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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
Six Who Matter: The Super Jew
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue. More specifically, this article is part of our 2007 Six Who Matter series.
She leaps tall buildings in a single bound. She volunteers, she leads trips to Isreal and Auschwitz, and she donates her bone marrow to complete strangers.
There are those among us who attend parties, and there are others who bring life to them. Alana Shultz does both.
On any given night, she may be attending a benefit, listening in on a lecture, or planning a fundraiser for the multitude of organizations to which she has lent her talents and her enthusiasm for all things Jewish.
I find Shultz on Manhattan's Upper West Side, just as she is in the throes of apartment hunting after a particularly dispiriting experience with a failed roommate. She is dressed artfully in a long black skirt, flip-flops, and a black t-shirt emblazoned with an image of Wonder Woman across the front. "I need to feel like a Wonder Woman," she says, referring to her housing crisis, although to those who know her, the moniker reveals an example of art imitating life. She herself admits: " I like to have a good time, but it's not enough to satisfy my soul. I need to know I'm being productive and adding to the world."
At 28, Shultz sits on the boards of several Jewish organizations, and when asked, she will tick off the groups she is most involved in: The Manhattan Jewish Experience, Dor Chadash, Havalight, the SoHo Synagogue, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Jewish International Connection, and Birthright Israel, through which she has led two trips to Israel. She's not just a volunteer. Shultz's professional life is in the Jewish world as well, as a program director for Congregation Shearith Israel, Manhattan's Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. Dating back to 1654, it's one of the oldest congregations in America.
"When I'm enthusiastic about something, I don't hide it," she says.
Raised in a Conservative Jewish home in Fairlawn, N.J., Shultz attended public school but developed a strong Jewish identity at home. Given the choice of having a bat mitzvah party or a taking a family trip to Israel, Shultz chose the latter. She developed even stronger ties to Israel -- and to Judaism -- when she spent her junior year of college abroad at Hebrew University. "I realized it's such a rich world out there. I fell in love with Israel, and was opened up to the spiritual joy and intriguing intellectual dimensions of Judaism," she says.
To hear her tell it, Shultz draws inspiration from many places, in particular her name. In college, Shultz says, a rabbi told her that the letters of her Hebrew name -- Chanah -- corresponded to three attributes belonging to the ideal Jewish woman. "That more than anything inspired me to be an eishet chayil," or woman of valor, she explains. By her own definition, that includes giving charity, and remaining loyal to her family.
Several years ago, circumstances tested those qualities when Shultz donated life-saving bone marrow to a young Israeli woman she did not even know. Like many students, Shultz had joined a bone marrow registry during college and promptly forgot all about it. Then, in 2003, the registry confirmed that her genetic makeup matched that of a leukemia patient. "I'll do it," Shultz responded immediately.
International law dictates that bone marrow donors and recipients must remain anonymous to each other for one year after treatment, though Shultz, who serendipitously learned her recipient was an Israeli woman named Anat, booked a flight to Israel just shy of the one-year mark. When they finally met, Shultz recalls, "I felt this instant connection to her." Their meeting took place on Anat's 29th birthday, a day she nearly did not live to see.
On matters of life and death, Shultz grows sober, recounting the murder of her relatives during the Holocaust. Two years ago, Shultz participated in the March of the Living with her grandfather, an octogenarian who was liberated from Bergen-Belsen but spent much of World War II working in labor camps.
Several times, Shultz repeats words like "inspiration" and "pride" to describe him, and to describe her grandmother, who escaped a Nazi death march and survived the war. "I look at all four of my grandparents, and think of what they and their families have gone through, and what fortunate and unfortunate circumstances have brought to me where I am now. I think anyone who takes their Judaism for granted, it's like a slap in the face for all our ancestors," she says.
"A lot of people, she adds, "don't realize what a miracle their Judaism is… I'm aware of that all the time."
-- Text by E.B. Solomont / Photo by Sam Norval
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue. More specifically, this article is part of our 2007 Six Who Matter series.
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