south suburban Jewish community "was always here for me," she says. "There is a small number of Jews and pretty much every Jew knows every other Jew in some way or another. It's a very vibrant community and we all stay very involved; it helps us keep our identities."
Since she never had a bat mitzvah as a child, Gaby, along with five other women from her congregation, celebrated hers as an adult a year ago.
Of all her volunteer commitments, she finds the PADS program particularly rewarding. "We consider these people our guests in the temple; we try and treat them that way and we haven't had too many problems," she says. New volunteers, she reports, are always surprised to find that "so many of these guys have jobs, but they just don't have it together to get a place to live. Most people think they're out on the street begging, but that's not the case with a large number of them. They usually have minimum wage jobs and can't get enough money to get the first and last month's rent together."
One of her most pleasant surprises has been the volunteer reaction to the program. A drive to provide new socks to the men drew an "overwhelming" response from the religious school, she says; students also make tzedakah bags for them at holidays, and congregants donate everything from breakfast cereal to disposable razors.
Many others help out at the shelter on Tuesday nights; they come from her synagogue, from the community and from neighboring B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood. Of course, "when some people see me coming, they try to hide," Gaby says, laughing. "But I was warned about that before I took the job."
Labor for life
One would think that Chaikey (Clare) Greenberg has moved a lifetime away from the secular Yiddish culture in which she grew up on Chicago's West Side.
In some ways-since that culture no longer exists-she has. In other, more important ways, Greenberg remains very much the same person as the young girl who joined a Zionist youth group because its members "were going to solve the problems of the world, solve the problems of the Jewish world. It was wonderful," she recalls.
More than half a century later, she's still trying to solve the problems of the Jewish world.
Greenberg grew up in a family of Yiddishists-her father was the director of the Sholom Aleichem Folk Institute in Chicago and principal of a folk-shulen, a secular Yiddish school; her mother, Bessie Hershfield Pomerantz, was a well-known Yiddish poet with five books to her credit. Yiddish culture thrived on the West Side of Chicago. "It was something special," Greenberg says. "My kids are very jealous that we grew up in the kind of community that we did, because it will never be repeated."
She also became involved in Labor Zionist activities at a young age. In 1948, just after the State of Israel was established, she attended the first meeting of what would become the Israel Branch of the Labor Zionist Alliance. There she met a young World War II vet who had been seriously injured in the Battle of the Bulge. In fact, Danny Greenberg was in a cast from his chest to his ankles and was attending the meeting on a weekend pass from the V.A. Hospital. They married a few years later.
It was the beginning of a partnership that not only produced a long and happy marriage and three children, Aaron, Joseph and Ruth Bernkopf, but also launched a host of Labor Zionist activities and groups in the Chicago area.
The Labor Zionist movement (the organization is now called Ameinu and recently celebrated its 100th anniversary) pioneered many of the aspects of Jewish life that we take for granted today, including Jewish schools and summer camps and youth trips to Israel. Labor Zionism's youth component, Habonim, led the nation in providing Jewish summer camp experiences for children and teens. Chicago Labor Zionists were among the most active in the country, and Chaikey and Danny Greenberg were leading players on both the local and national levels.
Meanwhile Greenberg, who had earned a degree in library science at the University of Chicago, was carving out a remarkable career in an entirely different realm. From 1957 until her retirement in 1990, she served as director of the Newspaper Division of the Municipal Reference Library in City Hall-a fancy title for someone who, in the words of a newspaper story on the occasion of her retirement, "established the clip library single-handedly and built it into a unique resource for information seekers." Another story, in the Chicago Tribune, called her "one of Chicago's lesser-known civic treasures." The archive was named the Clare P. Greenberg Newspaper Collection in her honor.
Danny Greenberg died five years ago, and the couple's children now have children of their own, but Chaikey Greenberg continues to be active in Zionist and other Jewish activities and spends time in Israel every year. Three years ago, the Labor Zionist Alliance of Chicago honored her for her longtime service. Her son Aaron, in delivering a lovingly humorous tribute to his mother, noted that in calling up childhood memories, "as I recall, my parents had meetings roughly three times a day for about 40 years."
On a more serious note, he summed up his mother's life and work by saying that she "lived by the writer's adage that it is far more effective to show than to tell. My mother did not spend a lot of time telling us that it is important to work for the welfare of the State of Israel and the Jewish people ... Instead, she showed us these things through the example of her life, a life characterized by countless hours over many decades spent working for a noble goal."
She is still adding to those hours.
Let all who are hungry...
Bill Clinton and Steven Spielberg have enjoyed food from Stuart Morginstin's catering company.
So have the residents of the homeless shelter at the Ark.
The two extremes represent the two poles of Morginstin's professional life-poles that are not opposites but part of a larger world view.
Morginstin heads Danziger Kosher Catering, one of Chicago's premier and most popular caterers. But those who know him esteem him as much for the charity work he does as for Danziger's hand-made gelatos, signature pastries or spectacular multi-course presentations.
Morginstin, it seems, was destined to be a caterer. Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, N.Y., he started helping out at a family friend's catering business as a teenager. Later, he met the woman who would become his wife-and found out that her father owned a catering business, Danziger's Kosher Catering, in Chicago. After they married, his father-in-law asked him to work for him, so the couple moved to Chicago.
Morginstin quickly discovered that his ideas about the business differed from his father-in-law's. Danziger's, he says, was doing a fine job preparing traditional Eastern European Jewish food for an older generation. But he had other notions. So he and his wife, Caryn, bought the business and set out to "elevate kosher catering to the highest possible level," Morginstin says. He saw his task not only as a smart business decision but as a way of combating anti-Semitism, since, he says, "at that point, kosher catering was not getting a very good rep in the non-Jewish community. Kosher food was looked down upon."
Nearly 25 years later, Morginstin has met the goal he set himself-and then some. His company now employs 25 to 45 people, depending on the event, and caters every type of social occasion from weddings to charity balls. His wife and three children, ages 12, 15 and 17, are integral parts of the company as well.
Among Danziger's signature events is a Passover program that Morginstin has catered for the past 12 years in a high-end hotel in Phoenix; often, Steven Spielberg is among the guests. This year, seder dinner featured 26 flavors of Italian gelato, all made in-house; a wine list with 342 offerings, plus a choice of 20 types of bottled water and 49 kinds of tea. And those were just the extras. The program draws guests from all over the world and is usually sold out by October, Morginstin says.
But the rich and famous aren't the only recipients of Morginstin's creativity. Years ago, he heard that the Ark, a Chicago social service agency, needed food for its homeless shelter. He and his wife packed up some delicacies left over from an event and drove them to the shelter. To their shock, the person who opened the door was someone whose wedding they had catered several years before. He had lost his job and was living at the shelter.
"I realized then that you can go from being the richest person in the world to being the poorest, and it could happen to anyone," Morginstin says.
Ever since, he has donated food to the Ark on a regular basis. When he noticed that many guests would only eat half the food so they could save the rest for another meal, he made the portions bigger. And he started another annual tradition-a Chanukah party at the Ark with enough food for more than 1,200 of the agency's clients.
Morginstin says he sees the donations as a way of giving back to the Jewish community that supports his business; in addition, the Ark's clients "are sharing in other people's simchas; it's almost like a double mitzvah," he says.
Now he is about to embark on another tzedakah project on an even bigger scale, using the hundreds of pounds of produce and other food that is discarded by markets daily to prepare meals for needy members of the community, in the process creating many jobs for those who need them.
"I believe we could eradicate hunger in the Jewish community in Chicago," he says. "Children could go to school with full stomachs. The whole community can grow based on this."
Efforts to the max
If you're looking for someone who exemplifies the adage that one person can change the world, Ilyce Randell is your woman.
She has, at least, changed the course of a disease and given dozens of Jewish parents hope where there once was none.
Randell's extraordinary efforts began eight years ago, shortly after she and her husband Mike had their first child. By the time baby Max was four months old, the Randells were seeing signs that something was wrong, and doctors put him into the hospital for a series of tests.
The results were devastating. Max had Canavan disease, a rare Jewish genetic disorder in which the body lacks an enzyme needed to create myelin, the substance that forms a sheath around nerve fibers. (Canavan can appear in non-Jews, but is far more prevalent among the Ashkenazi Jewish population.)
Doctors told the family that the disease "would literally destroy Max's brain until there's nothing left," Randell recalls. Max would "become a vegetable" and die before he was four years old, they said. The family was advised to consider placing him in a pediatric nursing home. Canavan, medical authorities said, was in "a class of disease so rare there's no treatment (research) going on. There's really nothing you can do," Randell recounts.
The next few months "were sort of a blur," she says. "I remember looking at our apartment building and wishing a bomb would hit it and everyone would be destroyed-that would be easier than the road we had ahead of us."
That mindset didn't last long. "We decided, if there was nobody doing any kind of work for this disease that we would raise money and find people, we would go wherever we had to go and do whatever was necessary," she says. Her efforts would not be focused on Max alone but on other families with children with Canavan and related disorders. Most of them, too, had lost all hope, Randell discovered through Internet forays.
She found a gene therapy trial that might have benefited Max and other Canavan children, but it was running out of money. "If we wanted Max to be treated, we had to raise enough money to keep the entire lab going, so that's what we did," starting with a fund-raising letter to friends and family members, Randell says. Those efforts raised $50,000 and led to the formation of Canavan Research Illinois, a charity devoted to developing treatments and funding research for the disease as well as increasing public awareness. Randell continues to run the organization (www.canavanresearch.org), which has now raised more than $1 million.
As for Max, he has had two gene therapy treatments-at 11 months, he was the youngest person in the world to receive the cutting-edge therapy for a brain disease-and has far surpassed his doctors' expectations. At eight, he attends special ed classes while spending part of the day in a mainstream classroom.
"Cognitively he is very very bright," his proud mother says, noting that he can operate a computer with his eyes, manipulate the joystick for his motorized wheelchair ("other kids think that's very cool") and communicate effectively by blinking his eyes and using them to "point" to what he wants. He can say a few words as well. Most importantly, Randell says, he is a happy, loving child with "a magnetic personality."
The Randells also have a three-year-old, Alex, who does not have Canavan but is a carrier of it. Randell has been instrumental in efforts to make sure that before they have children, Jewish parents are tested for Canavan and 10 other genetic diseases.
Today, Randell's days are filled with fund-raising, networking with other parents, lobbying and overseeing educational efforts, all designed to increase public awareness about Canavan and similar diseases. For her efforts, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin called her a "profile in courage."
And the impetus for her always comes from Max, who works so hard at all his tasks that a therapist once said that "if trying made it so, Max would be president."
"He makes me work harder," his mom says. "I think, if he can do this, I can certainly raise a million dollars. It can't be that hard."
Committee woman
Emily Soloff was once firmly established in a career she loved, one she had wanted to follow since high school-journalism. She had earned a master's degree from Columbia University's journalism school, taught at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and spent nearly 20 years covering Chicago for the Lerner Newspapers, a community newspaper chain. When Chicago Jewish News was launched in 1994, Soloff came on board as a reporter.
"One of the organizations I covered a lot was the American Jewish Committee," she says. "I found the people were extremely knowledgeable about what was going on and highly analytical about what the issues were, and also willing to risk making statements that challenged the complacency of the Jewish community. I found that very intriguing."
But it took her by surprise when the regional director of the organization said, "You've been writing about these issues for a long time. Why don't you come here and try to solve them?"
Soloff pondered the offer for several months, then, she says, "it became one of those irresistible challenges." She joined the AJC as assistant director; now, after nine years with the organization, she is the regional director. It has been an amazingly enriching journey for her.
Initially, she had to overcome the journalist's mindset of listening, but not becoming involved. "If you're going to be an advocate, you have to risk, to open yourself up to other people and let them have a window on your thinking," she says. "You have to really engage. That was a big transition for me."
That hurdle crossed, she began learning about other religions, since interreligious affairs make up a large part of the AJC's agenda. "Like many Jews living in a city like Chicago, I thought I knew a lot about Christians," she says. "I discovered that I didn't-I really knew very little. The challenge of interreligious affairs was both exciting and in some ways daunting."
She participated on behalf of the organization in dialogues with Methodists, Muslims, Lutherans and Presbyterians; helped launch a Catholic-Jewish educational enrichment program designed to teach young people in both religions about the other faith; and, on an even more personal level, opened up her Shabbat table to numerous Catholic seminarians.
In fact, over the last five years, Soloff and her family (she and her husband have three grown children) have shared their Shabbat dinners with more than 30 seminarians from all over the world, including Africa, Korea and Poland, in a program run in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Chicago and its seminary.
"It has given us an incredible window into the future of the Catholic Church," she says-and has given many of the guests a positive experience with Jews after they may have had some negative preconceptions. "It challenges their thinking about who Jews are and what Jews believe, and I think this is creating a tremendous ripple effect on the potential leaders of the Catholic Church," Soloff says.
She, along with the chapter, is involved in a host of other arenas, from monitoring church-state matters to developing a course on Jews and government to facilitating dialogue on the contentious divestment issue. On that matter, she takes the view that "it behooves us to try to understand each other" and notes that Jews and Christians don't always mean the same thing even when they use the same words.
"We're not about dictating answers, we're about engaging people in an intelligent way," she says. "I have great faith in people's intelligence and I think people will seek the right path if they're given the information. Education is a powerful, powerful tool."
Soloff notes that this is the AJC's centennial year. "Many organizations don't survive into the second century," she says. "The AJC takes very seriously this idea of a mission on behalf of and for, not only Jewish people, but for America and Americans. As new issues develop and new concerns arise, this is an organization uniquely positioned to be able to address them in positive ways. I'm looking forward to watching AJC in its second century."
"I'm an optimist," she adds. "I think you have to be an optimist to do this work."
Rx for young Jews
When the president of a national organization tells you that you represent "the bright future of the Jewish people worldwide," it could be hard to deal with.
That doesn't seem to be the case for David Steinberg.
Those were the words that Avraham Infeld, national president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, used when Steinberg, along with seven other students from across the country, received the 2005 Philip H. and Susan Rudd Cohen Student Exemplar of Excellence Award at a student leaders assembly last year.
It's not the first prestigious award that Steinberg, who graduates this year from the University of Illinois-Chicago, has won. But for this personable future pharmacist from Skokie, it's not all about the glory. Rather, he's more interested in bucking what he sees as a trend among Jewish students his age-becoming assimilated into the larger society at the expense of their Judaism.
"In America, we feel so comfortable as students, we have so many resources available to us," he says. "Jewish patriotism, Zionism-they're available; we don't really have to work so hard for them the way they do in other countries. So we get too comfortable."
Steinberg himself became involved in the diverse Jewish world early on. He graduated from Ida Crown Jewish Academy, an Orthodox high school, but attended both the Conservative Camp Ramah and the JCC's Camp Chi. "Being introduced to all these different denominations was real interesting to me," he says.
As for the UIC's Levine Hillel, it was practically foreordained that he become involved: His mother and father met at that very Hillel. He became active right away, chairing the freshman committee and starting a weekly kosher barbecue on campus, the first of its kind. He was also instrumental in launching a kosher meal program-now, two to three kosher meals a week are served on campus. And this year, for the first time, there were not one but two Passover seders on campus.
As Steinberg moved through the Hillel ranks, becoming vice president, then president of the organization, he also became interested in the World Union of Jewish Students, an organization that functions like a Hillel in countries outside of the United States. At the group's international congress in Israel last year, he was one of three students chosen to represent the United States, and he now serves as the U.S. representative to the WUJS.
He particularly relishes "being able to meet people from literally all around the world and talk with them about what's happening on campus in Croatia, in Melbourne," he says. "When a country has 400 Jews or 2,000 Jews, they have to deal with very different issues than we do. Ours are, how do we bring all these people together? Theirs are, how do we have enough funds to support the different things we want to do."
Amidst all this activity, Steinberg also finds time to volunteer in Rush North Shore Medical Center's pharmacy department and at Lieberman Geriatric Health Centre, to tutor bar mitzvah students and to be active in UIC student government, where his leadership led to the creation of a student government Web site for the first time.
A biology major, he'll be off to pharmacy school later in the year, but vows that his activity on behalf of the Jewish student population won't cease. He's not yet sure where he'll be going to school, but since many pharmacy schools are in rural areas, he's thinking he might go to one that doesn't have a Hillel-in which case he would start one.
In addition, one of his continuing efforts is to create an American Union of Jewish Students, an organization that's now in formation. The goal is "to give Jewish students in America a voice," he says. "There is currently no organization that can speak on behalf of students. Hillel works for students, but there is no organization that gives students the initiative to lobby and to organize on behalf of themselves." The American Union would also engage graduate students more than Hillels are equipped to do, he says.
One thing is clear: This pharmacist-to-be will continue to dispense much-needed prescriptions for Jewish life to American students.
Consulting and charity
As president of the largest consulting company in the world that deals with small and medium-sized businesses, Gregg M. Steinberg could fulfill his philanthropic obligations through his company's foundation, IPA Charities, which makes donations to numerous charitable organizations.
But that isn't nearly enough for Steinberg. Instead, he is personally involved in a host of charitable endeavors, most of them Jewish- or Israel oriented, as he puts into practice his belief that "it is important to lead by example."
One of the main beneficiaries of Steinberg's formidable energy is the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, whose Midwest region he heads. He is also involved in the science institute's national committee. Being involved with Weizmann brings together three strands that play an important part in his life and activities: education, children and Israel. Being in a leadership role means a lot to him too, not for the prestige but because, as he puts it, "If I'm going to do something, I want to be able to have an impact and to perpetuate it for the next generation of givers."
Steinberg's achievements are all the more impressive considering that Jewish philanthropy-indeed, Judaism itself-didn't play much of a role in his upbringing. In his early years, he was a "corporate brat," following his father and stepfather, both of whom worked for large companies, to England, Brazil and Canada.
His parents were both Jewish, but they divorced when he was young and his mother married a non-Jewish man, so from first grade until high school, when he moved back with his father, he lived in a non-Jewish environment.
After college at the University of Arizona and graduate school at the prestigious American Graduate School of International Management (now Thunderbird/The Garvin School of International Management) in Phoenix, Steinberg moved to Chicago, his wife Stacy's home town (she actually grew up in Skokie). They now have two children, Ethan, 15, and Jessica, 11. He joined Buffalo Grove-based International Profit Associates in 1992 and took over as president five years later, overseeing the expansion of its revenues from $5 million to a projected $240 million in 2006.
At the same time, his sense of responsibility to the community was growing. He originally became involved with Weizmann because his wife and son are both juvenile diabetics, and the institute has a renowned diabetes research program. Now, he says, he is more impressed than ever with Weizmann's role in exporting "Israel's number one resource, brain power and technology, and what it does for mankind around the world."
He is also active in the Anti-Defamation League, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and a host of other, lesser-known charities, many of them focusing on education, the Jewish world or Israel. He sits on a Middle East Strategy Group through the Aspen Institute that deals with economic prosperity and security issues in that part of the world.
What is needed there, he says, is "not necessarily just dollars, but also time invested trying to sway the debate in the direction of being beneficial to both Israel and the long-term security of the region."
That philosophy applies not only to individuals but to companies, he believes. "Businesses and corporations have a responsibility to provide back to the community from which they derive benefits," he says. "We derive our benefits not just locally but around the country, so we provide back around the country in terms of the philanthropic efforts we support."
The educational component is particularly important to him. "Education raises all boats," he says. "A better-educated world is a world that's going to be friendlier, more peaceful and more practical."
Meanwhile, he worries that members of his generation (he's 43) and the next younger one, are not as involved in charitable endeavors as previous generations, and he feels a personal responsibility to try to change that.
"In order for charitable organizations to do the wonderful work they do, it takes people supporting them both through money and through time," he says. "And these examples have to come from the prior generation for it to be perpetuated. That leadership has to come by way of example. One can't expect everybody else to do it if one doesn't do it oneself."
The art of peace
There are many strands to Wendy Sternberg's life: the arts, medicine, Judaism, travel, Israeli dance, education, working for peace.
Genesis at the Crossroads, the organization she founded in 1999, weaves all of them together.
Genesis defies easy description, but in brief, it's a Chicago-based non-profit that seeks to use the arts as a vehicle for bridging the divide between cultures in conflict. From its first event-the screening of a film about the meeting between two ethnic minorities-to its latest, "Peace It Together," a monthlong festival of music, dance and art, it has served not only as a showcase for artists that are unfamiliar to most Chicagoans, but also as a melting pot of cultures with an emphasis on the Middle East.
The journey that led Sternberg to Genesis began in her arts-infused childhood in New Jersey, with a mother who was a singer and a father who drew and painted prolifically. One of her earliest memories is falling asleep to the sound of her mother softly playing the mandolin.
Sternberg found her own form of artistic expression in dance and creative movement and playing the flute. At the same time, her parents' Jewish tradition (she was raised as "a Conservative Jew in a Conservadox community," she says) led her to an interest in Israeli dance that has remained with her throughout her life.
She majored in French literature in college, but also developed an interest in an entirely different area: medicine. "I had a vision of taking care of people and being involved in a profession that was always challenging," she says. Yet throughout medical school (where she took an extra year to live and work in South India) and the development of her practice as an internist, "there was always a humanities component." She also continued to travel widely and off the beaten path-she has been to more than 30 countries-and used her trips, including a time spent living on an Israeli kibbutz, to discover each people's folk arts tradition.
Her training led her to a thriving practice in internal medicine and a teaching post at Northwestern University, but she continued to seek ways to bring diverse peoples and cultures, including Jews and Palestinians, together. A course she took in 1999 on self-expression and leadership served as a catalyst.
"I started to take a look at the things that really stirred me," she says. "My Jewish upbringing has always led me to think about what kind of a difference you want to make in the world. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict-how do you get at that? Religion and politics are divisive, but the arts bring people together. They are really a universal language. I walked into my Israeli folk dance group and I had the whole concept of Genesis in one fell swoop."
Since that time, the organization has grown quickly, garnered much support and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and others, and gone global while still remaining anchored in Chicago. In 2005, its most ambitious project to date, Hamsa, was hosted by Hollywood filmmaker Harold Ramis and featured two days of cross-cultural music and dance performances, an art exhibit, children's activities and food in Lincoln Park.
This year's event, "Peace It Together," which featured, in addition to performances, the display of a Middle East Peace Quilt, continues on through an educational component. In a Genesis-designed curriculum, students at several Chicago-area elementary and high schools are making squares for quilts that will eventually be delivered to Iraqi children. Sternberg envisions more and more educational programming-"We've got to come up with some out-of-the-box thinking to really make a dent in promoting peace in the classroom and beyond," she says.
For the future, Sternberg reveals that "I'm looking for a husband. I want to have children. I'm happily looking for someone who is curious and who embraces things that are going to make a difference in the world and who isn't cynical.
"It's so easy to be cynical." she says. "But I can't do Genesis if I'm resigned. You can't do it if you're thinking, well, nothing I do is going to make a difference anyway. But Genesis is really the antidote to cynicism."
Everywhere man
Contrary to popular opinion, Rabbi Douglas Zelden has not had himself cloned.
It may appear to be otherwise. Rabbi Doug, as he is almost universally known, hosts a popular cable TV show on Jewish subjects, "Taped With ... Rabbi Doug"; is a frequent guest on Chicago radio talk shows; coordinates and teaches at the Jewish Children's Bureau's therapeutic yeshiva day school; tutors bar mitzvah students at a congregation in Highland Park and is the second rabbi at another in West Rogers Park; serves as the Jewish chaplain for Seasons Hospice; works part-time as a mashgiach (kosher supervisor) for the Chicago Rabbinical Council; officiates at numerous weddings and funerals; and gives occasional bar mitzvah instruction at other synagogues as needed.
Oh yes, he also ushers at various theaters and concerts around Chicago and somehow finds time to spend with his wife, Lois, and four daughters, ages 10, 7, 3 and a newborn.
He does it all "to be able to say I made a difference in someone's life," he says. And he is eminently satisfied in that regard.
This one-man Jewish community is a Chicago native who spent most of his youth in what was then the Maine Township unincorporated area near Golf Mill. His mentor was Rabbi Jay Karzen of Maine Township Jewish Congregation; from bar mitzvah age on, Zelden accompanied Karzen to weddings to sign the ketubah. On these outings, which numbered in the hundreds, he was often joined by his good friend Jeff Schoenberg, now an Illinois state senator. When Karzen moved to Israel, Zelden took over the congregation until a new rabbi was hired.
After receiving his rabbinic ordination, Zelden followed his parents into the teaching profession-his father taught chemistry at Ida Crown Jewish Academy, his mother was a public school teacher. Zelden himself taught at several Jewish day schools, then, 17 years ago, was asked to create a program for the Jewish Children's Bureau for a school for boys who, because of behavior or attention problems or learning disabilities, weren't doing well in traditional day schools.
The program started with three students and Zelden teaching all the classes. In the intervening years, it has grown to include an elementary, middle and high school with a full-time staff of seven and a support staff the school shares with JCB's secular therapeutic program. Zelden teaches in and directs the school's Jewish Studies department and "coordinates everything. Most people just refer to me as 'the rabbi,'" he says when asked about his title.
Several days a week, after the school day is over, he travels to Highland Park, where for the last 26 years, he has done bar mitzvah tutoring at Congregation B'nai Torah, an experience he finds extremely fulfilling. "I'm an Orthodox rabbi working in a community of Reform people, and they make such a connection with me," he says. "I have made such a difference in their lives-I see it."
Another night he might go to the studio to tape several weeks worth of his TV show, which is seen by viewers in Chicago and the north and northwest suburbs (visit www.tvrabbi.com for times and channels). The show, which he has hosted for a decade, grew out of frequent appearances on talk radio shows like Steve Dahl's, where "they call me whenever they're talking about something Jewish," he says. On his own show, he hosts local and national Jewish entertainers and celebrities, politicians and media figures and covers events of interest to the Jewish community, such as the dedication of a new Torah or a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony with Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
He welcomes the hundreds of e-mails he receives weekly about the show. "It has renewed people's interest in Judaism," he says. "That's why I became a rabbi. That's why I do what I do."
That philosophy, in fact, informs all of his activities. "In everything I do, I try to make a difference," he says. The bar mitzvah tutoring he does is emblematic of his values: "With 80 families or so a year, I know I've made a connection to Judaism for them," he says. "I can't even tell you how rewarding that is."
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