The Bernie Entin Man of the Year 2024

Mar 17, 2021 | Brotherhood

Bernie Entin Man of the Year Award Winner – Rob Edison!

Congratulations to Rob Edison, winner of the Brotherhood’s 2023 – 2024 Bernie Entin Man of the Year Award! For years, Rob has been the driving force behind Brotherhood’s Sunday Morning Speaker/Bagel Brunches. He is our key setup and cleanup guy, arriving early in the morning to set up tables and staying late until the final fork is washed and stored. Rob’s personal history includes teaching elementary school English in Australia, serving as the high school English department chair in Oxnard, and acting as a union representative. Rob is an animal lover, classical pianist, and punk rock enthusiast. He is always pleasant, always interesting, and always a mensch!

Mazel tov, Rob!

Sunday Speaker Series: COVID-19 Discussion

Dec 28, 2020 | Brotherhood

Upcoming Speaker Series

Sponsored by Brotherhood

Sunday, January 10, at 10:00 a.m.
Featuring our own, Dr. Jane Parnes, MD, senior scientist at Amgen
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82870195111

Topic: COVID-19: The Virus, Antibodies and Vaccines

This timely talk will provide valuable insights for all of us concerning COVID-19 and help us understand our treatment options should we become infected.  It will begin with an overview of how COVID-19 invades our bodies – in technical terms the pathophysiology of infection by SARS-CoV2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.  Next, we’ll learn how monoclonal antibodies are used to treat the virus – these antibodies are obtained from people who’ve recovered from COVID-19 and they are how President Trump was treated.  Dr. Parnes will then turn to the approaches being taken to develop vaccines to treat COVID-19.

Who is Dr. Parnes?

Dr. Parnes has a very impressive resume.  She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe/Harvard (1968-1972) and then earned her MD degree from Harvard Medical School (1972-1976).  She served as an internal medicine resident at Massachusetts General Hospital (1976-1978), followed by post-doctoral research at both MIT (1978-1979) and the National Institutes of Health  (1979-1982).  She then moved to Stanford University where she was a Professor of Medicine (1982-2008).  She is currently a senior scientist at Amgen where she serves as the Executive Medical Director in Translational Medicine and the Therapeutic Area Head for Inflammation, Cardiometabolic and Neuroscience in Early Development.  She is also a Professor Emeritus at Stanford.  We are extremely fortunate to have her as a speaker.

While we are unable to provide our normal Sunday morning fare of lox, bagels, cream cheese and other tasty treats, we are working hard to provide stimulating and thought-provoking topics from a broad spectrum of speakers.  We hope you’ll find these Sunday morning speaker events enlightening, thought-provoking, entertaining and worthwhile. Our February talk will feature our own Rabbi Emeritus Alan Greenbaum.

Brother of the Year

Jun 24, 2020 | Brotherhood

ANNOUNCING THE BERNIE ENTIN BROTHER OF THE YEAR

Under normal circumstances the TAE Brotherhood would announce their pick for the coming year’s Brother of the Year at the Brotherhood’s annual Erev Shabbat service, which was to place in mid-March.  The selectee does not know in advance that he’s been selected, and the announcement is therefore a surprise to him—at least that is the hope.

But this year’s circumstances are not normal, so we are making the announcement via this e-mail to all of our Temple Adat Elohim membership.  Hopefully, when our selectee reads this e-mail, it will be a surprise to him.

First, however, we wish to explain why we call our Brother of the Year the Bernie Entin Brother of the Year.  Bernie Entin, of blessed memory, was the first man to be selected as our Brother of the Year.  His devotion to TAE, expressed in so many ways during his years of membership at TAE, was legendary.  He was a tireless volunteer at our synagogue, both within the Brotherhood and the larger TAE community.  He was even selected as TAE’s Volunteer of the Year on multiple occasions because, were you to visit the TAE campus, you would likely find Bernie on the office’s second floor doing numerous volunteer activities:  folding bulletins, stuffing envelopes, or whatever else needed doing.  Just before Bernie’s death due to cancer, the Brotherhood Board voted to rename TAE’s Brother of the Year award as the Bernie Entin Brother of the Year, and Bernie was made aware of this.  We hope, if Bernie is looking down on us, that he’d be pleased with our subsequent selections.

This year’s selectee has also been a tireless worker for TAE.  He’s served on the TAE Board of Directors as well as the Brotherhood’s Board of Directors, including serving as TAE’s President.  He’s volunteered at many TAE events, including our annual Purim Carnivals.  Indeed, he personifies the spirit and tradition of volunteerism that Bernie Entin himself personified.

Our selectee was born near the Great Lakes and, by his wife’s admission, was a mediocre student in high school.  This was probably due to his love of bowling because, also by his wife’s admission, he spent most of his spare time at the bowling alley.

Be that as it may, he demonstrated his keen intelligence and “aced” the college entrance exam, gaining admission the Wayne State University.  Staying true to his love for bowling, he spent the first year at Wayne State bowling for dollars.

After a year at Wayne State, our selectee’s family moved to Los Angeles, and he enrolled in Los Angeles City College.  While there he met the woman who would become the love of his life, and their first date was at … you guessed it … a bowling alley.  You’d think that our selectee would go easy on his date, but such was not to be.  She survived the humiliation of defeat, and they shared their first “shy kiss” at the end of the date.  In his wife’s words, the rest is history.

By now we’ve given enough information that our selectee probably knows who he is, but we’ll continue this story.  They married in 1963 while he was attending Los Angeles State University (now Cal State LA) and his wife was pursuing an education degree at UCLA.  While his wife taught school, our selectee pursued a law degree at UCLA.

After our selectee graduated and passed the bar, he worked while his beautiful wife became a homemaker and raised their two red-headed children.  Our selectee became active in B’nai B’rith, serving as its youngest president.  He and his family also joined Temple Judea where he served on its board.

After moving to the Conejo Valley they joined Temple Adat Elohim, and both became very active in the TAE community.  Our selectee served as TAE President, and he’s also held many other positions.  He’s been the go-to person whenever there was a tough issue to address, and he’s a fountain of information on TAE’s history.  He also barbeques the best hamburgers and hot dogs for TAE’s Purim Carnival.

His beautiful wife Judy has supplied most of the information presented here, but we would like to add one more volunteer activity in which our selectee is involved, a full-time job in itself.  He is into his second year serving on the Ventura County’s Civil Grand Jury, spending untold hours conducting investigations for the betterment of the Ventura County community.

We are both honored and happy to announce the TAE Brotherhood’s selection of Larry Levine as our Bernie Entin Brother of the Year.

(2020)