Philissa Cramer | Jewish News

Steven Spielberg wins Grammy, becoming 9th Jew in elite EGOT ranks

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:45:44 +0000

(JTA) — The legendary director Steven Spielberg has become the ninth Jew to secure “EGOT” status after winning a Grammy for producing a documentary about the music of John Williams.

Spielberg was awarded the Grammy for producing Music by John Williams, which won best music documentary, before the televised ceremony on Sunday, Jan. 31. The win makes him the 22nd person to win the coveted quartet of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards.

Spielberg has won three Oscars, including best picture for the 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler’s List; four Emmys for TV programming including two World War II dramatic miniseries; and a Tony for producing the Broadway show A Strange Loop.

Spielberg adds to a large proportion of Jewish artists to win all four of the top entertainment awards. Nine of the 22 EGOTs have been Jewish, including the first person to ever reach the status, composer Richard Rodgers. Rodgers and Marvin Hamlisch, who was also Jewish, are the only people to have added a Pulitzer Prize to the EGOT crown. The most recent Jewish winner before Spielberg was the songwriter Benj Pasek, who secured the status in 2024 with an Emmy.

One of Spielberg’s more celebrated
recent works was a drama based loosely on his own Jewish family. The Fabelmans, released in 2022, earned him three Oscar nods — for best picture, best director, and best screenplay — but no wins.

In promoting that movie, Spielberg said antisemitic bullying when he was a child had informed his sense of being an “outsider,” which he translated into his filmmaking.

Schindler’s List, meanwhile, spurred
the creation of the USC Shoah Foundation, a leading center for preserving Holocaust testimonies that has also recently embraced the task of preserving stories of contemporary antisemitism, too.

“It was, emotionally, the hardest movie I’ve ever made,” Spielberg said about his most decorated movie — for which John Williams earned an Oscar for the score. “It made me so proud to be a Jew.”

Trump’s new White House ballroom architect is a Jewish immigrant who has advocated for refugees

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:35:59 +0000

(JTA) — After parting ways with the first architect hired to carry out his vision for the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump has picked a replacement — turning to a firm run by a prominent Jewish architect who once called on Trump to keep the country’s doors open to refugees and immigrants.

Shalom Baranes was born soon after his parents fled Libya amid antisemitic sentiment there, coming to the United States as a child with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now known as HIAS. He rose to prominence as an architect in Washington, D.C., where he has designed and renovated both private and government buildings, including the post-9/11 Pentagon, that trend toward the modern.

The White House confirmed on Friday, Dec. 5 that it had chosen his firm, Shalom Baranes Associates, to continue the East Wing project, centered around the ballroom that Trump wishes to construct. Trump clashed with the first architect on the job over the ballroom’s size.

“Shalom is an accomplished architect whose work has shaped the architectural identity of our nation’s capital for decades, and his experience will be a great asset to the completion of this project,” a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said in a statement.

The firm did not immediately publicly confirm its attachment to the project, and Baranes did not reply to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.

Baranes’ selection stands out in an administration that has typically favored partisan and ideological loyalists. Baranes is a repeated donor to Democratic candidates who has openly advocated against one of Trump’s signature policies, his efforts to limit refugee admissions.
In 2017, two months into Trump’s first term, Baranes penned an op-ed for the Washington Post about the new president’s travel ban. Trump had declared a ban on migrants from seven mostly Muslim countries and refugees from around the world soon after taking office, igniting wide opposition including from Jewish groups.

“The anti-immigrant sentiment I feel today is nothing new to me,” he wrote. “When my Jewish parents arrived in the United States just a few years after fleeing persecution in an Arab regime, it was as difficult for them to be accepted here as it is for Muslims now.”

Baranes laid out his criticism gingerly while saying he hoped the travel ban would be short-lived.

“As I watch the news and see families struggling to leave their countries and escape tyranny, I wonder who among them will make it to our shores and become part of the next generation of researchers, teachers, inventors, real estate developers and, yes, architects,” he wrote. “My hope is that the Trump administration will take actions to ensure that the travel ban is indeed temporary, so that good, hard-working individuals fleeing tyranny can find a new home as I did — and that each of them will be given the same opportunity to help build this great nation that I had.”

Among the Jewish groups to lobby against Trump’s travel ban was HIAS, the organization that had helped Baranes and his family come to the United States. HIAS declined to comment on his selection as White House architect but said through a spokesperson that the organization was working to respond to Trump’s crackdown on refugees, which the president renewed after an Afghan refugee shot and killed a member of the National Guard in Washington.

To those who are familiar with Baranes’ style, he is a surprising pick for more than just because of his personal politics. His designs typically trend toward the modern, not the gilded classical style that Trump favors. He also has said he prefers to think carefully before tackling a project — an impossibility when it comes to the White House ballroom, which is already mid-construction.

“You have to wonder why he would risk a stellar career and near pristine reputation for a project that could possibly end up in disaster. He could be publicly fired and castigated by the developer-in-chief or ostracized among his colleagues and clients,” wrote Douglas Freuhling, the editor in chief of the Washington Business Journal.

But Fruehling noted that a successful build at the White House — one that balances Trump’s tastes with the gravitas of the White House — would be a defining capstone for any architect’s career. “He may just be the perfect architect for the job. For his sake, I hope it turns out that way,” he wrote of Baranes.

Baranes’ portfolio includes multiple synagogue renovations. He donated his services to restore the interior of Sixth & I, the Jewish center in downtown Washington, D.C., when it was reconstructed just over two decades ago.

Tom Stoppard, playwright whose last work explored his family’s buried Holocaust history

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:42:41 +0000

(JTA) — Tom Stoppard had already won four Tony Awards during his prolific career as a playwright when he penned what would be his final staged work, dealing with his family’s Holocaust history.

Already in his 80s, Stoppard wrote Leopoldstadt to explore a past he said he had thought was not relevant to his life — until he realized that it was. The play, which portrayed a Jewish family grappling with how to respond to rising antisemitic ferment in their native Vienna, won the Tony for best play after it opened on Broadway in 2022.

“I thought that the subject of the Jews through the war had been done and done,” Stoppard told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “But actually, not really!”

The prize bookended more than five decades of awards for Stoppard, who died Saturday, Nov. 29 at 88.

“He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language,” his family said in a statement announcing his death at home in Dorset, England.

Born in 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, Stoppard emerged from a wartime ordeal that claimed his father and — although he would not know it for years — saw all four of his grandparents murdered in Nazi concentration camps to become one of the world’s most productive and celebrated playwrights.

Stoppard authored dozens of plays throughout his career, sometimes premiering more than one a year on London’s West End. Five — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1986), The Coast of Utopia (2007) and Leopoldstadt — later won best play when they transferred to Broadway in New York City.

He also won the Academy Award for best screenplay in 1998 for Shakespeare in Love and was nominated for the prize another time, in 1985 for Brazil.

Not all of his contributions bore his name. Stephen Spielberg said Stoppard had done an uncredited rewrite on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and that he had been “pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue” in that 1989 film.

The Indiana Jones movie centered on the main character’s quest to free his father, who had been captured by the Nazis — an echo of autobiography for Stoppard, though he would not first stare down his own family’s fatal encounters with the Nazis for several more years.
Stoppard’s own biological father had been killed during World War II in Singapore, where the family had moved the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Eugen Straussler worked as a doctor for a shoe company whose owner had arranged for his Jewish employees to transfer to locations outside of Europe. The family was largely assimilated: Stoppard would later write about his mother, Martha, “Hitler made her Jewish in 1939.”

As the Japanese closed in on Singapore, Martha sought refuge in India with Stoppard and his brother. His father stayed behind to support Singapore’s defense and was killed during the Japanese occupation. (Stoppard at first believed Straussler had died in captivity but later learned he had fled on a ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese.)

Stoppard’s mother remarried a British man in India who adopted her sons, giving them both the Stoppard name and entry to England, where Stoppard would soon become, in his words, “a British schoolboy.” After graduating from elite prep schools, he forwent university to head straight for the West End, where he soon made his mark.

His early identity, and certainly the Jewish family he had left behind in Czechoslovakia were, by Stoppard’s account, firmly detached from his creative imagination as his works ricocheted across a diverse array of topics, frequently employing the lens of real historical figures alongside the highbrow intellectualism for which he was known.

“Stoppard’s plays have been suffused with wit and wordplay and asked essential questions about how we live, love, die, and explore the depth of the human condition,” said the literary free speech organization PEN America, which honored Stoppard multiple times for his advocacy work, in a statement upon his death. “The world of contemporary theater will forever bear his mark.”

A sign of possible Jewish connection came in 1986; he organized a demonstration in London on behalf of Soviet Jews that included other British celebrities and the U.S. senator Bill Bradley. But he said he replied to letters thanking him as a Jew that he was “not really Jewish.” It was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that he would learn about the depth of his own Jewish identity.

In 1993, a relative from the new, free Czech Republic named Sarka wrote to his mother saying that she would like to reconnect. At a meeting in London — whose location his mother selected to avoid her husband, who Stoppard said harbored many prejudices — Sarka sketched out a family tree that Stoppard had never seen.

The occasion prompted an exchange that would shape Stoppard’s final work. “How Jewish were we?” he said he asked Sarka, having grown up being told that the Nazis targeted anyone with a Jewish grandparent. “You were completely Jewish,” she told him, shattering what he said he had been “almost willful purblindness, a rarely disturbed absence of curiosity combined with an endless willingness not to disturb my mother by questioning her.”

Sarka revealed the grim toll of the Holocaust on Stoppard’s family. His mother’s brother had survived, but their three sisters were murdered, two at Auschwitz. Both sets of his grandparents, too, had been killed — his mother’s parents sometime in 1942 and his father’s parents at Terezin in 1944.

The next year in Prague, where he was speaking at a PEN conference, he was approached in his hotel lobby by a man bearing a photo album. Inside, Stoppard would later recount, was a picture of him and his brother, prompting an even deeper reconnection with the family he had left behind as a toddler. He would visit Zlin, his hometown, and meet people who knew his father as a doctor — including a young girl, now an older woman, whose hand he had stitched after she broke a pane of glass.

In Leopoldstadt, those stitches are transformed into a mark and a memory for the character based on himself, Leo, a young British man with no recollection of his past as a Jew in Austria. The play won accolades for its presentation of the dangers of assimilation at a time of rising antisemitism, though it also drew criticism for giving relatively short shrift to Leo’s own excavation of his identity.

For his part, Stoppard said that while he had dwelled in his later work on his own past, Judaism had never come to feel like an active component of his identity or artistic outlook.

“It’s not a very elegant phrase, but I could say I didn’t factor in my Jewishness,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2022. “I just live my life and let the Jewishness take care of itself.”

Yet that was not always the case for those around him. In an essay published last year, the playwright recalled that his adoptive father had asked him to drop the Stoppard name after he first began demonstrating the “tribalism” of Jewish identity back when he demonstrated on behalf of Soviet Jews. By then, he was firmly established as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights. “I wrote back,” he recounted, “that this was not practical.”

Stoppard, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, four children and several grandchildren.

Tom Lehrer, satirist who sang about ‘Hanukkah in Santa Monica’

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:58:21 +0000

(JTA) — Tom Lehrer never identified closely with his ancestral Judaism. But the famed satirist and mathematician, who died Saturday, July 26 at 97, wrote one of the first popular songs about a Jewish holiday.

(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica debuted in 1990, well after Lehrer’s peak as a performer, on a come-from-retirement performance on Garrison Keillor’s radio show.

Keillor commissioned the new song from Lehrer because, he observed, Jews had written many popular Christmas songs but none for their own holidays.

“There was thus a deplorable lacuna in the repertoire, which this song, a sort of answer to White Christmas. was intended to remedy,” Lehrer said on air.

The resulting song — which also mentions spending “Shavuos in East St. Louis,” “Rosh Hashanah in Arizona” and “Yom Kippur in Mississippi” (try saying it out loud with a Southern accent) — has grown more popular in recent years. The writer Sarah Weinman attributed its rise to the New York City nightclub impresario Michael Feinstein, whom she said had turned the gossip columnist Liz Smith, composer Marvin Hamlisch, and writer Nora Ephron on to the song.

Notable recent covers have included an arrangement by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, a jazzy version by the singer Deborah Silver, and a Yiddish rendition that spells the title Khanike in Santa Monica.

The song was a departure for Lehrer, who was born in Manhattan in 1928 and grew up in a secular Jewish family. He rarely spoke about his personal life, but in the liner notes of a compendium album released in 2000, he addressed his family’s relationship to Judaism.
“More to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue. My brother and I went to Sunday School, but we had Christmas trees, and ‘God’ was primarily an expletive, usually preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘my’ or both,” he said.

Lehrer enrolled at Harvard University at 15, where he studied math before joining the U.S. Army and then returning to Cambridge for a graduate degree. He gained renown locally for his parodies, which often took aim at divisive political issues and pushed the boundaries of propriety. His first album, which he paid to record in 1953 and sold at his performances, became a cult hit that ultimately propelled him to multiple world tours, a shoutout by England’s Princess Margaret and, in 1965, a spot in the Billboard Top 20 for his album That Was The Year That Was (it peaked at No. 18).

Lehrer retired from touring in 1967 but continued to write songs for TV shows and dabble in musical theater intermittently for some time. But he spent the bulk of his time in the classroom, teaching math and, at one point, musical theater, at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Famously private, Lehrer never married or had children. He died at his home in Cambridge, which he kept while dividing his time between the coasts.

While (I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica was the Lehrer song that put Judaism in the title, at least one other famous song contained Jewish content as well. The 1965 song National Brotherhood Week, which pilloried an event promoting togetherness at a time of rising tension over race, drew laughs when he got to the verse about religion.

“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants,” he sang. “And the Hindus hate the Moslems, And everybody hates the Jews.”

Netanyahu leaves White House without fanfare or announcements

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 20:35:45 +0000

(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left the White House after two days of meetings with the Trump administration — but without the public appearances or breakthrough announcements of his previous trips.

Instead, Netanyahu released multiple statements emphasizing his commitment to continuing the Gaza war until Hamas poses no threat to Israel — a sign that he remains less eager than President Donald Trump to reach an agreement with Hamas over ending the war.

He also said he had spoken again with Trump about their “great victory” against Iran, a day after his office released footage of him presenting the president with a mezuzah in the shape of the B-2 bombers that Trump dispatched to bomb Iranian nuclear sites last month.

Israeli media is reporting that officials there believe as much as 90% of the issues that separated Israel and Hamas over a ceasefire deal had been resolved. And Steve Witkoff, whom Trump has charged with negotiating peace, said that he believed 90% of the gaps had been closed and that a deal could come soon. But a plan for postwar governance — and whether Hamas could continue to play a role in any form — reportedly remains an obstacle.

The deal being negotiated would allow for about half of the 50 Israeli hostages in Gaza — of whom 20 are thought to be living — to be released within 60 days. It would also require the two sides to continue negotiating toward a permanent conclusion of the war.
Trump is eager to achieve peace and told his Cabinet on Tuesday, July 8, according to Axios, “We have to get this solved.” But Netanyahu faces pressure from key coalition partners not to end the war, particularly if it leaves Hamas in place in any way.

As he left, Netanyahu released a statement alluding to the deaths of five soldiers early on July 8 in Gaza and signaling that he was not pulling back on the military campaign in the enclave. It echoed the notes he struck in a public statement before he arrived.

“We focused on the efforts to release our hostages. We are not relenting, even for a moment, and this is made possible due to the military pressure by our heroic soldiers,” he said. “Unfortunately, this effort has exacted a painful price from us, the loss of the best of our sons. But we are determined to achieve all of our objectives.”

Netanyahu also met with other officials in Washington, D.C. He spoke to reporters after one of them, with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

“We need both sides to agree,” Netanyahu said. “I hope we will pass the finish line. The less I speak about this publicly the better.”

‘Unfathomably horrific’ to ‘major step towards a real peace’: US Jewish groups respond to Trump’s Gaza comments

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 21:04:27 +0000

(JTA) — Reactions from partisan American Jewish groups to President Donald Trump’s proposals for Gaza — that “all” Palestinians leave and the United States “take over” the territory — began flowing in just as soon as their leaders picked their jaws up off the floor on Tuesday, Feb. 4.

The proposals — the latter of which was reportedly secret to even many in the Trump administration before the president aired it at a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — elicited sharp revulsion from liberal Jewish groups and excitement from those on the right.

Mainstream Jewish groups did not immediately respond but began to issue statements on Wednesday morning. The American Jewish Committee, for example, said it welcomed the support Trump expressed for the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire but expressed concerns about his norm-shattering proposals.

“At the same time, the President’s surprising, concerning, and confusing comments on an American plan to ‘take control’ and ‘own’ Gaza and the relocation of its population raise a wealth of questions – first among them the impact of the President’s announcement on the ongoing hostage-release agreement,” the group said in a statement.

Many groups did not strive for such balance.

“What do you even say about this absurd & dangerous press conference?” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, on social media. “Unfathomably horrific and cruel for Palestinians. So incredibly foolish re: US interests. And fundamentally at odds with Israel’s own future — because there is no Jewish, democratic Israel without Palestinian self-determination.”

And Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement, “The notion that the United States is going to ‘take over’ Gaza, including with the deployment of U.S. troops, isn’t just extreme — it’s completely detached from reality. In what world is this happening? Not the one we inhabit. Netanyahu praised his ‘out of the box’ thinking, but let’s be honest — it’s insane.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, had previously expressed openness to the idea that Trump’s iconoclastic approach to Middle East politics could allow for an elusive breakthrough toward peace. On Tuesday night, he channeled none of that optimism.

“J Street cannot express strongly enough opposition to the ideas being put forward by President Trump regarding Gaza. There aren’t adequate words to express our disgust at the idea of forcible displacement of Palestinians with the assistance of the United States of America,” Ben-Ami said.

“We call on leaders around the world, political leaders in this country and, of course, Jewish communal leaders in this country to express in no uncertain terms that these proposals are absolutely unacceptable – legally and morally,” he added.

Most American Jews did not vote for Trump. Among those who supported him, the reaction to his Gaza proposals — which matched the vision laid out by Israel’s far-right — included excitement.

Mort Klein, who heads the Zionist Organization of America, called Trump’s plan for the United States to take over Gaza an “extraordinary declaration that could assure the end of the Islamic-Arab terrorist group Hamas, and secure southern Israel after decades of terrorist attacks and missile launches from Hamas in Gaza. It will also be a major step towards a real peace in the region.”

Klein added, “Trump’s move could enable Israel and the US to develop this oceanfront oasis as a paradise in the Middle East while giving Israel the land it needs to thrive as a technological, scientific, cultural and religious giant. I see G-D’s hand here ultimately fulfilling his promise to the Jews of sovereignty over all the Jewish land of Israel.”

Jewish community springs into action as devastating Los Angeles-area fires widen

Philissa Cramer — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 20:22:49 +0000

(JTA) — Daniel Sher’s voice broke as he related the latest to members of his Pacific Palisades synagogue. Kehillat Israel had just sent a message saying that its building had so far survived the devastating Palisades Fire, but, the associate rabbi noted, so much had been lost.
“I cannot begin to describe the feeling that I am currently holding as I hear from so many beloved community members who’ve lost their home — while my family has found out that we’ve lost our home,” Sher said in a video he posted to Instagram on Wednesday, Jan. 8. “Our community that we love so dearly is in disarray.”

Sher later shared a picture taken by his wife of what remained of the home they lived in with their three young children and pets. Only a fireplace and chimney could be distinguished from a sea of ashes — one of thousands of structures that have burned as fires raged across the Los Angeles area.

At least one historic synagogue, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, was completely destroyed by fire, but not before community members battled challenging conditions to remove the Conservative congregation’s 13 Torah scrolls.

Los Angeles’ Jewish community — the second largest in the United States — has swung into action, attempting to provide relief and reassurance at a volatile time. Synagogues and Jewish community centers in safe areas are opening their doors to those who have fled their homes. A Jewish loan society is doling out funds to people who must start from scratch. And local Jewish eateries are fanning out to distribute free food to firefighters who have been battling blazes for days, with no end in sight.

“We have bagels. We have food trucks. We want to pull up to any safe zones to feed firefighters or anyone displaced from their homes,” Yeastie Boys Bagels posted on Instagram. Soon after, it announced that it would be distributing bagels at several evacuation centers. The pop-up shop also announced it would partner with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen, known for its work in disaster zones, to do even more.
More than 100,000 have been ordered to evacuate the fires, the worst in L.A. history, burning mostly uncontained (as of press time) in multiple locations across the region. Many others, lacking power and reliable water, preemptively left their homes for areas with clean air and less risk.

Among those who have lost their homes are the Jewish celebrities Billy Crystal, Adam Brody, and Eugene Levy. Meanwhile, a local newscaster encountered Steve Guttenberg, a Jewish actor who belongs to Kehillat Israel, as he sought to help people who had to abandon their cars in gridlock while evacuating the Palisades Fire.

Some of the new fires cropped up in densely populated areas closer to the city’s core, including Hollywood and Brentwood.

While the region has always been prone to wildfires, the risk has historically been low in the winter. But this year, little rain has fallen, drying out vegetation fueled by last year’s historic rainfall, creating optimal conditions for a winter blaze that watchdogs say is a perfect example of the kind of “compound climate disaster” that is becoming more common.

“Now is the time to rally support for the communities being ravaged by these ferocious fires,” Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of Dayenu, a group that aims to mobilize Jews on climate issues, said in a statement. “It is also the time to use our radical imagination to envision and build a different future — one that is just, livable, and sustainable — free of this kind of rampant and devastating destruction.”

For now, many in the region are focused on immediate, practical concerns. The Jewish Free Loan Association announced $2,000 no-interest loans that do not require guarantors for all Angelenos with emergency needs, such as replacement clothing and hotel stays. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles compiled a list of more than a dozen Jewish institutions providing refuge and emergency assistance to people from across the region, while also looking ahead toward the long recovery process the region will require. And community members are taking stock of what has been lost, even as the risk remains for more devastation to come.

“I do know that we will continue to care for one another, to reach out to one another, and we will rebuild,” Sher said in his video. “So many of us are experiencing heartbreak. But when a community experiences heartbreak together, it means we can mend our hearts together as community as well.”

Wildfire Relief Funds

The Los Angeles Jewish community has mobilized to provide essential resources, including mental health support, warm meals, shelter, and space for displaced individuals, families, and institutions.

Jewish Federations in Los Angeles, Ventura County, and San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys have opened a Wildfire Crisis Relief Fund to provide critical assistance to those impacted. https://www.jewishla.org/wildfire-crisis-relief/

If sending a check, make it payable to JFEDLA and send to PO Box 54269 Los Angeles, CA 90054-0269. In the memo line, indicate this is for the Wildfire Relief Fund.
IKAR, a prominent Jewish community organization in Los Angeles “that seeks to inspire people across the religious spectrum” has put together a page of resources. https://ikar.org

Resources include:
The Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund enables a Rabbinic team to lend support, care, and kindness to those in the community who need it. (Please note “FIRE” in occasion field)
World Central Kitchen’s Relief Team is supporting first responders and families impacted by wildfires in the Los Angeles area. They are mobilized across the region to provide nourishing meals to people in need.
California Fire Foundation works with local fire agencies and community-based organizations to provide direct, ongoing support to victims of wildfires.