Nora Baier, 3, and her mother, Mara, buy cookies from Calvin Boothe, 13, at Temple Emanuel of Tempe's hurricane-relief bake sale on Sept. 25. Behind them is Erin Briney, 12.Photo by Deborah Sussman Susser
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In Tempe, Calvin Boothe and Erin Briney, who are 13 and 12 respectively, spent the morning of Sept. 25 fielding questions, mostly about cookies. Both are members of Temple Emanuel of Tempe Youth Group, or TETY Jr., which raised a total of about $70 for hurricane relief through the bake sale it conducted at the temple.
Temple Emanuel was also one of two designated drop-off sites in the Valley for donations to Jacobs' Ladder, the hurricane relief effort of the Union for Reform Judaism. So while Boothe and Briney were selling baked goods, volunteers around the corner packed up and taped shut dozens of boxes of diapers, toilet paper and linens to be delivered to the URJ's Henry S. Jacobs camp, in Utica, Miss.
Meanwhile, up at Temple Solel in Paradise Valley - the other drop-off site in the Valley - congregants and volunteers from Temple Chai also packed boxes. Temple Solel Executive Director Patti Evans says that it was Merle Weiner, a Temple Solel member who is president of the Pacific Southwest Council for the URJ, who "stepped up for Arizona" as the URJ was developing the Jacobs' Ladder project and "volunteered to make it all happen."
Evans credited the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix with getting the word out about the relief effort. Fred Zeidman, the federation's assistant executive director, "really stepped up to help get us some of the supplies that we needed," Evans says. "And (federation Executive Vice President) Adam Schwartz personally put together an e-mail from the federation and sent it to their e-mail list."
Evans says that Solel collected nine pallets of supplies, including teddy bears.
The list of items that the URJ had asked for included school supplies, Evans explains, so when somebody walked in with a donation of new teddy bears, "we decided that those absolutely fit into the school-supplies category, and we boxed them up and wrote school supplies on the boxes."
"We really did stick to their rules," Evans says. "The one exception was the teddy bears.
"Those sound like school supplies, don't you think?"
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