Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday September 23, 2005

COVER STORY:
Journal of hope

On the scene in Baton Rouge with Bay Area rabbi

by rabbi eric weiss

Following Hurricane Katrina, people across the country answered the call to help. One was Rabbi Eric Weiss of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco. Together with his colleague Gail Kolthoff, he spent a week in Baton Rouge assisting Rabbi Stan Zemeck, a former rabbi at San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel. What follows is a first-person chronicle of Weiss’ experiences.

Day One: Tuesday, Sept. 13

As we took off from Dallas, the American Airlines pilot came on to let us know that our flight to Baton Rouge was the third he and the flight crew had volunteered to fly so that folks could get in and out of Louisiana. The plane was full, every one of us going to Baton Rouge or other parts of Louisiana to help.

Some were family members coming to assist loved ones, others were relief workers of all kinds: Red Cross, U.S. Coast Guard, AmeriCorps. So many from communities of faith came to do the nitty-gritty work of helping anywhere it was needed.

We all made friends quickly. “I’m right between you boys,” said Jane (I learned her name from her Red Cross badge), plopping herself between me and the man in the aisle seat. He said, “Well, just two more shoulders to rest on.” It became a good metaphor. This town was one huge place of people helping each other, each giving the other a shoulder to rest on.

Sheila, a congregant of Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, picked me up, and in the small world of Jewish geography we discovered common friends in both San Francisco and Houston.

Baton Rouge was 300,000 citizens just about a week ago and now has a million. The influx has created traffic jams and tremendous stress. Sheila has had 21 guests in 10 days.

And she is not unusual. Congregants are housing family members and others from New Orleans. Social workers, doctors, rabbis and other Jewish communal professionals from New Orleans are helping evacuees — while they themselves are evacuees.

Everyone is gracious. Folks went to New Orleans to save the Torah scrolls from the synagogues. On a table in the synagogue library at Beth Shalom, Torah scrolls are labeled by the synagogue’s ark they once stood in and draped in tallitot.

One of the Torahs was donated by a family to their New Orleans synagogue. Their daughter will become bat mitzvah this Shabbat in Shreveport. The Torah will be taken from Baton Rouge to Shreveport this week so she can read from her own synagogue’s Torah.

Every effort is being made to give some stability to “everyday life.” And so even in the midst of the devastation, this girl will become a woman as she reads from a familiar Torah.

Our work here has been to set up logistic help. The number of people who need assistance is staggering. A doctor in the synagogue is arranging a consortium of physicians who will reduce their rates to treat patients. And so many others are offering what they can.

The displacement is tremendous. Those who help –– the clergy, doctors, volunteers and other Jewish communal workers –– give of themselves around the clock. Many are themselves recipients of the services they offer others.

Day Two: Wednesday, Sept. 14

This morning we sat with the religious-school committee to decide on the opening-day program. One of the moms shared that last night her daughter suddenly wanted to know, “When is Daddy going to come home?”

Her father is an emergency room doctor and was just on his usual shift at the hospital. Nothing was seemingly out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, she was anxious to see him.

Everyone is affected. Everyone knows folks who are displaced, looking for relatives or otherwise thrown out of their usual routine and into a life of the unknown.

The school decided to open with a variation of a program we do at bereavement camp: grief and growing. They will do a story of loss in which a child goes on a walk and meets adults who tell him/her of “tools” they have learned during their life for coping with loss: eat right, rest, talk with friends, let your emotions out, look to the future, stay with community, don’t be afraid to take risks/leaps of faith, talk to God, etc.

The sense of loss is tremendous on so many levels. Of all places, the synagogue is the place to acknowledge all the losses as well as the ways in which we need to both offer help and receive it. In this way, children (and everyone else) can know, on some deeper level, that Jewish life is nourishing during happy times and sustaining during terrible times.

This afternoon we sat with clergy to discuss how others are dealing with day-to-day issues. We talked about how faith and spiritual need can sustain folks. Every house of worship is either offering shelter in its own buildings or among congregants/parishioners. Every home is a shelter.

Gail Kolthoff has been helping in so many ways. She has been distributing Wal-Mart cards to folks in need — people whose businesses have been destroyed, those who have lost their homes to the floodwaters, those who just a week or so ago were planning vacations to Europe and now need to buy clothes because all they could leave with were the clothes on their backs.

The stories are endless.

Tomorrow there will be a temporary burial of a gentleman who died in New Orleans. He needs to be buried here in Baton Rouge until his family can put him to rest at the family plot in New Orleans. At Shabbat services tomorrow there will be two baby-namings.

Days Four, Five and Six: Friday, Shabbat and the Weekend

This morning we met with Betty, a 71-year-old woman who fled her home in New Orleans. She has slept in her car for the past several days. She was caught in a quagmire of road closures until she was able to arrive in Baton Rouge after hours of driving in a car with no air conditioning, (dangerous for older folks and young children in a place where the temperatures are in the 90s). There was hardly any place along the way to buy water.

Betty left New Orleans with a few items and her dog. One of the tragedies is what happened to animals. Some have died; others were left to fend for themselves.

There is so much to consider in a disaster that one of the aspects left out is how to work with animals and animal shelters. It may seem trivial, but think of how children respond to tragedy and have to leave a pet behind, of the clean-up and health costs of animals that have died, and of elderly folks who have only a dog or cat to keep them company.

Everybody has the threshold at which they feel as though they will break, and for many it is the loss of a pet.

A small community in Alabama called to say that they would take up to 15 Jewish evacuees who wanted to relocate. They would pay their expenses for a year and provide job retraining if possible. Betty lost her home. It is only worth the land it sits on and she has no funds to re-build. We sent Betty off to Alabama to start a new life.

At 71 she is tired and determined. I can only imagine what stirs in her heart and soul as she drives off to a place she does not know, to people who will welcome her, to start all over again.

Later that morning we met a woman who is a professional here and herself an evacuee. She was renting her home in New Orleans. It is under more than 10 feet of water. In those satellite photos we see on the news, she can locate her own street and see the rooftop that sits like an odd island of shingles in a muck of stagnant water. She is just one of so many who lost so much yet is working to do what she can to soothe others.

Many are beginning to go back to see the their homes. Some are able to get some work done, have a friend turn on the air conditioning to dry out the house, or find a contractor to tear out walls and floors to begin the process of reconstruction.

Others are seeing what they’ve lost. The most pain comes from losing such things as Shabbat candlesticks, a favorite family photo. No one is upset at losing things like computers.

We met a nurse from Los Angeles, here for 10 days through the California Nurses Association. They have been bringing nurses to Baton Rouge for relief work in the hospitals.

Cindy is an intensive-care newborn specialist. She came with us to Shabbat dinner at a congregant’s home and then to services. While we were waiting for services to start she was telling me that the mothers with babies in the intensive care unit cannot afford bus fare to bring their own breast milk to the hospital. In one of those spiritual moments, the sanctuary became a sacred place as we began to sing and light the Shabbat candles, and her heartfelt story moved all of us.

At Shabbat morning services we had a bar mitzvah. A young family had otherwise planned to be in their own New Orleans synagogue with family and friends. Here they were, their son with his mom and dad, with a Shabbat minyan of 30, called to the Torah for his bar mitzvah.

The rabbi had come in from Houston to bless him. At the oneg, the boy’s father took a dime, a nickel and three pennies out of his pocket. He placed them in his son’s hand and said, “I have a bar mitzvah present for you. It is not the one I had originally planned to give you. Here is 18 cents. I want you to put them now into your own pocket and keep these specific coins.”

I told him I knew many synagogues throw candy. I gave him some of the See’s lollipops I had brought. He took one for himself and two to give his parents. It was a bar mitzvah without any photographs, but one we will always remember.

Day Seven: Monday, Sept. 19

Last night there was a communitywide meeting to let the Baton Rouge and New Orleans communities know that the national umbrella organization for all the federations, United Jewish Communities, has given a $1 million grant to help with relief efforts. The money will be used wisely. There is so much to do and we are all in this for the long term.

The trauma is multivalent. Just three people we’ve worked with these past couple of days:

An Argentine woman who came to Louisiana for a better life lost her business and home. She does not know when she will be able to return to New Orleans to see what can be salvaged. She has been to Shabbat services, the community meeting and any other gathering she can to gain some kind of normalcy. She is living with her daughter in her college apartment while deciding what to do next.

A fellow Jewish communal worker showed me pictures of her home. Water came in, peaked at 11 feet, then receded. Couches were moved across the room, her dining-room set turned upside down. Her neighborhood is filled with debris.

A young mother with her own children now has her sister’s two children as well. The children were on a play date with neighbors when the floodwaters surged. They were taken onto an emergency bus to a shelter and could not get to their parents. The children, 10 and 7, were in the shelter for a week before they could be reunited with their grandmother.

Meanwhile, during the flood the parents had tried to escape through their attic and onto the roof. They did not make it. Their bodies were discovered days later. Their funerals were this weekend. The children will now live with their aunt and uncle in Baton Rouge.

It is hard to characterize just how much neighbors are helping one another, how much the synagogue has become a place of refuge and how tirelessly everyone is working to lend a hand. People who otherwise are used to giving, are now receiving. Families otherwise secure are now facing a future without knowing what schools to go to, where a job will become available or where they can live.

The infrastructure of services is not deep enough to meet the need and it is clear that all of the issues, individual and communal, will remain with Baton Rouge — and the entire region — for years to come.

Tomorrow we will be leaving here, but we will remain in contact with the community.

RELATED STORIES:

Bush praises Jewish relief efforts for Katrina

Rabbis, Jewish leaders weigh damage in New Orleans

How to help

< California Northern of weekly news Jewish the>