Faces

Teens & tikkun olam

Dan and Leslie Shiner of Mill Valley report that for the next year their son Zachary Shiner will be calling Thibodaux, La., which is seven miles outside of New Orleans, home. He's taking time off college to work for Habitat for Humanity (via Americorps), building and repairing houses in Louisiana. The young Shiner may be exhibiting chip-off-the-old-block tendencies: his dad was part of the Congregation Rodef Sholom group that repaired homes in Mississippi last March.

From Costa Rica, where Camp Tawonga's Teen Service Learning program participants ended up when their Israel trip was cancelled, director Nina Kaufman writes that the group "collected garbage in a village whose streets are filled with trash. A few children there, who don't know about the harm caused by lack of proper waste disposal, joined us in the streets, and saw, maybe for the first time in their lives, another way of living. Maybe after they left, they will try it again on their own."

Rabbi Eric Weiss will talk with participants in the Tawonga group, the Diller Teen Program (which also cancelled an Israel trip), and a couple teens from Let's Go: Israel (which did get there) on Mosaic, Sunday, Aug. 20 at 5 a.m. on CBS Channel 5.




Shlomo & Solomon

Sirak Sabahat, the Ethiopian-born actor who plays a grown-up Shlomo in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival's "Live and Become" told the Berkeley audience that he was airlifted to Israel in 1991 through Operation Solomon. It took a year for his family to walk from their village to the camp where they were rescued. "It would have taken a much shorter time," he joked, "but my father wouldn't ask for directions." Neil Friedman of Menemsha Films, a film distribution company, announced that the film, which looks at race and religious bigotry among other things, will be released publicly this fall, and will probably be in Bay Area theaters in November.




Kudos & mazel tovs ...

Michael Ralston has been named new chair of the Marin Committee of the Jewish Community Relations Council. He succeeds Jeanne Lee ... Eileen Ruby, immediate past president of the East Bay Jewish Community Federation will receive the Kipnis-Wilson Friedland Award at the UJC National Women's Philanthropy Conference next month ... East Bay federation's board member JoAnn Jacobson was honored in June for 15 years of leadership as chair of the federation's Havurah ... Yuriy Teslyar, a June Stanford grad, is one of 15 graduating students nationwide to receive a Merage American Dream Fellowship, created to recognize and reward academically talented immigrant students. Teslyar emigrated from Russia when he was seven.




Short shorts ...

Jewish Community High School of the Bay principal Andrew Shapiro Katz was among 21 principals from U.S. and Canadian day schools to participate in the Principal's Program offered by Bar-Ilan University's Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora in partnership with Avi Chai Foundation ... Melissa Packer, director of Education at Walnut Creek's Congregation B'nai Sholom got a "big-picture view" of her profession at United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's New Directors' Institute ... Educators Robyn Siegel and Shaina Wasserman have joined the staff at Los Altos Hills' Congregation Beth Am.




Save the date, Susan

Susan Berston of San Francisco and Susan Roe of Mill Valley write that the 2006 "Susan Gathering" is slated for Thursday, Nov. 9, at Tres Agaves Restaurant. Find out more at the new Web site: www.susangathering.com.




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