ORT America author luncheon raises $115,000
More than 320 guests celebrated the joys and complexities of family life at ORT America’s Lunch with a View 2013 “Inside the Jewish Family Home” Sunday, April 21, at Bryn Mawr Country Club in Lincolnwood.
Featuring guest speakers Jami Attenberg (“The Middlesteins”) and Joshua Henkin (“The World Without You”), the author luncheon raised nearly $115,000 for ORT-KesherNet, a network of job-training centers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus empowering women to start, manage and sustain their own businesses.
“We’re working together to make the dreams of thousands of women come true,” said Kim Frankenthal, who co-chaired the luncheon with Gwen Heyman. Both women reside in Highland Park.
Book-group leader Judy Levin of Riverwoods moderated the program devoted to a literary exploration of Jewish family life.
Joshua Henkin, award-winning author and director of the MFA Program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College, reflected on the connection between fiction and family gatherings — like weddings, bar mitzvahs, and Passover seders — which bring people together and where sparks sometimes fly.
“Characters come to life through conflict,” he said. “Without conflict, there’s no story.”
For Buffalo Grove-native Attenberg, whose fourth novel and New York Times best-seller “The Middlesteins” is set in the Chicago suburbs, a character’s obsession with food forms the heart of a story focusing on family entanglements.
Inspired to write the book to capture the time and place where she grew up, replete with references to strip malls on Dundee Road and trips to Old Orchard, she views food as the complicated, inescapable lifeblood of relationships.
“If we can learn to look at food with love, not as an enemy,” she concluded, “it would be easier to love ourselves.”
Designed to spark family memories, the dairy menu began with cheese, julienne carrot and celery sticks with Thousand Island dip, and stuffed olives, followed by scoops of egg, tuna, and salmon salads and challah rolls.
Mixed nuts and chocolates served in long-stem candy dishes accompanied mandel breads (Jewish biscotti), rugelach (Jewish crescent-shaped pastry rolled around a filling), and sherbet for dessert.
The event began with a reception that featured a viewing of lavish raffle packages, including Chicago-area hotel stays and weekend getaways, spa and salon services, an in-home wine-tasting party, designer jewelry, restaurant dinners, theater and entertainment tickets, and headlined by a week at a luxury resort in Mexico and a deluxe White Sox Sky Box party for 14.
The ORT movement was founded in 1880 in St. Petersburg, Russia, to provide job training for impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe.
Today, ORT supports a network of high-tech educational programs serving more than 300,000 students in America, Israel, South America, India and the former Soviet Union.
More than 20,000 women have learned computer-related and business-management skills, such as accounting, understanding insurance, and how to get credit, through ORT-KesherNet programs.
In addition to improving their economic situations, ORT-KesherNet graduates have learned to access social-service resources, including domestic violence shelters, rape-crises centers, and local vocational placement, and have become engaged in improving their communities through volunteerism and philanthropy.
Karen Fine of Northbrook and Lori Kahn of Deerfield are president and executive vice president, respectively, of ORT America Metropolitan Chicago Region.
Raffle chairs were Holly Ginsburg and Debbie Miller, both of Highland Park, Linda Ring of Northbrook and Susie Rodriguez of Buffalo Grove.
Judy Rosen of Long Grove is director of ORT America Midwest region. Barbara Statland of Wilmette is director of Operations and Events, Metropolitan Chicago Region.
For details about ORT America, contact (847) 291-0475 or visit www.ortamerica.org.
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