Grantees in the News

Over the past five years, Rick Nahmias has been able to feed millions of people in need, and, the founder of Food Forward says, it all started with an orange.

In 2009, Nahmias was walking around the neighborhood with his dog when he saw “a great amount of fruit trees that weren’t being harvested.” A friend of his, in particular, had a tangerine tree and an orange tree, but only used a few of each for herself and her daughter. Through his work as a documentary photographer, Nahmias saw first-hand how many communities were in need, and that sparked the idea to harvest his friend’s fruit and donate it to a local food bank.

“That was kind of a watershed moment,” the nonprofit founder said. “I saw the opportunity to connect need with abundance.”

Nahmias launched his first harvest in 2009 with the help of just one other volunteer. Together they gathered 85 pounds of tangerines in a few short hours. Less than a month later, he enlisted 50 people on another harvest, which yielded 5,000 pounds of oranges that would have otherwise rotted. Now with three core programs in place, Food Forward recovers and donates 4 million pounds of food each year.

According to the Nahmias, a native Californian, local trees produce hundreds of pounds of fruit, much of which would go to waste. Now it’s Food Forward’s mission to make sure that this excess produce is being used to provide nutritious meals for the hungry. Nahmias added, “The feeling is with this organization is that we have the solution within our own means to maybe not solve hunger, but to fight it.”

At 62, Esther Macner radiates feistiness and confidence.

During a recent interview at the Journal’s headquarters, she described herself as an “Orthodox Jewish feminist, which I’ve been all my life, before the word became a label.”

A former prosecutor and trial attorney in New York, Macner moved to Los Angeles just five years ago and is now poised to become an increasingly important presence in the Los Angeles Modern Orthodox world.  Her focus is the crisis of women, known as agunot — literally “anchored” —  who are stuck in dead marriages, unable to make their estranged husbands grant them a Jewish divorce decree, known as a get. Less than one year ago, the mother of two and grandmother of two established the nonprofit Get Jewish Divorce Justice to advocate for these women who are unable to remarry without risking their status within their faith community.

For Macner, the issue is deeply personal. She believes the Jewish legal system enabling the creation of agunot is “an embarrassment to me and a painful blemish on my identity.”

And while an agunah cannot remarry or have more children beyond those she had with her husband, he, if he can obtain the permission of 100 rabbis, is allowed to take a new wife and create a new family.

To that end, Get Jewish Divorce Justice, along with several area rabbis, is organizing an event called “Retying the Knot, Unchaining the Agunah,” at which Orthodox married couples will sign postnuptial agreements, a legal vow to be fair to one another should they ever decide to divorce.

The agunah issue took the local limelight last March, when a group of Angelenos, including a few prominent Modern Orthodox leaders, traveled to Las Vegas to stage a rally at the second marriage of a former L.A. resident, Israeli Meir Kin, who was continuing to refuse a get to his first wife, Lonna Kin. The Jewish Journal ran a cover story about the Kins headlined “Till Get Do Us Part.”

Macner’s mission with her fledgling organization is to let women caught in such marriages know that her group is a resource for help.

In the Orthodox community, postnuptial agreements can be created by couples who never entered into halachic prenuptial agreements before getting married, and the documents obligate married couples to settle a divorce in a reputable rabbinic court, among other things.

Corrupt rabbinic courts have been part of what leads to agunah cases, Macner said, by allowing the husband to find ways to escape the marriage for himself — or sometimes even to attempt to extort money from the former wife.

Many of the L.A. rabbis who participated in the Las Vegas rally, including Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea Congregation; Rabbi Kalman Topp of Beth Jacob Congregation; and Rabbi Ari Segal, Shalhevet’s head of school, are among those participating in Sunday’s event.

Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City also will be at the event.

Rabbi Yona Reiss, a member of the Chicago Rabbinical Council, will present a talk titled “The Origin and the Urgency of the Halachic Pre-Nuptial Agreement.”

More than 450 agunot are believed to live in the United States.

Part of the problem is that there is no official registry of agunot keeping a count, Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), which organized the Las Vegas action, said in an interview at the time of that rally.

Here in Los Angeles, Macner is currently seeking volunteers for a task force that will reach out to “agunot who are in need of assistance,” a recent email from her organization said.

Macner told the Journal that her efforts to raise awareness about agunot, including integrating prayers for agunot into the tehillim(psalms) readings at synagogues, have successfully helped resolve the cases of several women.

Get Jewish Divorce Justice, with just two staff and no office space, is smaller than the better-known ORA, but its goals are similar — the “prevention of abuse in the Jewish divorce process, through education, advocacy and individual counseling,” an online biography for Macner reads.

Macner said she views herself as a “liaison” among the rabbinic community, the victims, and the rabbinic courts, which often don’t work together in ways that might lead to resolving agunah cases, she said. For instance, women are not always comfortable discussing their situations with the male rabbis of the rabbinic courts, she said. Being an insider and understanding these issues helps her, she said: “I’ve always been Orthodox, and I have always worked from within the community.”

Macner said she is also interested in forming a support group for women who have undergone these challenges to focus on healing through the arts. She is working to create a theater piece telling real women’s stories, which she called “The Agunah Monologues.”

Macner draws on her experience as a trial attorney and divorce mediator, specializing in “family law, domestic violence and rabbinic court representation,” according to her biography. She is a graduate of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, received a master’s degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Macner and her husband, Chaim Plotzker, live in Pico-Robertson. She jokingly describes the union as a “mixed marriage” — she attends services at B’nai-David Judea, and he attends Young Israel of Century City.

Together they also attend the Happy Minyan, a Shlomo Carlebach-style congregation, she said.

Prior to taking on the agunah issue, Macner worked as an advocate for the advancement of women in Orthodox circles, including creating a shul in 1980 where women read from the Torah and said Kiddush, and where young girls sang Adon Olam. 

As she made her way out of the Journal’s office, where the interview took place, a final question from a reporter stopped her in her tracks.

“Why be Orthodox if you’re a woman today?”

Macner admitted to having some differences with the Orthodox community, in particular the way its laws can marginalize women.

But she said she can’t “divorce” herself from living a life based on halachah, disagree with it though she might.

“It’s too high a price to pay to have someone deny their identity,” Macner said. “If something is wrong, you need to change it from within.”

 Esther Macner_ Agunah advocate promotes post-nuptials _ Lifestyle _ Jewish Journal

A unique business model for social change is taking place in the Boston area. When they are not performing at venues such as Symphony Hall, a group of professional musicians have discovered a way to support themselves financially and take part in an innovative social service. Since 2010, Shelter Music Boston has been bringing their classical chamber music to residents at homeless and wellness shelters.

Three full-time members of the group make up the core of Shelter Music Boston, with a few musicians who play on occasion. Violinist Julie Leven, the executive and artistic director, started the organization four years ago due to a lack of musical jobs at the time. She was working on an organic farm with Rebecca Strauss, a violist and violinist in the group, when the two began discussing the state of their musical careers.

“We started talking about the fact that there was not much work in the freelance classical music world,” Strauss said. “There were so many financial cutbacks that musicians were losing work left and right, and I was most definitely one of them.”

It was on a frigid winter day in December 2009 when Leven read a newspaper article about a woman in New York City playing music in homeless shelters. “That’s it! We need that in Boston. I am going to make that happen,” she said. Leven amassed a group of musicians and then contacted Elizabeth Condron, who was working at the Pine Street Inn Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain at the time.

“The very first time we went, I was a little bit nervous and didn’t know how we would be received, and neither did anyone else, including the people who worked there,” said Shelter Music Boston violinist Julia McKenzie.

Now, four years later, the group is playing at seven homeless and wellness shelters, including Crittenton Women’s Union, Dimock Center, Caspar Emergency Shelter, Community Day Center Waltham, and Pine Street Inn’s Men’s Inn, Women’s Inn, and Shattuck Shelter.

At Dimock Center in Roxbury, in a program supporting women post-detox, I witnessed two worlds colliding. The center has a large and tranquil campus of castle-esque late 19th-century buildings. It sits atop a hill, overlooking the lives that these women once lived, and in the distance toward the horizon, the lives that they are soon to lead.

Shelter Music Boston’s performance was not like going to a classical concert at a traditional venue where you sit in your seat and clap at the end. It was highly interactive and a learning experience for those at the center. Pausing in between each musical piece, the musicians allot time to discuss the many different composers or inform the residents about their instruments. The audience asked questions and shared their own thoughts and feelings.

“The point of our shelter concerts is not just the performance,” Leven said. “The performance is the starting point for the interaction, the education, the community building, and creating a respectful environment for people to feel more human.”

Along with the audience involvement, the musicians’ dedication to the shelter residents is also integral to their effectiveness. Strauss explained, “The residents who are in the shelter for multiple months, or sometimes years, know us. Stability and consistency are important so that they know there are people in this world who care enough to come back every single month.”

The Pine Street Men’s and Women’s Inns in the South End of Boston hosts crowds of homeless men and women. The two shelters sit side by side and are surrounded by renovated restaurants and brownstones. The exterior of the shelters put on the façade of old brick factories, while the interior resembles a typical high school. The walls in the hallways are lined with lockers, the cafeteria is large, and the residents congregate in groups, chatting like high school students in between class periods.

Shelter Music Boston performs in the cafeteria, and the concerts, similar to those at Dimock Center, include plenty of audience participation. One man during a concert transcended the barriers of appropriate etiquette for a classical performance. He yelled things like, “This is hot!” and “I’ve never heard anything like this—this is cool!”

“He was responding, and no one has ever told him it was wrong, that you don’t yell at a classical concert. It was fine that he did that. It was cool for me as a performer. In jazz they clap all the time, and in rock and roll they’re screaming, so what’s wrong with this?” Ms. Leven reflected. “Afterward he came up to me and said very quietly, ‘You gave me back my heart and soul.’ I will never forget this man. This is why I became a musician. For this moment, this one guy.”

While Shelter Music Boston performances are for residents only, the organization will hold a concert that is open to the public on October 5. Anyone interested can contact Shelter Music Boston for more information.

Shelter Music Boston Brings Classical Music to Homeless Shelters

Family-to-Family’s One Book at a Time program, in partnership with the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, has expanded to 19 communities in 13 states, and continues to grow. One Book at a Time matches donors to children in need, helping them build their own home library. “We’re really amazed at the daily requests we get from donors from all over the U.S. to sponsor a child,” said Pam Koner, executive director of Family-to-Family. “We are working with Boys & Girls Clubs across the county, YMCAs and schools, and we hope to be in all 50 states by the end of the year,” Koner added.

As part of the expansion, OBAAT is exploring the idea of bringing on a children’s book author as a spokesperson, and is in talks with publishers about a possible “featured publisher of the month.” The featured publisher would recommend books for donors to consider under the OBAAT program and link back to indie booksellers to promote independent bookstores in the process.

The latest states to sign on to the program include New Jersey, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maine, Maryland, and Alabama, as well as additional sites in New York and California.