Rita Swiener is one of those people who always seems to know what she wants. Even as a six-year-old growing up in the slums of Pittsburgh, she was certain of which gifts she hoped Hanukkah would bring at the orphanage where she lived. “I said I wanted...

Some people retire to get away from work. Others seek work out after leaving their jobs. Herb Eissman is definitely the latter.“I just like to be helpful to people,” he said.It’s something the 82-year-old native of Neosho, Mo. proves every weekday...

Had her dad stayed in Hollywood, once he passed his screen test, a gaping hole might have been detected, years later, in the fund-raising and religious worlds here. But since Depression-era studios had little money for beefing up raw talent, the Goldenbergs...

Crossing a Paris street to go to a bakery, a young child was hit by a car driven by a Nazi. “It was like I was a piece of paper,” the French-born Rachel Goldman Miller recalls. “He never stopped.”During the German occupation of France in World...

Young violinist Hava Polinsky performs the first movement of Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 during the Unsung Heroes event last week, held by the Jewish Light at the JCC. Close to 300 people attended the event, which recog-nized the Light’s nine ‘Unsung...

While his son plays in the next room, Michael Shapiro, president of Ohr Atid, couldn’t be happier to hear the sounds of activity filtering in from the other side of the Barry H. Levites Chabad House on Forsyth.“For Eitan, it’s been amazing,” he...

Joy Sterneck remembers reading an essay about the dash that appears in obituaries and on tombstones between the years one is born and passes away. “It’s not so much when you lived and when you died,” she says. “It’s the dash in between that...

In his back yard, Steven Rosenblum grows vegetables and herbs. As a founder of the Clayton Community Garden, along with 20 other families he grows more of the same. But perhaps Rosenblum’s most formidable nurturing skills are on display when he tends...

Pat Simons’s mother, an immigrant from Poland, went to college when few women did so, and her father was always “a great reader,” so growing up in El Paso, Simons well understood the value of education and the pleasure of reading. Simons has passed...

Twenty-three years ago, Marshall Cohen was living what some might consider the ultimate slacker life. He was working for his family’s business, Globe Drugs; living with his parents, June and Julius Cohen; and stockpiling his earnings.But nightly local...

For Unsung Hero Larry Opinsky, making a difference in the world at large is also about making a difference much closer to home—one that affects his daughter.“What I can do is make the world a better place for her and for her quality of life,” he...

Samantha Lurie says she is humbled to be honored as an Unsung Hero, but insists that she has been able to make a difference for area high school students only because so many people have helped her help them. “I want to talk about my heroes,...