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,...

Before she became a lawyer, Nancy Schmidt majored in art history in graduate school, but in her career she has turned her attention to larger canvases—those of people’s lives. For almost 15 years, Schmidt, who is not Jewish, has provided free...

Marion Lipsitz may be an Unsung Hero, but almost everyone sings her praises and has a story about her – and many of those stories are worth retelling. For example:In 1938, Walt Disney chose Lipsitz as the ideal Snow White for the campus Snow White Ball...

Driven is a word that could easily describe Charles Baron. “What drives me at the moment are primarily issues affecting the city of St. Louis and its future,” said the Temple Israel congregant. “I see evidence of the city’s collapsing....

The myth is that every Jew excels and succeeds. The reality is that those who fail, by conventional standards, are sometimes forgotten. A Jewish prisoner — a seeming contradiction in terms to many — wrote a letter several years ago to the Jewish...

“There are two ways of helping,“ says Rabbi Zvi Zuravin, executive director of the Vaad Hoeir. “There is helping because you have to and then there is helping because you want to. That’s Merle. She is an extremely selfless person who does...