KC SONG LEADERS — Several people with ties to The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah, got together at Hava Nashira, the song leaders’ workshop held annually at Olin Sang Ruby camp in Wisconsin. It’s a program for training song leaders, music teachers, rabbis, cantors and music specialists in leading Jewish music in camps, congregations, community centers and other types of Jewish programming and was founded in 1992 by the late Debbie Friedman, Cantor Jeff Klepper and Jerry Kaye, director of the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute Camp in Oconomowoc, Wis. There were more than 250 participants this year including three participants and one faculty member who were all confirmed at B’nai Jehudah. Rabbi Larry Karol (confirmed 1970), who is now the rabbi of Temple Beth-El, Las Cruces, N.M., was on staff. Rachael Klein (confirmed 2007) is beginning studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem; Bess Wohlner (confirmed 2000) is a fourth-year rabbinical student at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles; and Rabbi Ken Chasen (confirmed 1981) is a rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles.
SURPRISE! — Barney Mayse learned he has multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system, which has attacked his ability to walk, more than 20 years ago. For many years he has tirelessly raised funds — he estimates he has raised $50,000 over the past 11 years — to find a cure for the disease. Earlier this month Mayse was surprised when the Heartland Border Walk Foundation for MS, a K.C.-based foundation with all monies staying in K.C. to help people afflicted with MS, and United Access presented him with the gift of an accessible van and a power wheelchair. The van is equipped with a side ramp for him to get his wheelchair into the van, a swivel seat allowing easy transfer from the wheelchair to the driver’s seat and hand controls making it possible for him to drive the van. Mayse, who is a practicing Catholic, has been an active volunteer at The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah assisting at many Purim carnivals and Mitzvah Days along with a variety of other projects with his daughter Samantha and wife, Carol Dale.
ASNER HERE THIS WEEKEND — If you don’t already know that Ed Asner will be in Kansas this weekend to be inducted in the Kansas Hall of Fame and to perform in a benefit Sunday night, June 14, for Friends of Sheffield, well … As a recap, Ed Asner Live! will feature Asner as FDR in a performance at the White Threatre (tickets are still available.) Proceeds from the event will go toward the restoration of the chapel, which has deteriorated to the extent it has been uninhabitable for the past 20 years, at the 111-year-old cemetery where many of us have loved ones buried. Friends of Sheffield Cemetery has raised $800,000 of its $1 million goal. For more information, contact Arlene Shalinsky, ticket sales chair, at 913-642-8588 or . Information is also available on the website http://sheffieldcemetery.org.