Local rabbi leads volunteers in restoring homes and hopes

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

For one family, the work Rabbi Joel Soffin and 18 other volunteers did on their wrecked New Orleans home was “so holy,” they asked to join him on his next project.

The group of volunteers, mostly from New Jersey but also from Washington, DC, and New York, spent the week of Hanukka studying, praying, and rebuilding the homes of four Jewish families caught in the path of Hurricane Katrina.

It’s the kind of project for which Soffin, religious leader of Temple Shalom in Succasunna, has developed a national reputation, beginning with his first “build” in Kentucky in 1993. Even before that, Soffin and his congregation were doing international tikun olam work, beginning with a contingent he took to the USSR in the 1980s to work on the issue of Soviet Jewish refuseniks. He has spearheaded projects benefiting Vietnamese refugees, as well as people in El Salvador, Argentina, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and the United States.

But previous building projects in the United States were under the aegis of organizations like Habitat for Humanity. “This time, nobody laid out plans or supplies for us,” he said. One participant was a professional electrician; another, who does carpentry as a hobby, served as chief builder, figuring out what tools the crew needed.

Participants used Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue in New Orleans, as their base of operations and were hosted by local families in their homes. The work consisted mostly of insulating, drywalling, spackling, putting up sheetrock, and taping.

The project was dreamed up by Temple Shalom congregant Stu Bauer, whom Soffin refers to as his partner on the builds. As Soffin, who turned 61 on Dec. 31, explained, “I got an e-mail asking me, ‘How would you like to spend your birthday in New Orleans?’ I said, ‘You’re on.’”

Working with the Houston federation, the temple group received a list of 21 homes in need of clean-up. Together with Bauer and his wife, Shirley, Soffin made an advance trip to New Orleans to select four houses to work on. The Union for Reform Judaism adopted the project for its Adult Mitzva Corps, a program inspired by Soffin’s earlier missions, and provided a grant. That also generated some unwanted publicity, however: According to Soffin, participation in the group was limited to 18 — since hotels are unavailable, they would be dependent on local hospitality.

Each of the four homes that were adopted is owned by a member of the local Jewish community, and while their property was not among the most devastated, there was “plenty of work to be done,” according to Soffin. The rabbi and some of the participants spoke to NJ Jewish News by telephone from New Orleans, just after a closing ceremony following the work on the fourth house.

Several of the homes were so damaged, he said, “you could see straight through from one end to the other.”

The group hung sheetrock and insulation, and ultimately, he said, “we transformed the space into rooms, and the buildings into homes.”

In one case, their job was just shoveling rubble from around a gutted house, making it possible for the owner, Brooke Weiss, to consider putting in some grass.

“We give the homeowners a hanukkia, candles, and a mezuza,” said Soffin, likening the rituals to Hanukka’s theme of rededication. Blessings were recited for each family, but most moving, according to several participants, was a silent walk through the home, surveying the progress they had made.

Suzanne Geltman of Randolph, 17, a sophomore at Rutgers and one of the youngest participants, said, “Going through the house and looking at the progress we made, looking at the sheetrock, the spackling that turns it from a skeleton into a home — it’s definitely the most uplifting thing.”

Rabbi Ruth Gais, leader of Madison’s Chavurat Lamdeinu, who took her two daughters on the trip, was struck by the emotional toll the hurricane has taken on the community. “The people whose houses we were working on are so needy in ways you wouldn’t think. These could be my parents. One man survived the Holocaust, the Hungarian revolution, and now in his old age, he saw his house destroyed again.”

According to Soffin, more than the physical work, they are helping heal people emotionally. “What we’re really building is people’s spirits. Our presence gives people a source of renewed hope.”

That was true for Weiss, a member of Congregation Shir Hadash, a New Orleans Conservative synagogue. Following Hurricane Katrina, she had to gut her family’s home in the uptown New Orleans area, due to the extensive structural damage it suffered. Because she and her husband, a New Orleans police officer, haven’t yet been reimbursed by their insurance company, “it’s been difficult to do anything else,” she told NJ Jewish News.

And that situation hasn’t been made easier by the contractors who haven’t kept their appointments. Weiss and her daughters have been living in Jackson, Miss., while her husband has been staying in a cabin on a cruise ship docked in New Orleans. “We’re so thankful someone is here and helping. It’s so hard to take the first step. The fact that other Jewish people have come to do something here has done something to strengthen my faith and my sense of what it means to be a Jew. Half the problem for us is just getting started.”

After being part of stories like this one, Geltman has already decided to participate in Soffin’s next project, a build in Jerusalem planned for 2007.

Oh, and the family that wants to be involved in his next project? “They’ll definitely be invited,” said Soffin.

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.

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