| Hillel helps fulfill Katrina pledge BY MIKE UNGER 
Photo courtesy of Lauren Stillman
Counterclockwise from bottom: Perry Sacks (sunglasses), Rebecca Kern, David Grossman, Andrea Shedler, Erica Goldfine, Laiah Idelson, Brian Schaffer, Shira Zamir, and Sarah Block Family photos and a snow cone machine. That’s all Tracy asked Laiah Idelson and the other Hillel volunteers gutting her house to salvage. “When she was younger she used to have a snow cone stand, and that was the machine she used,” says Idelson, an AU sophomore. “It reminded her of good times and home. We found it and it was still usable. She was so happy. It really made me think about how we have so much stuff in our lives, but what really matters to us is interesting.” While many college students were sunning themselves on beaches in Mexico or Florida, Idelson and eight others from AU Hillel spent their spring break week in New Orleans, helping victims of Hurricane Katrina try to reassemble the shattered pieces of their lives. Sixteen months after the storm ravaged the region, vast neighborhoods still lay in a state of disrepair. Houses, untouched since Lake Pontchartrain overwhelmed the levees and submerged the city, sit like tombstones marking a row of graves at a cemetery. That’s the grim picture Idelson and Jewish Campus Service Corps (JCSC) fellow Lauren Stillman painted of the Big Easy upon their return. Yet, despite that depressing reality, they found plenty of hope among the suffering and tragedy they encountered. “I came back totally appalled and inspired at the same time,” Idelson says. “I just feel like people have already forgotten about the Gulf Coast. But the people there were so gracious and so excited to see us. They thanked us profusely.” The trip was part of a 10-year commitment to aid the Gulf Coast made by Hillel International, a cultural organization for Jewish communities on college campuses worldwide. More than 200 students from 17 universities were in New Orleans, working side by side with the AU contingent. Their main task: gutting houses to their core. Many New Orleans homeowners can’t afford to pay workers to haul every ounce of trash and debris from their home, or to deconstruct their house down to its studs, which is required by insurance companies before they pay claims. Others can’t deal with the emotional weight of the job. 
Photo courtesy of Laura Stillman
From left: Lauren Stillman, Erica Goldfine, and Perry Sacks wearing their personal protective equipment. Enter the Hillel volunteers. Each morning, Idelson, Stillman, and their friends awoke at 6:30 in bunk beds lined up in a furniture factory-turned-dormitory and piled into buses for the trip from Slidell, La., to New Orleans. From 9 until 5 they toiled in houses, carting strangers’ worldly possessions to massive trash piles on the street and taking sledge hammers to walls, floors, and ceilings that once sheltered families. “These homes hadn’t been touched since Hurricane Katrina,” Idelson says. “My house had five feet of water inside that sat for months. The walls were covered in mold.” The volunteers worse gas masks, hard hats, goggles, and gloves in the 70-degree weather. “The refrigerator opened,” Idelson recalls. “Meat and dairy had been in there for over a year and a half. It smelled like death. After two hours you would go two or three houses down and the smell had spread. Your clothes wreaked of it, the bus wreaked of it. You couldn’t breathe or do anything near it. It was the worst thing I’ve ever smelt in my life, and I’ve smelled some gross things.” “Just imagine the worst garbage can you’ve ever smelt, and multiply it times a lot,” Stillman says. The one-story home Idelson worked in was owned by Tracy and her husband, who lived there with their two children. They evacuated as the storm bore down on them; when they later returned the loss and devastation were so overwhelming that they couldn’t deal with it. “I was cleaning out one of the little girls’ rooms for a while, she was about seven when the storm hit,” Idelson says. “There were CDs, little kids movies, little girls toys. Coloring books were stuck to the floor. I just kept thinking, it could have been me. I was a really big girly girl when I was little, and I had the dress-up clothes—she had tons of dress-up clothes in there.” Tracy, a nurse, told Idelson that she’s come to realize the relative unimportance of material things. “I don’t need the stuff if I have the people,” she told Idelson. The people—her family and new AU friends—photos, and the snow cone machine. For Tracy, that was enough. |
