Mother Nature’s tekiah
Congregation Etz Chayim’s Rabbi Chaim Koritzinsky, who was a rabbi in Santiago, Chile, before joining the Palo Alto congregation this past summer, has been in touch with his friend and former colleague Rabbi Roberto Feldman about the 8.3-magnitude earthquake that hit the country days after Rosh Hashanah. “So if the Shofar sounds didn’t shake us deep enough, the Shofar Gadol from Mother Nature sure did, and the privilege to help and volunteer for clean-up is a precious way to await Yom Kippur,” Feldman wrote.
“Nobody in the Jewish community was hurt, and all community centers are OK,” Feldman reported. Chile’s Jewish community has been engaged in an effort to help those who lost homes, particularly in the northern coastal town of Coquimbo, an area where some million people were evacuated. The town survived the earthquake, he said, but the tsunami that followed “left a trail of destruction and loss.”
Branching out
When Deb Yates needed tree cuttings for her sukkah roof, she turned to her Oakland neighbors — via technology. Her post on the group email list “Glenfriends” (from the Glenview area) yielded numerous responses, including one from a woman who was making her own sukkah but offered to share her branches, Yates said. Another person “said I could cut her bamboo in front of her house and one person … told me he would be cutting some palm fronds near the Dimond Recreation Center and told me where to go to get them.” The Glenfriends request was a first for Yates. “It was my partner’s idea to post this way — and what a good idea it was!” she wrote. “It felt so neighborly to get responses and I felt a real sense of community.”
Yates hosts a sukkah open house each year where friends come by to chat and create decorations with art supplies she keeps on hand. “It’s also nice to sit in the sukkah to read, meditate and play games.” Last year, she added, her family put a blow-up bed in it and her kids slept there.
Good reads
Susan B. Katz of Belmont has published her fourth children’s book, “ABC, School’s for Me,” with illustrator Lynn Munsinger. She’s also the author of “My Mama Earth,” which won the Moonbeam Gold Award for best picture book of 2012. For info, visit www.susankatzbooks.com … Fans of the “Getting Old Is…” mystery series and its heroine Gladdy Gold can get to know San Rafael author Rita Lakin when her memoir is published later this month. In “The Only Woman in the Room,” Lakin recounts her years as a pioneering female scriptwriter in the 1960s when Hollywood television was exclusively male.
Short shorts
Michael J. Futterman of Larkspur, who was appointed to the Tamalpais Union High School District board of directors to fill a vacancy in July 2014, is now running for the position in the November election. He served as president of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council “in the increasingly distant past,” he wrote … Brandeis School of San Francisco’s 2015 honey sale, chaired by Jacqueline Shelton and Sharon Weinberg, brought in $6,500 for Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger. The group sold honey products (honey sticks were the top seller), Judaica and hand-dipped Shabbat candles. In the four years since beginning the school’s annual tzedakah event, parents, students, faculty and staff have raised a total of $19,000.
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