By Robert Kalfus
In 2009, Elie Lowenfeld was a student at New York University, and traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to help the community there with relief following devastating floods. He was disappointed by the visible lack of participation among his peers in the long-term recovery efforts. Elie returned to his campus, and felt the need to involve the Jewish community in aiding victims of disasters, and founded the Jewish Disaster Response Corps, an all volunteer organization to rebuild communities devastated by hurricanes, flooding, and other disasters.
JDRC has since then become a nonprofit which has been recognized as a national service-learning provider for domestic alternative breaks, and has worked with over 1,000 students nationwide to provide physical and emotional support for disaster affected communities. The JDRC mobilizes Jewish and interfaith groups to participate in week-long service learning programs complementing challenging rebuilding work with discussion, reflection, and community building.
Sallie Mendelsohn, Elie’s mom, collected at least one of the more than two dozen T-shirts that her son created to clothe and identify the volunteers at their disaster relief missions, in places including Alabama, identified by the red T-shirt at center spelling in Hebrew letters “Alabama”, in addition to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, St. Bernard Parish, and others where the JDRC has successfully accomplished relief missions.
“My son Elie, the youngest son of my three sons, seeing the need to start a Jewish organization to work with the Baptist, Catholic, Muslim and other faith based organizations, started a Disaster Response volunteer organization,” said Sallie. “My kids left me all their T-shirts, and I couldn’t bear to toss them out. None of the T-shirts had been worn, they were all sitting in the closet.” Sallie had seen other Yonkers Rising articles and photos of T-shirt projects, and not wanting to discard the T-shirts memorializing her son’s work helping others, Sallie contacted seamstress and clothing designer Leah Katz, whom she has known more than 20 years ago prior to Leah’s store, LaRobeByLeah, locating to 1692 Central Park Avenue in Yonkers. (www.LaRobeByLeah.com)
“It is a lot of fun to recycle and personalize your material,” said Sallie. “I collected all the T-shirts and handed them to Leah, along with two fitted queen size sheets, a front and a back, and Leah created the rest,” filling the quilt with batting, and piping finish on the edges, brown to match the front sheet, and grey to match the back sheet color.Leah started designing and stitching the quilt little more than one month ago, finishing the quilt in time for Sallie to present it to her son and his wife for a Thanksgiving surprise. Sallie expects that her son Elie and his wife will use and enjoy the unique quilt.
“My accomplishment is for me to see the customer’s reaction, when they see it complete,” said Leah. “That is a great deal of satisfaction for me.”
In partnership with the New York Says Thanks You (NYSTY) foundation, the JDRC (http://jdrcorps.org/) committed to rebuilding two-hundred first responders’ homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy (82 of which are already complete) with the help of our volunteers for their Hurricane Sandy relief program. It is estimated that over two thousand New York City firefighters, police officers, and other first responders were directly impacted by Hurricane Sandy, with their primary homes either heavily damaged or destroyed. Each one of the first responders assisted provides hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of their fellow New Yorkers with essential and/or life-saving services.
