Mensches and idols
Cooking and singing talents were flaunted — in a good way — at the Silicon Valley Celebrates Israel festival last month. Ken Aitchison handily whipped together an Israeli chopped salad in the Mensch Chef Cooking Competition and got the grand prize for his culinary skills. Runners-up included Sivia Van Gundy, Seth Silverstein, Joel Rubnitz and Gary Naillon.
Taking the awards from a field of 24 at the Fifth Annual Jewish American Idol singing competition were Jessica Stein, age 12, first place; Daria Keidar, 9, second place; and Lily Guggenheim, 6, third place.
In addition, Roi Bachmutsky, Molly Ellenberg, Devora Fine, Brent Ghan, Scott Hirsch, Rebecca Holtzman, Braden Katzman, Amy Lanctot, Sarah Levine, Ben Lilly, Joshua Ronen, Nyssa Spector and Marlena Vasquez were honored for their outstanding service to the Jewish community.
Doubling the impact
Philanthropist Tad Taube is featured in the spring edition of Philanthropy magazine. In it he discusses (among other things) how his personal foundation and the Koret Foundation, which he serves as president, collaborate to “achieve impact that a single charitable entity may not otherwise be able to achieve.” The new Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life, opening in the fall in Palo Alto, and Poland’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews are two such examples.
High honors for high schoolers
Talya Feldman of Palo Alto’s Kehillah Jewish High School was a finalist in the national Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition and won a $15,000 scholarship for her project, “Spread Patterns of Influenza B at Home vs. at School in an 8th Grade Cohort.”
She was also a member of the JCHS team that went to RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network’s “Moot Beit Din” competition, in which students were asked to apply Jewish text to contemporary situations in a competition loosely modeled on law school Moot Court programs. Feldman and Ethan Palm, Josh Remba and Esty Starr-Glass took second place in their school’s group. Winning top honors in its group was the Jewish Community High School of the Bay team, comprised of Ethan Hall, Avram Schwartz and Hannah Sosebee.
Short shorts …
Lynne Avadenka, a Michigan-based artist, won the Dorothy Saxe Award for Creativity in Contemporary Arts for her seder plate in the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s seder plate exhibit. Her piece was a cardboard globe inscribed with the entire hagaddah. Local artist Tor Archer won the Audience Choice Award for his piece, “A Natural Seder,” a copper and brass tree-like sculpture holding six nests for symbolic foods. The exhibit just closed, but visit www.thecjm.org for photos of the winning pieces and the others, as well … Ben Pastcan, librarian at Sacramento’s Shalom School, writes proudly that the school’s library has received basic accreditation with Association of Jewish Libraries … Varda and Irving Rabin of Tiburon and Eta and Sass Somekh of Los Altos hosted benefit concerts of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Woodwind Octet in mid-May on behalf of the American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Maribelle and Stephen Leavitt and Lydia and Douglas Shorenstein co-chaired the events with the hosts … Outgoing East Bay Jewish Community Relations Council chair Felice Zensius will be honored for three years of service on June 15 at a benefit for the group. The event will feature Frances Dinkelspiel, author of “Towers of Gold.” For info, contact Myrna David at [email protected] or 510-839-2900.
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