Kobe, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, doesn’t merely sit on Curtis Shore’s lap. The dog melts into it, splayed blissfully across his belly.
Leaning back in his royal blue Barcalounger, Shore knows Kobe’s favorite scratch spots. The two look so contented, it’s hard to believe they commune only an hour or two each week at the Sunset District home Shore bought soon after moving to San Francisco in 1957.
“Who does not love a dog?” asks Shore in a clipped German accent.
As his burgundy-colored vest signifies, Kobe is a certified therapy dog with the Canine Corps, a program for homebound seniors currently offered in San Francisco and Marin counties by the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services.
Kobe’s owner, Jo Kaufman, sits next to Shore, leaning toward him as they chat about his health. She has to speak up. Shore, who turns 90 next week, has a little trouble hearing, a lot of trouble walking and is legally blind. His cheery wife, Eva, 87, stands nearby ready to assist.
“Mit deine Hand,” she says, encouraging her husband in German to feed Kobe a few kibble treats by hand.
With Kobe on his lap, Shore feels fine. His physical ailments and bad memories of fleeing Germany seem to fade when he strokes Kobe’s velvety head.
Kaufman and Kobe visit the Shores every Thursday. But they didn’t just show up one day. Human and canine underwent six hours of training first. Only special people and very special dogs make the cut.
“His temperament was so incredibly wonderful, I thought this is something I would really like to do,” says Kaufman, a San Francisco writer and calligrapher who also volunteers for a similar SPCA program. “[Kobe] really loves people.”
JFCS canine program coordinator Lisa Caper so far has recruited and trained five human-and-dog teams for the corps, four of which have been matched with JFCS clients.
According to Caper, research shows dog therapy works, because it’s about the power of touch and unconditional love, especially “when you talk about people with health issues or who are institutionalized,” she says. “They don’t get a lot of touch. This wonderful creature does nothing but stare at you attentively and lick your hand. You can ask it the same question 42 times. It doesn’t care. Give it some chicken and it’s your best friend. It’s simple.”
A licensed social worker for 20 years, Caper launched Canine Corps last October. Her main role with JFCS is as director of Dream House, a transitional housing program for mothers and children who are survivors of domestic violence. She’s also a dog lover. Caper’s late chow mix,
Blue, was a “Zen dog” with a calming influence on people.
Blue inspired her to look into the world of service dogs, and she intended to train him. After Blue died unexpectedly, Caper vowed her next dog would become a therapy dog.
“I had done research on dogs used as therapy animals for kids who had been through trauma,” she says. “Some [children] shut down as a result, though animals can get them out of their shell. Kids who are either nonverbal or preverbal tell their story to the dog or play with the dog, and use that as a way to communicate.”
Pet therapy also has been effective for people in physical therapy. Caper says that while walking a dog, “people forget about the pain. Their faces just light up.”
Enter Loki, a Catahoula mix Caper adopted in 2008 because she was the cutest puppy of all time. “She’s a herding dog,” Caper says. “When she’s around toddlers she thinks they are sheep.”
Caper experimented with Loki by taking her to Dream House to work with the children. Encouraged, she and Loki enrolled in a 17-hour training program at Santa Rosa’s Bergin University of Canine Studies last summer. It not only teaches basic commands — including the important “leave it,” which tells the dog to drop hazardous substances like medications — the program also makes sure the dogs have the right temperament for service work.
Loki graduated magna cum doggie.
Coincidently, last fall a private donor approached JFCS with funding for a Canine Corps similar to the one run by the SPCA. Caper got the green light from her supervisor, Gayle Zahler, to run the program. They view it as a way to help JFCS clients — some children but mostly seniors — who can no longer take care of their own dogs but who would benefit from the contact.
The JFCS Canine Corps differs from the SPCA program in that the latter sends service dogs mostly to institutions such as hospitals, assisted-living facilities and pediatric wards. Caper wanted volunteers to visit individuals. She put out the call, and the response was phenomenal, she says.
Kaufman, 59, was one of the first to volunteer. Her children gave her Kobe as a Mother’s Day gift in 2006, and immediately the two bonded. She found Kobe so sweet, she says, she wanted to share him. So she volunteered for the SPCA program two years ago.
But first, she and Kobe had to be trained.
“There’s a 10-point checkoff list,” Kaufman says. “The dog has to be handled by a stranger. Someone has to be able to pull on the paws. The dog has to respond to commands like going into a sit-stay while you walk 30 feet away.”
Once certified, she and Kobe began making the rounds at local Alzheimer’s units, convalescent homes and hospitals. Kaufman prefers working with seniors because she sees them as “an underserved population who are sad and lonely, and it can really make their day to spend time with a dog.”
Kobe joined the JFCS Canine Corps in October 2009, along with several other dogs and their human companions. Caper continues to recruit volunteers and, yentalike, match them with JFCS clients who use the agency’s Seniors at Home program.
Caper, with Loki in tow, first went to visit the Shores to see whether they might make good candidates for the Canine Corps program. She found them living independently but struggling. Curtis has multiple health problems. Eva has a full plate as her husband’s primary caretaker.
And they had lost their beloved boxer, King, a few years before.
“We just talked,” recalls Caper. “Their case manager said she’d never seen [Curtis] smile. He lit up so much with the dog, and all [Loki] did was sit there. It was magic.”
Kaufman and Kobe got the nod, and paid their first visit in January. Right away, Kaufman recalls, “Curtis said ‘Look at that shayne punim [on Kobe].’ ”
During a recent visit, Kaufman slips off to the living room where she helps Eva sort some bills. Curtis stays in his recliner with Kobe, who licks his fingers. As much pleasure as the dog gives him, he says he cannot forget the hard times from the distant past.
“We have survived,” he says. “That’s the main thing. That’s the best way to summarize the whole goddamn story. The less I think about it, the happier I’m going to be. I don’t hate Germany, but you cannot forget the people that didn’t make it.”
Kobe brings to mind another dog Shore once owned: a German shepherd named Hollie back in Shanghai. Like some 20,000 other German Jews, he, his mother and his siblings fled Berlin for the teeming Chinese city in 1939, escaping the full brunt of the Holocaust.
“I did not go to Shanghai because I like to travel,” Shore says. “I went strictly to survive. It sounds very heroic, but it’s not.”
Thirty of his extended family members perished in the Holocaust.
A native of Frankfurt, Eva (then Bookbinder) remembers well the terror of the 1938 anti-Jewish Nazi rampage Kristallnacht. She was one of the last Jewish children to escape Germany via the Kindertransport (her four brothers had made it to England ahead of her).
Recalling her father dropping her at the train station, she says tearfully, “If I had known at that moment I couldn’t see him anymore, I would never have left.”
She rode out the war in England, serving as a teen adjunct with the Royal Army.
Meanwhile, Curtis languished in Shanghai until 1949. His mother moved to Israel, while he eventually made his way to Pittsburgh, where a sister lived.
The next year he moved to New York, where he met Eva. The couple married and relocated to San Francisco, where he started a home furnishings business that he ran from 1959 to 1989. The Shores had one daughter, Linda, who lives in Sonoma, and they belonged to Congregation B’nai Emunah, a San Francisco synagogue founded by former Jewish refugees from Shanghai.
For many years, life was good. Curtis says he has “San Francisco in my bones,” and though their neighborhood in the avenues off Taraval Street has changed, Eva says she still loves it.
Years later, the two returned to Germany as guests of the German government. Though they had a good time in Eva’s native Frankfurt, Curtis had a tough time being back in Berlin, and decided to cut short his visit.
The steady march of time has taken its toll. The couple accepts help from JFCS and other assistance agencies. Nowadays Shore can get around only with the aid of a walker, and the steps down to the street are daunting.
“When Curtis has had a bad night, I can see it,” says Kaufman. “He looks tired. One time he said to me, ‘What kind of life is this? I don’t get out.’ But the minute I come in, Kobe knows the routine. I put kibble in Curtis’ hand and he starts giggling like a boy.”
Thanks to such successful matches, Caper is encouraged by the program’s progress. She is sending service dogs to Rhoda Goldman Plaza (a San Francisco residence for seniors) and hopes to add the Jewish Home for the Aged, though she says with all its existing pet therapy programs the S.F. institution is already “a zoo.”
Caper adds that it may be time for Loki to get some religion, hanging out with as many Jewish seniors as she does. She admits with a laugh that she bought the book “How to Raise a Jewish Dog” but has not yet gotten Loki a yarmulke.
JFCS clients such as the Shores aren’t the only ones who benefit from the Canine Corps program. Kaufman says she gets a lot out of volunteering.
“I always feel upbeat afterward,” she says. “Kobe makes it all great. Last week [Curtis] said, ‘I want to get better and be able to go to the park with Kobe.’ ”
For information about volunteering for JFCS’ Canine Corps, contact Lisa Caper at (415) 359-2442 or [email protected].