Chai Life Spring 2013 (PDF Document) - Jewish Federation of South ...

Live for today
A real estate developer, Ken has graduate degrees in architecture and business.
He and his wife live in a beautiful home with their two teenage sons and a yellow
labrador named Tikva. For two decades, Ken successfully climbed the corporate
ladder. “I was sitting on top of the world,” he says. “Then, overnight, I found
myself unemployed.”
Ken turned to Federation – his family had always donated to the Annual
Campaign, never imagining that he would one day be on the receiving end of
vital Federation supported services – and began attending programs designed
for unemployed people like himself. “You realize that you’re in good company
with other very smart, accomplished, successful businesspeople who have simply
found themselves out of luck in hard times,” he says. “It reorients you.” Indeed,
Ken has come to view his business setbacks as the force that brought him closer
to Judaism.
Ken believes that he will soon be back at work and, when he returns to the
corporate world, he has vowed to maintain the connections he made and
remember the lessons he learned while unemployed. “Federation has kept me
connected with other positive, like-minded, caring Jews who offer their support
and encouragement,” he says. “It just makes you feel like you’re not alone. With a
little faith and with good company, we will come out of these difficult times with
a new appreciation for our community and the Jewish Federation.”
MOSHE & YOCHEVED
Hope for tomorrow
Ever since she could remember, Kelsey had wanted to go on the March of the Living.
In 2007, she had her chance. “There’s nothing like that feeling of walking under that
“Arbeit Macht Frei” sign at Auschwitz for the first time,” she says. “It’s otherworldly.”
While immersed in the March of the Living two-week-long Holocaust education
program, supported in part by generous gifts from Federation donors, Kelsey
heard many stories of survivors returning to the concentration camps with their
families. She was particularly moved by the experiences of one survivor and his
adult son.
KEN
“Unbeknownst to his dad, the son had gone to a market and gotten all these different
foods to have a picnic because his dad had said the hunger and the suffering was
what you never got over. You got over the death and you became numb to it but
the suffering you just never got over. They sat and had a picnic at Treblinka,” she
says. “There’s something about this that just pulls at the heartstrings and makes
the emotions go a little crazy because it is bringing life to a place that was full of
death.”
Kelsey was so moved by her experience that she earned a degree in Holocaust Studies,
paving the way for future generations to “never forget.”
KELSEY
“There are those of us who are going to carry the torch. We do care and we are
going to step up. I’m going to collect as many stories as I can and keep passing
them on. Ultimately,” she says, “we do all belong to each other in this world.”
7 CHAILIFE