THE JEWISH LISTS:
Jewish Chicagoans of the Year 2008
GAYLA CAHAN: Madame President
 "There are lots of jokes about rabbis and temple presidents not getting along," says Rabbi Ellen Dreyfus of B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood. But none of them apply to her relationship with Gayla Cahan, the Reform congregation's current president.
"I'm blessed to have a president who I really see as a co-worker, not an adversary," Dreyfus adds.
Being involved in synagogue life is nothing new for Cahan, who lives in nearby Flossmoor in Chicago's southern suburbs. She grew up on the North Shore, where her parents were among the founding members of what is now Am Yisrael Congregation in Northbrook. "I think it influenced me quite a bit, to see my parents founding a new synagogue," she says. Her immersion in the Jewish world deepened as she attended Camp Ramah and learned Hebrew, which came easily to her.
After graduating from Northwestern University, Cahan, a dental hygienist by profession, lived in Israel for a time, where she worked in a dental clinic in a hospital in Tiberias. "I wanted to do something more adventurous, and I knew there was a need," she says.
Back home, she married Joel Cahan, a doctor who worked in northwest Indiana, and moved to a place where she never thought she would live, the southern suburbs. She soon saw the advantages.
"My really strong involvement comes from having moved from the north suburbs to a smaller community with fewer Jewish families," she says. "You really have to identify and become part of the community. I think it's a great place to live and raise kids." Her own include Miriam, who is in law school; Noah, an architecture student; and Joshua, a pre-med student.
Cahan, meanwhile, became involved with every aspect of the Jewish community in her area while continuing to serve as an adjunct faculty member in the dental hygiene department at Prairie State College in Chicago Heights. She taught Hebrew at her synagogue and became active in other organizations including the Anita M. Stone JCC in Flossmoor and the South Cook Section of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Primarily, though, "I'm very focused on the synagogue," she says. "There's not a single job I haven't done there. We depend so much on volunteers, and I'm not going to ask people to do things I wouldn't do."
For the last two years (she's in the last year of a three-year term) she has served as president of B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom. It's been a challenge, Cahan says, because the Jewish population of the southern suburbs is declining. "I became president at a time when our members were feeling a little discouraged because of the demographic changes," she says. "There are not that many new Jewish families moving into the southern suburbs. People are aging. Their kids live on the North Shore, and they're moving to where their kids and grandkids are. We're dealing with a shrinking Jewish population."
Among her first tasks, she says, was to "pull people in to work to energize the synagogue, to focus on the good things we could do. We don't have to be big to have an active, vibrant synagogue that meets the needs of our members. We're finding ways to connect with our members with the numbers that we have."
Dreyfus says Cahan brings "a sense of calm. Her demeanor might belie her strength. She has been tremendous in putting our finances in order, urging people to move ahead on projects. She has a vision for the congregation and the community and inspires others to form their own vision and act on it. And she's really good to work with. There's a real sense of partnership."
For her part, Cahan says she is happy that the synagogue continues to work in partnership with the region's two other synagogues and to welcome "people of all backgrounds. We're a very inclusive synagogue."
And she continues to believe that the southern suburbs are a great place to live. "There are things a small Jewish community has to offer that a larger one doesn't," she says.
Cahan is living proof of that.
ELIANA FISHER: Never too young
 It's not unusual for a bar/bat mitzvah child to undertake a mitzvah project, a good deed that benefits others in the community. But Eliana Fisher's went way beyond the norm.
That's not surprising because since she was small, friends and family members say, Eliana has been remarkably concerned about the welfare of others.
"She is filled with love and loving kindness. That really defines her life" is the way Rabbi Allan Kensky of Beth Hillel Congregation Bnai Emunah in Wilmette puts it.
Kensky is the Fisher family's rabbi, but his and his family's connection to Eliana goes even deeper.
The 14-year-old, a recent graduate of Solomon Schechter Middle School, was good friends with Kensky's late wife, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a Judaic and feminist scholar who died of breast cancer several years ago.
"Tikva was this giant in her world but she was able to meet Eliana where she was at. She and Eliana played cards and watched 'Dancing With the Stars' together. She would talk about things that Eliana wanted to talk about. Eliana didn't know her as this literary and scholarly genius, she just knew her as Tikva," Eliana's mother, Elysa Fisher, says.
"Sometimes on Saturday evenings before mincha, I went over to her house and played cards with her," Eliana recalls. "When she was sick, a friend would bring her food and I went with her sometimes. I really liked hanging out with her."
As Eliana was planning for her bat mitzvah, she learned that Frymer-Kensky had cancer. "I was trying to think about what I wanted to do" for the mitzvah project, Eliana says. "I knew that Tikva had cancer, and I thought it would be a really good idea to do something for her."
That's when Eliana's artistic side came out. She got the idea to sell T-shirts to raise money, and did the design herself. It includes words like "love," "life," "friends," "families," "humor" ("things that reminded me of Tikva," Eliana says) forming the shape of the familiar pink ribbon, with "Tikva is Hope" printed boldly underneath. (Call the synagogue at 847-256-1213 to order one.)
Eliana began to sell the shirts at her school, her synagogue and at special events. "People who walked in the breast cancer walk on Mother's Day wore them," she recalls. "It was really really cool to see that."
She quickly raised more than $2,000 and decided to donate it to the Israel Cancer Research Fund. Israel "is a great love of hers; she's been there four times," Elysa Fisher says. Eliana thought donating the money "would work toward helping to find a cure for cancer and it combined Israel with that."
The project was just one instance among many of Eliana's generous spirit. "She is such a caring, giving person," her mother says. "Her teachers always talk about how, from the time she was little, she was always the caretaker if someone was hurt or seemed upset. She has a very giving nature. It's all about tikkun olam (repairing the world) for her."
As a child, Elysa Fisher recalls, Eliana and her older brothers, Ari and Alex, often set up a lemonade stand. They would split the profits evenly, with whatever was left over going to tzedakah. "A lot of kids sold lemonade," their mother says. "Their idea was to sell lemonade and use it for tzedakah."
At Solomon Schechter, where students choose a tzedakah project every month, Eliana came up with the idea of inviting a representative of the chosen organization to come to the school to speak to students. The amount of tzedakah increased as soon as the program was implemented. She is also the only girl in her class who wears tefillin and is "very invested in liturgy and Torah reading. These things really speak to her," her mother says.
Dance speaks to her as well - she takes ballet, hip hop, modern and jazz classes and thinks she may want to attend Juilliard for college and go on to become a performer. But right now, there is Chicagoland Jewish High School, where she will be a freshman, to think about.
And many, many more T-shirts to sell.
JULIE HAMOS: Not politics as usual
 If you took the "el" or bus to work today, thank State Rep. Julie Hamos.
Hamos, a Democrat who represents Illinois' 18th district, chairs the legislature's Mass Transit Committee, which passed a bill that - to oversimplify a vastly complicated matter - kept the CTA from severely cutting services. Hamos created the committee herself three years ago when the then-head of the agency told her "we're running out of money and there's going to be major trouble down the road."
Passing the transit bill was anything but a smooth ride. "It was really difficult. It was 24/7 work for a long time. I stayed awake at night worrying about it," Hamos confides. But then taking risks, working hard and diligently and accomplishing the seemingly impossible have been traits ingrained in Hamos from childhood.
She was born in Hungary to Holocaust survivor parents who had long wanted to leave the country, which had a history of anti-Semitism. Getting out was impossible after the Iron Curtain fell, but in the aftermath of the brief Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Russian tanks that crushed it, Hamos' grandmother, a "strong matriarch" in her words, made arrangements for the family to come to America.
In what Hamos calls "an amazing act of courage," with only 24 hours to prepare, her grandmother and parents took their two young children and walked out into a new life.
"What's relevant in that story to my life today is that my parents raised us to seize every opportunity, to aim high, not to look back, not to be worried," she says. "I think I took this into Springfield. I do take more risks than people sometimes think I should, certainly more than most people do."
Hamos' risk-taking career began soon after she received her law degree from George Washington University. Her first job, which she credits with launching her entire career, was "one that I made up, and I went around the country to try and sell it - to me this is chutzpah," she says. The job was as a lobbyist for poor people in Illinois, and she worked with legal aid organizations advocating on poverty issues for the next several years.
She moved to Chicago in 1980 to work for then-State's Attorney (now Chicago mayor) Richard M. Daley, focusing on policy as it related to women and domestic violence. Daley later made her the head of the county's Child Support Division, where again she worked primarily on women's issues.
Meanwhile, she continued to be active in an organization she had formed in the 1980s, Cook County Democratic Women. "We were talent scouts, always looking for great women," she says. "In the process, we discovered Jan Schakowsky," then a consumer activist, now a popular and well-regarded U.S. representative from Illinois. "We recruited her to run for (state legislative) office, and the rest is history," Hamos says.
Ten years ago, when Schakowsky was preparing to run for Congress for the first time, she returned the favor. "She sought me out and basically said, girlfriend, it's your turn," Hamos says. "I wasn't necessarily heading toward public office. I had a very fertile and wonderful career working behind the scenes on public policy issues."
But she didn't turn down Schakowsky's offer. She has been in the legislature ever since, where, among many other accomplishments, she introduced her friend and Illinois legislative colleague Barack Obama to voters on the North Shore and became one of the first to endorse him in the U.S. Senate primary. Now she is actively working for his presidential bid.
This self-professed policy wonk ("it's almost everybody's title for me") has a personal life too. She has been married for 19 years to Judge Alan Greiman. He was a widower with six daughters when they met; now there are seven grandchildren as well. "I skipped over motherhood and got to the really good part," Hamos jokes.
As for the future, she isn't ruling out a run for higher office, much discussed since her successful work on the transit bill, but says that no matter what happens, one thing will never change: "My self image is still very much as an activist."
LAWRENCE LAYFER: Doctor, author, teacher, chief
 To read the author's profile on the dust jacket of Larry Layfer's new book, "A Chapter of Talmud" (Devora Publishing), you'd never know that he is the Abraham M. Chervony Professor of Medical Affairs and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie.
Or, indeed, that he is a doctor. He presents himself as simply a member of Am Yisrael Congregation in Northbrook, where he has taught a Talmud class for more than a decade.
He is that, of course, and a lot more besides.
Layfer's unlikely, enriching story begins on Chicago's North Side, where he grew up as a Conservative Jew (which he still is). In college, he studied at the famed Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, intending to write fiction, but "it didn't work," he says. "They always tell you to write about what you know, and I really didn't know very much." Instead he went on to medical school at Rush Medical College and began a career as a rheumatologist.
Soon he discovered another passion. "I never learned in yeshiva, and about 25 years ago, I decided it was time to learn some Talmud," he explains. On his birthday that year, he took the day off, bought a Talmud and began reading it. Shortly afterwards, an Orthodox resident he was working with told him "You're not learning Talmud the right way" and suggested a teacher, his cousin, Rabbi Shlomo Simon. Layfer has been studying with him ever since.
By this time, Layfer was married to Linda, a special education teacher. (Today the family consists of son David, a lawyer, and daughters Lisa and Laura, art historians who both work at Christie's in New York.) They moved to the north suburbs, where Layfer joined Am Yisrael and met the late Rabbi William Frankel, who became another teacher and mentor.
"I decided I needed both my (Orthodox) chevrusa (study partner) and my psychologist/rabbi to complete what I could get out of Talmud," he says.
Studying Talmud, he found, "filled an empty space in me." And what he learned, he wanted to teach. In that desire, he discovered the intersection between Talmud and medicine. At Rush North Shore, he runs the residency program, which involves much teaching. "I love to be in on learning. When a group of people sit down to learn and get excited about it, I love to be there," he says.
With Talmud, "the insights I get, if I've taken the trouble to think it through and write about it, I love to share it." Soon he was teaching several courses for the Dawn Schuman Institute, writing Torah columns (which appear in Chicago Jewish News and online) and designing other Internet courses. "It's a terrific outlet. As an avocation, it's what I live to do," he says.
For the last 15 years, he has taught a Talmud class at Am Yisrael. Most of the original members are still in the class, which has met at a nursing home and at a student's house to accommodate members' illnesses. He even persuaded the distinguished Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz to teach a session when he was in town. ("Everybody brought their spouses," he remembers.)
His love of Talmud study led to the idea for the recently published book, which is aimed at beginning students and focuses on a single complete chapter, the shortest one in the entire Talmud, in order to give students the feel of this type of study.
Layfer says it's for "individuals who think to themselves 'I've never done a chapter of Talmud. I'd kind of like to do one. How can I go through life without knowing what this book is?' Halfway through it, they'll be like, ah, I get it, now I know what everybody's talking about. Even one chapter, half a chapter, at least you walk away thinking, I've experienced it. It's like tasting kosher sushi - oh, this is what everybody's been talking about."
That, he says, is the way he felt when he first began studying Talmud. So he warns readers: "If it turns out to be your cup of tea, it will become your hobby." Or maybe, as it has been for Layfer, your passion.
REGINE SCHLESINGER: Voice of Chicago news
 News radio reporter and anchor.
Orthodox Jew.
The two would seem to be mutually exclusive, but in Regine Schlesinger's case, they meld smoothly in one extraordinary woman.
You probably know Schlesinger's voice if not her face. She joined WBBM Newsradio 780, Chicago's only all-news radio station, in 1973, right after her graduation from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. After working for six years as a writer and producer, she began appearing on air as a reporter and anchor. She's been at it ever since, covering every kind of story from politics to pop culture and beyond.
Schlesinger wanted to be a journalist for as long as she can remember, but she determined early on that she would never let her profession interfere with her passion for leading an observant Jewish life. In that regard, as in many others, Schlesinger was deeply influenced by her parents, both Holocaust survivors.
"I don't know how to express what they mean to me," she says. "Here were people who were handed the most horrible fate, and instead of being bitter and angry, they just went on to build new lives without expecting anything from anybody."
Schlesinger herself was born in France, arrived in America when she was two and grew up on Chicago's North Side, where she attended Jewish day schools. After graduating from Northwestern, she had her sights set on a journalism career but worried about how she would manage it.
"My professors told me, you have to go to a small town to start out; you're never going to get a job in Chicago. I knew that was not compatible with my religious life, finding kosher food and all the rest of it," she says.
Her father, a practical man, suggested she at least try some Chicago outlets. She found out that WBBM was looking for writers, and after taking a writing test, she was hired.
"I said, well that's wonderful, but I have something to tell you," she recalls. "I was supposed to start on Oct. 1, and the next week was Succos. I think my bosses had heard of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. I told them about the holidays and said I'm never going to be able to work Friday nights or Saturdays." Surprisingly, they accommodated her.
"I've never worked on a Shabbos or a Jewish holiday. I was the first one in broadcast journalism in the country to do that, and I don't know if there's anybody doing it now," she says.
She went on to cover every kind of story, big - Sept. 11, the Loop flood, the Laurie Dann shootings - and small. Often it is the latter, she says, that stick with her, such as her report on a small boy who needed a liver transplant and whose parents courageously agreed to allow doctors to pioneer a new method to give their son and other children a chance at life. Nor will she forget the story of the Willis family, whose six children died in an accident involving a fraudulently licensed trucker.
At a news conference, the Willises "talked about how they didn't own these children, they were G-d's stewards of these children. It was really a lesson in what we call emunah" or faith, she says. "Those kinds of stories were difficult to do, especially once I had my own children."
Those children are Jeremy, now 23, a Northwestern graduate who is soon to be married; Rachel, 20, a college student; and Ariella, 18, heading to college after graduating from Ida Crown Jewish Academy. Schlesinger's husband, Stuart, is an attorney who shares her faith and values.
As for Schlesinger, she says she loves her job at WBBM as much as she did on the day she was hired. "I love being a conduit, being people's eyes and ears and being in the front row of world events."
There's another reason: "Journalism has always appealed to me because of my background as a child of Holocaust survivors. Generally if people are pretty well informed, they do the right thing most of the time, so I think it's important to keep them well informed."
In Chicago, if Regine Schlesinger has anything to say about it, they will be.
LAWRENCE SHERMAN: A lifetime of giving back
 Here's how it usually goes in the Jewish volunteer universe: You're active primarily in your synagogue, or in the Jewish Federation, or in one of the many organizations in the Jewish world's firmament.
Larry Sherman's star shines a little bit more brightly. In a long career of community activism, he's been active in all three areas.
A list of Sherman's titles and accomplishments could tax a forest: past vice chairman, former director, chair of numerous committees with the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago; past chairman and trustee for life of Mount Sinai Hospital Medical Center of Chicago; past vice president of the Community Foundation for Jewish Education; former board member of the Union for Reform Judaism, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, Council of Jewish Federations, American Jewish Committee, Alliance of Latinos and Jews, Standard Club of Chicago ... the list goes on.
The titles, though, don't tell you much about the man, a man who was born and raised on Chicago's old West Side, where his father was a dentist for 57 years in the heart of Lawndale. Although no one in the area was wealthy, "we felt like we were privileged. We used to give clothing and stuff to underprivileged kids, even though we didn't know what that meant," Sherman recalls - his first foray into tzedakah.
Grade school was the Robert Emmet School, a public school that re-entered Sherman's consciousness a few years ago when he was assigned there during the Principal for a Day program. When he discovered that 95 percent of the students there came from families living in poverty, he organized a committee of alumni to help. They've sent Emmet kids to summer camp, bought them clothing and donated computers and other supplies to the school.
Lawndale launched Sherman into a career in finance and degrees from the University of Illinois and the prestigious Wharton Graduate School at the University of Pennsylvania. After holding several positions in banking and finance, he started his own company, Puritan Finance Corp., in 1958. "It was me, myself and I when I started out," he says. In the same month, he and his wife, Elaine, bought a house in Highland Park, and their first son, Roger, was born. "It was a little nuts," he admits.
Today Sherman remains the chairman of Puritan, which helps to finance small businesses, and is the father of four. There are also four grandchildren, ages 7 to 12. He has been a widower since Elaine's death in 1985.
Meanwhile, Sherman's involvement in Jewish community life was growing as fast as his business. "I walk both sides of the street," he says of his commitment to the Jewish Federation and to his synagogue, North Shore Congregation Israel, where he has been a member for 51 years, and to the Reform movement.
"Synagogues are central to Jewish life. Without synagogues, you wouldn't have a Jewish community. It doesn't mean you have to be religious, but it does mean that you have to support your synagogue."
One particularly fulfilling mission was serving as chair of the Federation's Jewish Education Committee, a task he was at first reluctant to take on ("What do I know about Jewish education?"). It was at a time when several educational institutions in the community were having financial difficulties, and through the committee, he was able to help turn the situation around.
"It gave me a sense of achievement to be a conduit through which I was able to help" the ailing institutions, he says. "Developing leadership and bringing in other people - that's always an achievement."
He laments the fact that today "it's hard to recruit people. They're more selfish with their time," preferring to write a check rather than serve on a board or committee.
His own philosophy, which he continues to cling to, is "It takes time away from your business, yes, but there's a sense of accomplishment, of achievement in bringing different projects to fruition and success. It's important to give back."
Larry Sherman has spent his life doing just that.
PATRICIA VILE: Post-Katrina tikkun olam
 It's easy to imagine Patricia Vile tearing down a house or building one back up. Her energy is uncontainable and contagious.
But no one has to imagine Vile, universally known as Patti, doing those things, because she actually does them. And many victims of Hurricane Katrina are better off because of it.
Vile has filled what she saw as a need within the Jewish community by organizing New Orleans tours for congregants of Chicago-area synagogues. They're called Katrina Relief Missions, and participants do real work in the hardest-hit areas of the still devastated community. There's also time for visits to New Orleans Jewish landmarks and even to sneak in a little jazz and some culinary adventures.
Vile, who has spent most of her career in the health care field, got the idea for the missions after she went on a New Orleans trip organized by the Reform movement shortly after Katrina hit.
"I was heartbroken at the devastation," she says. "But the trip was pretty much just talking, with lots and lots of speakers. I thought, the Jewish people should do what the Christian groups are doing, just roll up your sleeves and start making a difference."
With a long history of Jewish community activism but no experience in organizing tours, Vile took the idea to her own synagogue, Am Shalom in Glencoe. "My rabbi said, put it together and we'll do it." She soon organized a group of 19 people.
"It was a very powerful, meaningful experience," she says. "That was a year ago, and people in New Orleans were still just hanging on. Things were very bad. The attitude was, next week I'll make a decision. Maybe I'll go, maybe I'll stay." Her group demolished a ruined house down to its studs so a new one could go up on the foundation, then helped out at a food bank.
When word of the trip got around, another synagogue contacted Vile, then another and another. She began adding more Jewish content to the trips, such as visits to Touro Synagogue, one of the oldest synagogues in the country, and a discussion with Jennifer Moses, author of the book "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou." Former Chicago Public Schools superintendent Paul Vallas, who now holds the same office in New Orleans, also speaks to many of the groups.
Vile gets a small consulting fee from each trip but otherwise it's all a labor of love, although she is thinking of going into the "voluntourism" field full-time. A native Chicagoan with three children, seven grandchildren and two dogs, Vile also has a museum-quality collection of 250 teapots, many from Israel or with other Jewish connections.
The New Orleans trips, too, she sees as fulfilling the Jewish injunction to repair the world. "These are mostly city folks from desk jobs; they come together and get dirty and do what they can do. Some people need to rest more than others, but together you make a little dent. It's the repair of the world, and Jews live in that world," she says.
On an anniversary trip with Am Shalom a year after the first one, she saw a change in attitude among New Orleans residents, symbolized by the work the group performed - not tearing down a house but painting and repairing one for an 89-year-old woman who had moved back from a FEMA trailer.
"There was a change," Vile says of the later trip. "People were more positive, not as tentative about staying." Still, she notes that four key members of the New Orleans Jewish community, including the head of the Touro Synagogue and the legendary Touro Infirmary, have moved to other cities away from Louisiana.
"New Orleans wears you down. Everything is a big deal - going to the store, finding a Walgreen's that's open, finding a bank, a Home Depot." On the other hand, she notes, the Jewish community there is hopeful and trying to rebuild and re-invent itself.
Vile hopes her efforts have made a bit of a difference too. "There is this wonderful ripple effect," she says. "I may make a little difference, and then I go and tell someone and whoever I touch, may make a little difference. And it goes on."
JOSEPH WALDER: Education man
 Science and Jewish education are the twin engines that drive Joseph Walder's life. Now he has found many ways to combine these two passions.
Walder, a distinguished scientist and an Orthodox Jew (and one who sees no contradiction between the two) is the founder and CEO of Integrated DNA Technologies, a biotech company. The firm, which has nearly 500 employees, is based in Iowa, but its accounting and development offices are in Skokie, where it anchors the extraordinary Wi-Fi Building on McCormick Boulevard. The 1930s building also houses a teacher resource center, science displays and other projects, a synagogue, kosher restaurant and more, all spinoffs of Walder's projects.
A Northwestern University graduate who later taught in the biochemistry department of the University of Iowa, Walder began his first Jewish education projects when he and his wife, Shira Malka, an attorney, began to enroll their three children in Chicago Jewish day schools.
"I saw there could be substantial enhancement in the science programs in the Jewish day schools, and I started working with them toward that end," he says. He devised a number of extracurricular programs for students of different ages and hired a "fabulous educator," Heschel Weiner to oversee them.
Now the programs have expanded to include Super Science Sunday, a hands-on Sunday learning experience for Jewish students; a changing science exhibit in the Wi-Fi Building; and the Jerusalem Science Contest, a four-month-long science curriculum and contest open to day school students throughout the country. The finalists receive prizes including trips to Israel and, for the top winner, a four-year scholarship to the Jerusalem College of Technology.
Walder decries the notion that science and religion are in conflict. "There is no conflict at all," he says. "The two are very compatible. Great Jewish scholars over the centuries have always encouraged the study of nature and through nature to be able to appreciate Hashem's marvelous creation. It enhances one's emunah (faith) when you see the complexity of the world and realize there must be a creator behind it."
The science programs are now encompassed within a foundation Walder started, the Foundation for Learning and Development. It has two other pillars, as he calls them. One is the Walder Education Pavilion (also located in the wondrous Wi-Fi), which contains a teacher resource center where teachers in Jewish day schools, Sunday schools, Hebrew schools and even public schools can come and find resources, from books to videos to DVDs, to enhance their teaching of Jewish subjects. Recently a daycare center has been added so teachers can bring their children with them.
"We have teachers from every spectrum who come and use the resource center," Walder says. "You'll have the most Orthodox rabbi with long payos (sidelocks) next to someone from a public school dressed very differently, and they'll be working together. It's something that serves the entire community."
The third pillar, and to Walder's mind perhaps the most important for the future of Jewish education, is the Kehilla Fund. It borrows an idea from the Jewish education model in Europe before the Holocaust, he says, where "everyone in the community sees it as their responsibility to help the day schools. Rather than a kind of pay-as-you-go model, this would go to a more community-based model, which is actually historically how Jewish schools operated for thousands of years."
He started the fund four years ago when he realized that funding sources for Jewish day schools were inadequate, affecting the quality not just of science education but of all subjects. With tuition and even such events as fund-raising dinners covering just a portion of the schools' costs, "there was clearly a need for something else," he says. "What we've established with the Kehilla Fund is a cohesiveness, something that tends to bring about achdus (unity). Each person who contributes is not only supporting the particular day school where they may want to send their children, but they are recognizing that we all have a responsibility for every child and to contribute to all of the schools even if their children don't go there."
The Kehilla Fund has almost 1,000 members - and Chicago Jewish education is looking healthier.
IRWIN WEIL: From Russia with passion
 How to even begin to encapsulate the life of Professor Irwin Weil?
In 80 amazingly fruitful years, he has: taught at Harvard, Brandeis and Northwestern University, where he was one of the school's most popular professors; worked with a famous demographer to establish a census of Soviet citizens; participated in numerous exchanges between American and Soviet intellectuals and scholars at a time when such exchanges were anything but routine; taught Russian language and literature to generations of students; co-founded an American Studies Center at a Moscow university; helped students learn Russian music and sing Russian opera; introduced Jewish culture to Northwestern and made sure it played a central role on campus; sung the traditional liturgy at NU's High Holiday services for decades; and much, much more.
Today, although Weil is technically a professor emeritus at Northwestern, he continues to teach there and has recently recorded a course in Russian literature for the Teaching Company, which will allow many more students to be captivated by his scholarship and charismatic personality.
That personality first emerged in Weil's hometown of Cincinnati, where his father, a Reform Jew who nevertheless practiced many traditional rituals, once owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.
Weil received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, then worked for a few years in the New York theater. Next, he spent three years working with demographer Evgenij Mikhailovich, who is credited with calculating the number of individuals lost during the Holocaust. They worked together on a difficult project: making an accurate census of the secretive Soviet Union in the early 1950s.
Weil began visiting the USSR shortly afterwards, and by the time he arrived at Northwestern in 1966 (or as he puts it, "before Noah's Ark") he had spent six years laying the foundation for future U.S.-Soviet exchanges, meeting and befriending many Russian intellectuals, professors and scholars. He downplays the danger involved, but at times it must have been considerable.
"I began to get some inkling of what Soviet reality was like, and a great deal of respect for people who were able to navigate their way through that Byzantine mass of restrictions," he says. He has kept up many of these contacts and still travels to Russia several times a year, recently receiving an honorary degree there. Weil "knows the Russian language and Russian culture as well as any person in the United States," one critic wrote of him.
Meanwhile, at Northwestern, he says that "I determined when I came, that Jewish culture would play a central part in the life" of the school, which he describes as "a good solid Protestant Midwestern university" when he began teaching there.
His chance came shortly afterwards when several students asked for his help in starting a course on Jewish life in Eastern Europe. He was amazed when the university readily agreed, and with the help of another Jewish professor, Jeffry Mallow, now at Loyola, formulated a course called Eastern European Jewish Culture, which he taught for more than 25 years. It was popular with both Jewish and non-Jewish students. In the 1980s, as Weil was teaching Northwestern students about Tolstoy and Doestoevsky, he was engaged in another unlikely enterprise: establishing, along with a Russian counterpart, an American Studies Center at the Moscow Humanities University, an institution run along more free and open lines than the usual Soviet academic training ground. The center is an ongoing project and next year, which marks Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, will take up questions of democracy and national unity in the context of Lincoln's life.
Weil's own rich life experience has been enhanced by his 57-year marriage to Vivian, their three children and two grandchildren. Vivian Weil is the director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has "brains that have never been touched," her husband says.
Meanwhile, new teaching vistas have opened up for Weil through the Teaching Company, a national firm, which is offering his "Classics of Russian Literature" lectures as an audio or video set. "People react to (my teaching) because they know I have a passion for it," he concludes. "It's made for a wonderful life."
RABBI MICHAEL WEINBERG: The rabbi as teacher
 Americans of a certain age remember the Ed Sullivan show, and Rabbi Michael Weinberg particularly recalls one variety act: a man who started by spinning one plate on top of a broomstick, then gradually added more and more plates.
"Eventually he would have to go back and give the first plate an extra spin," Weinberg says. "Well, I have a lot of plates in the air."
He certainly does: rabbi for the last 21 years of Temple Beth Israel in Skokie (the most important plate), which is wrapping up a year of festivities for its 90th anniversary; office-holder in various national and local Jewish and Reform movement organizations, including current president of the Chicago Association of Reform Rabbis; faculty member every summer at Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, the movement's summer camp in Wisconsin; sometime leader of trips to Israel; mentor to a small Jewish community in Ukraine and to new Reform rabbis; husband and father; and much more.
Yet Weinberg, a native Chicagoan who grew up amid the South Side's then-active Reform Jewish community, discounts the titles and offices that take up pages of his resume. Not that the jobs aren't important, but they don't define him. "A lot of people like to tell stories with big flashy accomplishments in them," he says by way of explanation. "Those kinds of big events are important, but to me, the real story is the less exciting story of the every day."
For him, that means every day at the synagogue, where, he says, "my work is involved in every aspect of synagogue life and our congregants' lives. At this time yesterday, my calendar was clear and now it's very full. To me that's what makes life interesting."
At Temple Beth Israel, which has about 450 member households, his goal is "to engage and involve the members of the congregation in active Jewish living, being there with them to help them celebrate life's joys and cope with life's challenges." And how does he go about this lofty task? By being a teacher, which is the rock-bottom, humble way in which he defines himself.
In fact, he says he is constantly teaching, in both formal and informal settings. That includes seven or eight hours of classes a week, from bar and bat mitzvah students to teens to adults. And then there's the informal teaching, which goes on all the time, whenever he is around his congregants. "If it's in a community meeting, if it's in an informal conversation, my job is to bring in and to teach what Judaism has to teach," he says. "I'm doing that all the time."
He does a lot more too. Under his stewardship, the congregation has sustained a warm ongoing relationship with a tiny Jewish community in Ukraine, where Weinberg goes every other summer to run a camp for the children of the community.
Closer to home, congregants have led a daily morning minyan for the last seven or eight years, a highly unusual occurrence in a Reform synagogue. And they've partnered with a Baptist church on a soup kitchen project for 18 years.
Recently Weinberg has become excited about a new project, a worship program for the congregation's youngest members featuring an interactive prayer book that the children love. There's also a program by which the synagogue shares space with a Modern Orthodox congregation, Kol Sasson, of which Weinberg's son Daniel and his family, including an adored granddaughter, are members.
They form one strand in Weinberg's rich Jewish family life. His wife Jody teaches children with learning disabilities at Solomon Schechter Day School. Another son, Joshua, lives in Jerusalem, where he works for the Reform movement. Daughter Sarah has just graduated from college and will be working with her dad leading an intensive Hebrew program at the Wisconsin camp during the summer.
Parents and siblings all live in the Chicago area too, and Weinberg shares a profession with one of them: his sister, Rabbi Ellen Dreyfus, who is the spiritual leader of B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood and was one of the first woman rabbis in the country. "We're anchored here," Weinberg says.
Roots grow, and the plates keep on spinning.
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