“It Is Not Good for People to Be Alone.” Genesis 2:18
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“It is not good for people to be alone.” Genesis 2:18 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2016 Celebrating the 18th anniversary of Jewish Healing Connections and the dedication of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing. Do not cast me off when I am old; Don’t abandon me when my strength is failing. Psalm 71:9 Marjie, thank you and your team of professionals and volunteers for 18 years of commitment to those in our community in need of support as they face life’s challenges. Your work was an inspiration to Betty Ann and she was proud to call you her friend. Betty Ann, your caring and commitment to those in need always amazed me. It has made me a better person and the world a better place. I am so blessed that you entered my life and so honored to be able to name this Center in your memory. We love you and miss you so. Dan Miller Adam and Matthew Miller PROGRAM AN EVENING OF DEDICATION Marjorie U. Sokoll Director, Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing REFLECTIONS Barry Shrage President, Combined Jewish Philanthropies TESTIMONIALS David Breakstone Joyce Zakim Raquel Morales BETTY ANN’S LEGACY Daniel Miller CLOSING REMARKS Rimma Zelfand CEO, JF&CS 1 Dear Friends, Jewish Healing Connections (JHC) was founded in 1998 to bring the solace of Jewish tradition and community to people who would otherwise be disconnected from these sources of inspiration and comfort when burdened by illness, loss, or isolation. Over the past 18 years, JHC programs have offered compassionate support to thousands of people of all faiths and backgrounds. Tonight we celebrate our chai anniversary and the renaming of JHC with the dedication of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing. In 1998, I could have never envisioned this day. I am profoundly grateful to our dedicated donors, inspiring members of the JHC Advisory Council under the leadership of long time co-chairs, Marilyn Ross and Nancy Rossman, devoted Friendly Visitor volunteers, and committed colleagues, Barbara Sternfield and Sue Spielman. All have been essential to JHC’s success. Betty Ann was a founding member of the JHC Advisory Council and my dear friend. Over the years, she taught me so much by graciously sharing her personal experience of living with illness. She also understood the importance of philanthropic support to sustain JHC’s mission, lending her formidable fundraising skills to the JHC cause over and over again. Tonight, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Betty Ann’s husband, Dan Miller, for ensuring the future of our enduring mission in recognition of Betty Ann’s legacy, and I invite you all to join us in supporting the ongoing work of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing. Shalom, Marjorie U. Sokoll, MEd, Director Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing 2 BETTY ANN GREENBAUM MILLER In 2001, Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller, z”l, participated as a client in a Jewish Healing Connections (JHC) spiritual support group for caregivers and people living with serious illness. As a teenager, she had survived Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Intensive year-long treatment left her weakened and prone to chronic medical issues. In need of some professional emotional support for managing her daily life with her husband Dan and their two young sons, Adam and Matthew, she came to JF&CS. Betty Ann was so impressed and moved by the program’s mission that after her support group ended, she became a founding member of the JHC Advisory Council in 2002. She transitioned from someone who came to JF&CS to be helped to someone who could be a creator of the next wave of supportive activities for others. “I personally feel very connected to the kinds of experiences that folks have when they’re in difficult times,” said Betty Ann in 2011. “The opportunity to comfort, listen, and be present with another person in moments of loneliness or distress is profoundly meaningful. I feel honored to be part of JHC, whose mission is just that. Many people don’t have support systems, loved ones, resources, or community,” she continued. “I want to be one of the voices who says ‘don’t forget them, help support them’.” Despite ongoing heath challenges, Betty Ann became a skilled fundraiser for JHC. Proudly, she cultivated many relationships in order to raise awareness and increase involvement to help people in the Jewish community deal with the challenges of illness, loss, or isolation. In recent years, Betty Ann was able to develop her gift for compassionate care by becoming a professional chaplain through Hebrew SeniorLife’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program. She was drawn to the only Jewish geriatric CPE program in the country because she wanted to help people facing trauma and crisis in the course of daily living. In a 2011 interview, Betty Ann was asked about her most memorable moment since she became a JHC supporter. She recalled a Passover Seder for elders in the JHC program in which she and Dan were seated at a table with a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. “We had a fantastic conversation as we shared a meal with him,” she explained. “We were struck by the fact that we thought we were going to do a mitzvah, but [instead] he gave to us. Jewish Healing Connections creates opportunities for simple and meaningful connections like that.” Sadly, Betty Ann passed away last August. In her memory, Dan made a very generous gift to JHC, and the program has been renamed the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Jewish Healing. Along with sons Adam and Matthew, Dan knew how important this free program was to Betty Ann and recognized that she would have wanted these services to be available to all who might need it. JF&CS is extremely grateful to the Millers for their generosity and for ensuring that Betty Ann’s legacy will continue to inspire our community. *of blessed memory 3 Poetry by Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller, z”l Betty Ann’s husband, Dan Miller, explained what inspired his wife to write the poem Tapestry: During a very difficult surgical procedure over 20 years ago, Betty Ann experienced a vision. It was a vision of life and community as a tapestry or prayer shawl of the intertwined threads of our lives. This vision gave her tremendous comfort and strength to live with the challenges of chronic illness. She struggled for years to express this vision in writing; the result ultimately being this poem. I have read it countless times in the year since her passing. I have shared it with family and friends. It has given all of us a great deal of comfort in knowing Betty Ann is indeed still here with us, still connected to us through time and space. Tapestry I see each individual life represented by a single thread. Each thread is tied on and woven into the other threads that were there before and that come after. The varieties of threads create a beautiful pattern that flow through the fabric as if on the breath of life itself. When I am closest to the image of the tapestry, all I can see is my own thread and the few threads directly around me. When I stand back and look at as much as I am able, I see that my life thread is but a fragment of a whole whose beginning and end is out of my view. I also notice other things. I notice that the pattern of the tapestry changes and yet feels familiar. I notice there are knots, and frays and warped areas throughout the shawl. I notice vibrant colors, and even deadly colors. Colors that make me weep with joy, and colors that cause my retreat. I notice holes, tears, rips, and uneven weave. I notice patches, and darning, and do-overs. 4 When I look very closely, I see my thread has many frays and knots and pulls. I see places where it seems that the thread is even broken and then resumes its weave farther on in the pattern. I see when my thread has been ripped. Other times, I can see my thread blowing in a breeze, barely connected with any will and no strength….that is when the other threads around me hold my space in the tapestry. Even as they weave their own definition of color and texture, they remind me of my place. They share mending materials; they make suggestions for knots. They show me different and new directions of weave, maybe stronger ones and simpler ones. They even might share a piece of their own thread, which can be very close to breaking too. They always pull me back in, when my broken thread is beginning to float away… This is when the real healing begins and the tapestry repairs its holes. This is when the threads of the many separate lives take on an inexplicable iridescent gold aura. This is when I am no longer afraid and alone because someone has held onto my thread for me with his or her own life. They hold on, while I mend my own thread. The whole tapestry is once again salvaged and strengthened. Its beauty is calming and comforting. It seems to be life itself, or maybe life’s companions, love and compassion. The golden thread is woven so gently into so many of the single threads. In and out, all over every perfect and imperfect thread of the tapestry, it continues its elegant journey, floating effortlessly and endlessly through time and space with our frayed and broken… and golden threads in it.