Another 15 minutes

Celebrity is as celebrity does. Remember that.
                                                        Gilderoy Lockhart

On Sunday, November 13th I attended an AIPAC event at the home of Mark and Linda P. Soon after I arrived the regional director of the Houston AIPAC office came over to me and had the following conversation.

“Congratulations.”

“For what?”

“You know, the Forward.”

“What about the Forward?”

“You were named to the Forward Fifty.”

“The what?”

“The Forward Fifty most influential Jews in America. You are Rabbi Zamek, right? There isn’t another one, is there?”

“No just me.”

“Then you are on the list. Here I’ll email you the link.”

After a Treo to Treo zap (this seems to be the weapon of choice among Jewish professionals---the biennial was a giant Palm product placement) I read the list and sure enough there I was. My name was spelled incorrectly and the name of the congregation was slightly off, but it was a positive ID.

This is very flattering, I suppose, but also embarrassing. I am on the list in the “Community” section. The entry deals with my role in Katrina relief. The problem is that from reading the Forward you might believe, unless you were there, that I did all the work myself. I did do my bit to the best of my ability, but the record needs to be corrected.

The Baton Rouge Jewish Community as a whole responded to the crisis. I took part in an effort that included Beth Shalom, B’nai Israel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge. The Jewish Federation was the coordinating agency for our response. It is true that Martha and I called in our family so that we could work continually on the project, but many other people made sacrifices as well.

At any rate, now that the record is corrected here is the text of the Forward blurb on this guy “Zemek”:

Stanton Zemek
The feds might have taken their time responding to Hurricane Katrina, but the Jewish community was on the ground immediately, and few were more in the thick of things than Rabbi Stanton Zemek of Temple Beth Shalom in Baton Rouge, La., 80 miles north of New Orleans. When the storm hit, Zemek quickly turned his synagogue — one of two in Baton Rouge — into a processing center for the evacuees pouring out of the flood zone. Zemek had relatives come live with him so he could work around the clock, rounding up supplies and mapping out relocations. A few weeks after the storm, Zemek himself went into New Orleans to gather stranded Torah scrolls. Outsiders followed Zemek's struggles on a Web log he set up, and he was singled out in a September 21 speech by President Bush reviewing Jewish responses to the hurricane. The communal relief efforts involved thousands of efforts like Zemek's, and most went without any notice. Just days after Bush's speech, though, Zemek experienced the other side when his synagogue was hit by Hurricane Rita, flooding the sanctuary and driving the congregation to a local Baptist church. Working just as hard to save his own shul, Zemek had his congregation back in its sanctuary soon after the High Holy Days.

Dr. Bob went a bit batty about this Forward 50 business. When we bumped into URJ President Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who is legitimately one of the 50, he made a point of mentioning the list. Of course, the most significant thing about the whole episode is being mentioned in the same column as Jon Stewart.