• Jewish Chicagoans of the Year 2007
• Jewish Chicagoans of the Year 2006

Jewish Chicagoans of the Year 2007

SAMUEL FLEISCHACKER: Beyond the ivory tower

Life is a journey for all of us, but Samuel Fleischacker has come farther than most: from a European childhood to an American life, from a small town to a big city, from a liberal Jewish community to an observant one, from writing about culture and ethics to undertaking a study of religion and the Torah as the subject of his next book.

Now he has embarked on a venture that observers view as variously necessary and quixotic: bringing Jews and Muslims together to discuss not only the issues that unite them, but also those that divide.

Fleischacker is first of all a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, his academic home since 1999. He has published five books, dealing with culture and ethics, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the economist Adam Smith. But after Sept. 11 he stepped outside the classroom to form an experimental program under which Jews and Muslims would share an environment in which they could learn both about their own religion and the other's. Now the program is struggling because of a lack of money, but Fleischacker isn't giving up.

Perhaps his cosmopolitan background contributed to his desire to help people understand one another. He was born in England, where his German parents had fled during Hitler's rise, and brought up in the Hague in a liberal Jewish community. As an undergrad at Yale he came into contact with a number of figures who were influential in his Jewish education, including Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, rabbi emeritus of Chicago's KAM Isaiah Israel, who was then the university's Hillel director.

"His ethical conception of Judaism was very important to me," Fleischacker says. "I tell people I became a baal tshuvah (one who has returned to observant Judaism) because my Reform rabbi was so inspiring."

After receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1989, Fleischacker taught for a time at Williams College, but both he and his wife, Amy Reichert, an architect and Judaica designer, were seeking a life in a larger city. (The family also includes Noa, now 15, and 7th grader Benjy.) They visited Chicago when Reichert was feted for winning second prize in a seder plate competition sponsored by Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, then decided they liked the city. Fleischacker applied for a job at UIC, where, he says, he has been very happy teaching for the last decade.

In addition to his university duties, Fleischacker was instrumental in revitalizing the Chicago chapter of Peace Now and in forming the Shira Hadashah Minyan of Evanston, a mechitzah minyan (one in which men and women sit separately) where women read Torah and lead some parts of the service, created for his daughter's bat mitzvah and now an established tradition. "It's the most successful institution I've ever built," he says.

More complicated, and slower growing, has been his Jewish-Muslim Initiative at UIC. The idea for the program began after Sept. 11, when Fleischacker was teaching a course in political philosophy. UIC has a large Muslim population, and "there were a couple of Muslim women (in the class) who covered their heads," he says. "I felt I couldn't ignore it." He discussed nationalism and how it can give rise to violence. "The women appreciated the way I talked about it. It made me think we could do something helpful, raise issues in a comfortable context in which people could talk about them," he says.

In such a program, "we would stand outside the political realm and make for better citizens without pushing any kind of line," he says.

The school backed the project enthusiastically, but its implementation has been hindered by a lack of cash. "I don't think our legislators and governor care that much about funding it," Fleischacker says. "I had hoped that the communities would step up to the plate and would be enthusiastic about pouring money into it, but that has not happened. It has only been a trickle."

Nevertheless, there will be one class taught under the program next year, and "then it will depend if funding comes through," he says. "But UIC hasn't given up on it." Clearly, neither has Fleischacker.

JUDY FLEISCHER: Community at the center
Judy Fleischer never planned to be a Jewish communal professional, but the community drew her in.

For the past 14 years, Fleischer has been the executive director of the Anita M. Stone Jewish Community Center in Flossmoor. The JCC serves the Jewish population throughout the southern suburbs, and Fleischer's position is, by all accounts, a special job in a special community.

"I know there are areas in metropolitan Chicago that have Jewish families but not Jewish community," she says. "But from the time that we moved (to the southern suburbs) in 1976 to this day, this has always consistently been a Jewish community. We care for one another and look out for each other's needs and for communal needs."

Fleischer came to her position in this circle of community in a roundabout but not random way. She grew up on Chicago's South Side-very different from the southern suburbs, she notes-in a family where "our lives revolved around the synagogue and the JCC, with very strong values of perpetuating Judaism that I think my grandparents brought over from Europe."

A teen trip to Israel in 1967, just a few days after the end of the Six Day War, imbued her with a love of the Jewish state and a desire to visit it again as soon as possible. That opportunity came the following year on a JCC-sponsored trip, which also proved highly important in her life because it was where she met her future husband, Skokie native Kenneth Fleischer. The couple ended up attending the University of Illinois together and spending their junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

After marriage and graduate school (Fleischer received a master's degree in social work while her husband earned a law degree) they moved back to Chicago from St. Louis and settled "temporarily" in the southern suburbs.

"We were in transition," Fleischer explains. "This was supposed to be a temporary stop. But we quickly found this incredible sense of community that I think folks feel in a small town. A couple of years later, we were starting our family and buying our first house here."

When their first child was old enough for preschool, they enrolled him in the JCC and, Fleischer says, "that's when my involvement in the Jewish community began." (The family would grow to include Benjamin, Rachel and Tamara, now all adults.) Still working as a social worker, Fleischer became the president of the J after holding numerous other volunteer positions in the community.

When the executive director decided to retire, Fleischer was recruited for the job. "It wasn't something that was in my professional goals. I envisioned myself more as a volunteer than a Jewish communal professional," she says. "But I realized it was an opportunity and I didn't want to miss out on it."

That was 14 years ago, and since then, Fleischer has shepherded the JCC into a central role in the communal life of an ever-growing Jewish community, now expanding outwards from Homewood, Flossmoor, Park Forest and Olympia Fields into Mokena, Frankfort, Joliet and "places I probably didn't know existed 30 years ago," she says.

She is especially proud that the JCC serves people "from every congregation, every Jewish organization, and the unaffiliated as well." Programs range from the highly popular preschool to movies of the kind that "artsy theaters," of which there are none in the area, show in other parts of the city. The preschool, Fleischer believes, is particularly important. "Often we're the first Jewish institution that young families experience. It's a tremendous responsibility to help them feel comfortable and want to move on to congregational affiliation," she says.

As the head of the JCC, Fleischer is also involved in the South Suburban Cooperative Jewish Council, an association of synagogues and Jewish organizations in the area.

The "cooperative" in the title is key, she says. "What's unique about our community is that it's really working," she says. "It's not just that we have a formal council but that we really work together. Although I'm the director of the JCC, I always wear a communal hat. I really believe in community-that all the pieces need to be working together to be successful."

RABBI DOUGLAS GOLDHAMER: Signs of the times
The words that most influenced the course of Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer's career were spoken not by a Jew, but by a Christian televangelist.

When he heard them, Goldhamer was a student at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement's rabbinical seminary. The young student from Montreal had turned away from his Orthodox upbringing to come to America and study a kind of Judaism not much respected in his native French Canada. One day he had cut a class to sleep late and turned on the TV when he heard the fateful words.

They were these: "There are 50,000 deaf Jewish people and we need to save them for Christ."

"I said, 'Wow, I have a purpose'" Goldhamer recalls.

Around the same time, he heard about a deaf Jewish community in Chicago, consisting of some 15 families, whose members were looking for a rabbi. "It was like a calling," he says. He began traveling to Chicago once a month to conduct services for the community, learning American Sign Language along the way from the deaf families in whose homes he stayed. "To translate the ancient language into a modern language of sign was very exciting," he says.

Soon after he was ordained, in 1972, he established Congregation Bene Shalom/Hebrew Association of the Deaf in Skokie, and he has been the rabbi there ever since. He is the only full-time rabbi serving a deaf Jewish community in the United States.

The synagogue, he says, "is a place where deaf people have complete parity with hearing people." Services and classes are conducted both in sign and spoken language. In the beginning, Goldhamer says, the only congregants were deaf people. "Family members didn't join the synagogue," he says. "They just dropped their deaf relatives off. Then they came to services and they liked that the service was conducted three- dimensionally." Soon other hearing people joined, and the synagogue now has about 230 member families, both deaf and hearing.

"In normative communication, just the head is involved," Goldhamer says of what he calls "three-dimensional Judaism," "but G-d gave us a whole body, and in sign language we use the whole body to communicate. I think G-d smiles when G-d sees this, how our whole body glorifies G-d."

Goldhamer set about glorifying G-d in other ways as well. When he found that he was getting calls from people all over the country and even in Europe asking him to conduct services for simchas that involved deaf people, he realized he needed to begin training other rabbis to work with the deaf. When several seminaries told him that finances prevented them from opening their schools to deaf students, he started one of his own in 1992. Now the Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie, where he still serves as president, has 10 rabbinical students, including one profoundly deaf, "brilliant young woman" who will soon be ready to serve deaf and hearing Jews, just as Goldhamer does.

Another of his passions is healing through prayer. "I've seen how Jewish meditative practice leads to healing, physical healing," he says, citing the case of a physician who was cured of a brain tumor and other similar cases.

"Does it always cure? No," he says. "But does traditional medicine always cure? No. Does (prayer) heal much of the time? Yes." It is Goldhamer's contention that G-d is "hardwired" to respond when an individual prays in a certain way, and that "we are hardwired to receive G-d. It's not mind over body-it's G-d over person," he says. In 1999, he and Melinda Stengel, a licensed social worker, wrote a book on the subject, "This is for Everyone: Universal Principles of Healing Prayer and the Jewish Mystics" (Larson Publications), and he is working on another with the head of neurology at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

As he nears his 35th year serving the community, Goldhamer admits that most of his life revolves around his synagogue, where his wife, Peggy Bagley, a former art historian, works as the executive director. Their dog, Edison, comes to work with them every day. And Goldhamer says of the unusual house of worship he has created that "what we have is a model for a deaf and hearing synagogue. And it's working extremely well."

CHAZAN ALBERTO MIZRAHI: One life, two loves
Chazan Alberto Mizrahi is often affectionately called "the Jewish Pavarotti," and he once served as an understudy for the famous tenor.

But it's a good bet that Luciano Pavarotti has never chanted High Holiday services in front of hundreds of rapt worshippers nor entertained young and young-at-heart congregants at lively Friday Night Live! services.

Mizrahi has done both-and much, much more.

Today he's well known as the cantor of Anshe Emet Synagogue on Chicago's North Side, a large Conservative congregation. He has happily served there for the past 17 years while making six CDs for the Milken Jewish Music Archive collection, singing as a featured performer on more than 20 other recordings and performing in cities and festivals around the world, from Russia to Israel to his native Greece.

In between his birth in that country's Sephardic community and his tenure as one of Chicago's best known and most recognizable Jewish figures has been "a long road with a lot of bifurcations," in his words.

In fact, most of his life has run on parallel tracks: opera and chazanut, the cantorial profession.

It all started when he was 5 and his father took him to see "The Great Caruso" with Mario Lanza.

Hearing Lanza sing, "I thought, my god, you can do that with your voice?" he recalls. "That's what I wanted to do. Since that day, it never changed. I wanted to be an opera singer."

He got the chance to do that, and a lot more as well, because of his parents' decision to emigrate from Greece to America when their only child was 8 years old. His father, a survivor of Auschwitz, "had no education and worked with his hands in a textile factory," he relates. "They had a precocious boy who had some brains and a little bit of talent and they didn't think I could fulfill my potential in Greece," where children from poor families had little chance for an education. He credits all of his later achievements as flowing from his parents' courageous decision.

The family ended up in Cleveland, where several generous donors underwrote Mizrahi's education at Jewish day schools. "That's just the way they did it-Jews take care of Jews," he says. Eventually he made an eye-opening discovery: "You could be a chazan, be a Jew and still sing operatically."

He graduated from the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie and became a cantor, but, he says, "I still had that dichotomy where I always really wanted to do opera." For the first 10 years of his professional life, he tried to do both. "In each position, I either got closer to or ran away from the opera," he says. He sang with companies in Miami, Omaha and Toledo, Ohio, auditioned for the Met, and found himself understudying "this little unknown Italian guy, Pavarotti."

Then, after performing some concerts in Chicago, he found himself at dinner sitting next to Anshe Emet's rabbi, Michael Siegel. The synagogue was looking for a cantor, and Siegel asked if he would be interested. He was. He moved to Chicago along with wife Deborah and daughter Belina (now studying at Yale School of Drama after graduating there with a degree in astrophysics, Mizrahi relates proudly). As for Anshe Emet, "It was a very good match. Rabbi Siegel is a visionary, and the synagogue is like a family. I love working there."

And those opera dreams? "I called it quits about 10 years ago," he says. "You realize that there are some professions for which you're born and some you might have been born for if you weren't born Jewish and poor." Listening to the likes of Pavarotti and Placido Domingo, "I realized I'm never going to be that. I don't have that. I should stay with what I'm really good at. After that, I went back into chazanut with more gusto," he says. Now he travels all over the world to sing, including at the synagogue in Greece where he had his bris.

"I live to sing," he says. "That in itself makes me a very satisfied guy."

And as for Pavarotti, aren't they calling him the non-Jewish Alberto Mizrahi now?

KERRY R. PECK: Activist for the aging
Kerry R. Peck learned many things from his father, but perhaps the most important one was this: "When you become a lawyer, you can do good for people who aren't able to do good for themselves."

It's a bit of advice that has guided Peck through an illustrious career and continues to direct him as he moves into new and often uncharted areas.

Peck is the managing partner of the Chicago law firm Peck, Bloom, Austriaco & Mitchell, LLC, where he handles matters dealing with trusts, estates, wills, probate and related issues. He has gathered a raft of awards, been named a "superlawyer"-in the top five percent of the profession-by his attorney peers, appeared as an expert on dozens of TV and radio shows and served as president of the 22,000-member Chicago Bar Association, where among other accomplishments he convened the first interfaith event, designed to build bridges between the religious and legal communities.

But somewhere there is an elderly person enjoying retirement and knowing that her financial needs are taken care of, and another who is comfortably sitting down with his family to talk about end-of-life decisions. They may not know about all of Peck's awards and honors, but they're grateful to him nevertheless.

That's because elder law, a relatively new legal field, marks a particularly important area of specialization for Peck. He has recently helped revise Illinois' statutes pertaining to elder abuse and neglect, served as a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in 2005 and founded an elder law committee within the Chicago Bar Association. "I'm kind of leading the charge in Chicago to educate older adults and their families about preventive planning, getting things in order, taking steps to protect themselves," he says.

These are particularly necessary tasks today, Peck contends. "People are living longer and, with the advances of medicine, they're able to have a better quality of life," he says. At the same time, there's a need for more specialists in such areas as disability, the dying process, power of attorney, end-of-life decisions, taxes, litigation, transfer of wealth. And he wants to get a message out to all aging individuals and their families that it's important to consult an expert in such issues and to commit their intentions and desires to writing. The Terri Schiavo case-which Peck spoke on extensively-and similar right-to-die cases illustrate what happens when there are no written plans, he says.

Peck, who was raised in Wilmette when the suburb mostly consisted of cornfields, comes by his super-lawyer status naturally. His father, Joseph Peck, was a well-known Chicago attorney and CPA, and three of his five sons became lawyers. Kerry Peck never wanted to be anything else.

After graduating from Northern Illinois University and Chicago-Kent College of Law, he "temporarily" joined his father's firm, Peck & Wolf. The temporary job lasted 10 years. Then Peck formed his own firm and, later in his career, his dad joined it. "We kind of went full circle," he says. The elder Peck passed away last year.

There's now a new generation of Peck lawyers coming up: Daughter Haley just graduated from law school, and son Brandon is in his second semester. Peck's wife, Hillary, teaches special education in the Niles Township School District, a job that he says "carries on the flavor of the household"-helping people who need it.

That, in fact, is a recurrent theme of his conversation. In addition to his legal work, Peck serves on the board of Keshet, a Jewish organization for the parents of children with disabilities, and has put together a planned giving program for individuals who want to help support the organization. He calls it "a natural integration with my law practice in elder law, estate planning, dealing with handicapped individuals." He also works with the parents of children who have disabilities and the children of older adults with impaired cognitive skills.

Why does he take on such a thorny area of practice? "I was drawn to working with older and disabled adults out of compassion, a desire to give back," he says. "We all have an obligation to give back to the community."

ABBY PHILLIPS: Involved in getting kids involved
Anyone who believes that today's high school students are shallow, self-centered creatures who don't care about anything beyond the next party or their friend's video on YouTube obviously hasn't met Abby Phillips.

Perhaps one of her mentors, Rabbi Micah Greenland, regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, describes her best, calling her "a young woman who has contributed on so many different levels to Jewish youth activity in Chicago."

Phillips, a senior at Stevenson High School in Buffalo Grove, has been involved with NCSY since 7th grade, following a pattern her older sister set. She served on her chapter's board when she was in 9th grade and is on the regional board as vice president of outreach this year.

In her junior year she started a chapter of the Jewish Student Union at her school and is now its president. This national organization is an NCSY offshoot designed to get Jewish students in public schools more involved in Jewish life. In Abby's case, it seems to have worked.

Her involvement in these activities grows out of an observant Jewish home life, but even more from her own deeply held convictions. "I think it's important that if you believe in something and you believe you can do it, you go ahead and do it," she says. "NCSY helps kids come together and be proud of what they have, which is their Jewish heritage. It shows them the possibilities within that community."

To that end she has created events in tandem with the regional NCSY leadership and also devises "icebreakers," such as games and group activities, to be held at the beginning of events and conventions so kids will feel more at ease. She's also currently creating a slide show about NCSY so that teens in other schools will be able to get a feel for its activities.

It's important, Abby believes, for more public school students to become involved in groups like NCSY. Currently most of the regional leaders of the group are Jewish day school students, but, she says, "as more public school kids get involved in organizations like NCSY, more likely than not they're going to want to take on greater leadership roles. It just takes time to see the possibilities."

There's a large Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, where Abby lives with her parents -Arnold, a doctor, and Sallie, who helps her husband in his practice -- but it's not an easy sell to convince kids to get involved with a Jewish organization, she says. "Since people's number one point of reference is themselves, it's very hard to get kids involved with something like NCSY where all the attention is not centered on you," she says. "But if kids are trying to make a change in their life and they see the value of NCSY, then they will get involved."

Rabbi Greenland thinks that if anybody can bring about that change, it's Abby. "She has tried to make the programs warm and inviting to first-time participants," he says. "It's just illustrative of her desire to make Judaism and Jewish youth activities open and accessible to as many Jewish kids as possible. She thinks creatively about how to approach the issue of so many Jewish kids who aren't connected to anything Jewish. If there is anything she can do, she will do it."

Abby's mother agrees. Sallie Phillips says that the impetus for Abby's activities has come from within her, not from her parents. "She's very driven and very goal-oriented. She knows exactly what she wants in life and she goes for it, and all we can do is support her and be very proud of her for her accomplishments," she says.

Those accomplishments also include involvement with her school's political action club, where she serves as the president, and playing the piano.

In the fall Abby will enter a new arena of Jewish life. She'll attend Stern College for Women in New York City, the women's division of Yeshiva University. She plans to study economics and art history and eventually to be a lawyer, and there's no reason to doubt that she'll easily fulfill those ambitions.

As her mother says, "She is a force of nature."

PATTI RAY: Guiding college kids
College campuses, if the headlines are to be believed, are contentious places where anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism abound and Jewish students coexist uneasily with those of other faiths and ethnicities.

This may describe some schools, but not Chicago's Loyola University. On each of its three campuses, just the opposite is true. In a Jesuit university setting, the school's Hillel is a major part of college life with an influence that extends far beyond the small percentage of Jewish students.

Consider: Muslim students at the main campus store their prayer rugs at the Hillel and walk through its kosher kitchen to get to their mosque (Hillel advocated for its construction). Muslim and Jewish students, in turn, teamed up to advocate for the creation of a religious space for Hindu students-at a Catholic university.

This extraordinary example of unity within diversity is due in large part to the Hillel's director of the past 20 years, Patti Ray. The recipient of many honors, including Loyola's first award for outstanding professional staff member, she was also the first woman in the country to serve as a full-time Hillel director when she headed the organization at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus (now UIC) in 1975. But accolades aside, she contends that "the source of my nachas (pride) is that I love what I do-work with amazing young people at this critical juncture in their life."

Ray never set out to become a Hillel director and in fact wasn't very involved with Hillel as an undergrad at the University of Illinois. But growing up in Park Forest, a new community with a sense of promise for Jews, she gained an appreciation for Jewish values and the search for justice from both her Russian immigrant mother and an American-born father who was deeply involved in politics and intellectual pursuits.

Campus life suited her, and after graduation she went on to further study in English and American literature. Here she met one of her two great mentors, Rabbi Eddie Feld, the university's Hillel director. He encouraged her to start an organization for Jewish graduate students, then, noting how successful the venture was, asked her to be his assistant. She mostly received her training on the job, learning "how important it is to be a Jewish presence that's connected to the life of the university. That became in later years the foundation of how I do my Hillel work," she says.

Ray moved on to start a Jewish student organization at Roosevelt University, the first time the idea had been tried on a local commuter campus, then did the same at the Circle campus, where she stayed until 1979. By this time she was married to Allen, an attorney she had met at (where else?) a Hillel event, and in 1979 she "retired" to raise their twin sons, Avi and Yoni, now graduate students themselves. Caring for her aging parents as well as her children, she didn't envision going back into Hillel work, but in 1987 the university ministry at Loyola was seeking a full-time Hillel director, and the second of Ray's mentors, Rabbi Daniel Leifer, then Hillel director at the University of Chicago, contacted her.

"I thought I was too 40 and too Skokie to become a Hillel director," Ray recalls. But she took the job anyway and soon found that "the university embraced me personally and embraced the Hillel from the beginning. They give us all kinds of intangible as well as tangible support." In turn, "I think the Hillel at Loyola has helped change the face of the university in how the university relates to the non-Catholic students and communities there," she says. "Loyola is a values-based school, and that was a perfect mesh for creating an active, involved (Jewish) community on campus."

Although only about 200 undergraduate and 500 graduate students, or about three percent of the student body, identify as Jewish, Ray believes that students can learn valuable lessons from being a minority on campus.

"A student will learn how to integrate their Jewish identity with their life," she says. "They learn that being Jewish is part and parcel of how they live their life."

ROBERT M. SCHRAYER: From generation to generation
When the president of Tel Aviv University came to America seeking a Jewish community activist who could raise both funds for and interest in the Israeli school, it was Chicago's Robert M. Schrayer that he turned to.

It was an obvious choice. Schrayer was born into a family of Jewish communal leaders, has carried the torch throughout his life and is now passing it on to his children and grandchildren.

Still, he was just coming off a demanding volunteer position as head of the Jewish United Fund's 2005 annual campaign when the university's president, Itamar Rabinovich, came calling.

"He expressed the need they had for somebody who knew the Jewish community throughout the country and would spend some time developing fund-raising and raise the interest level in the Jewish community. I bought it. I said I would do my best," the soft-spoken Schrayer concludes modestly.

That, clearly, is what he has always done, to the benefit of the Jewish community in Chicago, the United States, Israel and around the world.

Schrayer developed a passion for Jewish communal activism at his parents' dinner table. He's a Chicagoan through and through-his father, grandfather and great- grandfather were all born and raised here. All were active in the Jewish community, and family members were among the founders of K.A.M., the city's oldest Reform congregation.

His father, the late Max Schrayer, was the only person to chair the federation's annual campaign three times. His parents were involved with numerous other Jewish and Zionist causes as well. Schrayer remembers Golda Meir coming for Shabbat dinner when she was raising money for Israel-"normative behavior" in the family, he says.

Following his parents' example, he has served in the local and national federation system in many leadership positions. Now he's lending his formidable skills to Tel Aviv University's American Council because "I believe in education. I believe Israel's future is in the development of its young people in terms of their education. Their strength is in their brain power," he says. The university, he adds, "is doing some fantastic research in the areas of cancer, the environment, medicine, law. It's a very impressive university with a very impressive staff."

He's serving a three-year "sentence" (his term) in the position and describes it as "difficult, extremely difficult. For some reason, the image of Tel Aviv University in America is extremely low. People are not aware of it. They do a great job of developing research programs but not a good job of making it known to the public."

Among Schrayer's first innovations was the creation of a public relations/communications program designed to "spread the word, raise our image in America." He is also attempting to develop more staff and volunteers.

He continues to be involved with the Chicago federation and is a political activist as well. He's supporting Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in his bid for the presidency and continues to be an advocate for Dan Seals, who lost in his campaign for the U.S. House against Rep. Mark Kirk but plans to run again in the next election, according to Schrayer. He gives his time and money because, he says, "I believe strongly that we need better people in our government."

He and his wife, Barbara, also live by the motto ofl'dor l'dor-from generation to generation. Barbara Schrayer is active with the Jewish United Fund, Council for Jewish Elderly and Jewish Community Centers of Chicago. Their son, Max, known as Skip, chaired the JUF 2006 annual campaign, taking over where his father left off.

One daughter, Elizabeth, lives in Maryland with her family, has her own political consulting firm and is on the board of a Jewish day school. Another daughter, Deborah Karmin, lives in Chicago and is also active in the Jewish community, serving in positions of responsibility with the federation's Young Women's Board and with the Parent Teacher Organization at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School.

And there are eight grandchildren growing into their roles as the Jewish communal leaders of the future.

BEATRICE MICHAELS SHAPIRO: A purpose in life
Beatrice Michaels Shapiro's name might sound familiar-she has written dozens of articles on all sorts of topics for the Chicago Tribune, Lerner Newspapers, and other publications. She has also written two books. But those who read her writing surely don't know the woman behind the byline and the inspiring story of her life.

Shapiro grew up in Lawndale, one of Chicago's old West Side Jewish neighborhoods. Her first book, "Memories of Lawndale," expanded from a contest-winning article she wrote for the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, taps her reminiscences from those times.

She graduated from Marshall High School but her family didn't have the financial resources for her to attend college full time, so she took a few courses at night at a junior college. She had no thoughts of being a writer, but "whatever I handed in, they always liked what I wrote, I don't know why," she says. Meanwhile she worked as a clerk at the Fair store on State Street and met her future husband, Larry Shapiro, while he was in the service during the Korean War.

They married in 1952 and their first child, Ira, was born the next year. The couple soon noticed that his development seemed to be lagging, and after they took him to several doctors, he was diagnosed as severely mentally retarded, a term that's out of vogue today but was commonly used at the time. The physicians predicted that he would never talk, and he never has; he did learn to walk, but as a grown man a severe curvature of the spine limits his movement.

The couple quickly decided to keep Ira at home with them. "The doctors said, why don't you put him in an institution, have a life of your own," Shapiro relates. "I said, what meaning would my life have?"

They vowed, too, that they would "take him out in society," Shapiro says, noting that in that era most disabled children were confined to institutions or hidden away at home. "It was not easy to close my eyes to the stares of the people who saw him, but I hoped that they would learn there are people like this around and become more kind and understanding," she says.

After five years, the couple had another baby. "I wanted to have a normal child," Shapiro says, and at first that seemed to be the case with their second son, Gary, who was clearly highly intelligent. But he soon began exhibiting behavioral difficulties, started running away and sometimes became aggressive. While Shapiro now thinks he might fit the definition of autism, that term was unknown when he was a child, and he was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder. Today Shapiro's sons are 53 and 49 years old and she is still responsible for their care. Her husband died two years ago.

Still, beginning when she was 40, Shapiro managed to earn a bachelor's and master's degree through a combination of TV courses and classes at Roosevelt and Northeastern universities. It took her 10 years altogether. Soon afterwards she began writing for the Chicago Tribune's "First Person" and "Chicago Voices" sections as well as articles for other sections-more than 50 in all.

" I wrote in the living room, with no privacy and noise all around me," Shapiro says. (Because of Ira's inability to talk, he communicates through near-constant loud noises.) "But I kept on because I wanted to accomplish something for myself."

"Memories of Lawndale" and a second book, "Breaking Ground: Careers of 20 Chicago Jewish Women," eventually followed.

Shapiro also founded and for the last 21 years has run the Adina Weiner Memorial Foundation, an organization that provides scholarships for graduating high school girls to study in Israel. The impetus was her friendship with the family of Adina, who died from an illness at the age of 17. The organization has thus far provided scholarships for 271 girls.

Through it all, Shapiro continues to provide all of life's necessities for her two disabled sons. Despite the difficulties, she says, "both children have given my life meaning. I feel G-d chose me to take care of both of these boys. This is my purpose in life."

LOIS ZOLLER: Go-to woman
Lois Zoller began her career as a fund-raiser at the age of 14 when her high school sorority threw a party for all the Jewish teens on Chicago's South Shore, where she lived.

"It was a big dance, and the different groups competed," she recalls. "You had to raise money. Most people raised $25. I raised $250. That was my start."

What the effort began was a practically unparalleled volunteer career as a fund- raiser, Jewish community leader and trainer of fund-raisers and community leaders. Zoller's resume is the size of an honors thesis; among the local and national organizations in whose efforts she has been instrumental include the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, where she has held nearly a dozen leadership positions; Council for Jewish Elderly; Weizmann Institute of Science; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; Crohn's & Colitis Foundation; Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School; International Hillel; Mt. Sinai and Michael Reese hospitals; and many, many more.

Admitting that she is perpetually "on overload," Zoller says she takes on so many tasks because "I just get encouraged by the incredible organizations I see out there. I call them gems. Not jewels-I only get involved in what I call gems."

She comes by her altruism naturally. "I'm just copying my parents," she says. They were deeply involved in an organization that was the predecessor of the Council for Jewish Elderly and founded CJE's Swartzberg House, a Chicago apartment house for low- income elderly persons. Today most of the residents are from the former Soviet Union, and Zoller often visits them. "I go up and down the aisles asking people where they're from and I feel very good because I can say, I've been there-to Riga, Minsk, St. Petersburg. I've been there visiting the Jews," often with a federation mission.

"I'm constantly called on by organizations to do something," says Zoller, a diminutive dynamo. "I can't stretch myself any thinner but I don't want to get out of anything I'm in because I think they're all terrific." Still, she admits that "it gets a little overwhelming because I can't call the same people over and over again."

She is a fierce champion of Israel and is proud of her involvement in a relatively new organization, Project Interchange, that brings influential non-Jews to Israel, including student body presidents and editors of college newspapers. She is similarly enthusiastic about The Israel Project, which distributes positive news about the Jewish state to the media.

Zoller also devotes much time and energy to medical research facilities, especially those in Israel. "Both of my parents had very rare, horrible diseases, and I learned that there's very little money out there for rare diseases," she says, noting that the Weizmann Institute has been working on a treatment for a disease from which her late father suffered.

The Chicago federation, however, "is my home," she says. "I've chaired a number of national events for the UJA, and there is no question about it, this federation is by far the best in the country" thanks to the leadership of its president, Steven Nasatir.

Fund-raising is not Zoller's only skill. A former travel agent and teacher with degrees from the Wharton School and National-Louis University, she has been all over the country training fund-raisers and board members of organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish; has taught classes at Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies; and sits on a number of advisory boards, which suits her because "you don't have to make every board meeting or be involved in all the everyday activities."

Outside of her organizational life, there is what she calls her "extra-beautiful time," which she spends with her grandchildren. She and her husband, James Mills, love spending time with Zoller's two sons and four grandchildren and Mills' three children and one grandchild. "They're the best part of it all," Zoller says, adding proudly, "And they're all in Jewish day schools." Mills is also heavily involved in the Council for Jewish Elderly and is chairing their main fund-raising event this year.

As for Zoller, she has some advice to members of Chicago's Jewish community: "Please don't hang up when you hear my voice on the other end. I promise you'll be happy you talked to me." Back to Lists