The following email went to Gary Lipman’s board from New Orleans and reprinted with his permission:

Today began in a way similar to our usual JCCA board meetings…an early start with a few routine committee and task force meetings followed by breakfast. But unlike any of our other meetings, the day then departed from the usual routine. The entire JCC board (about 70 people from throughout North America…mostly lay people with a few executive directors sprinkled in) boarded buses to go on a tour of New Orleans. I’m not sure what others expected, but what I saw was shocking. Nearly eighteen months following this disaster, broad swatches of this once amazing and vibrant city still lay devasted…barren…abandoned…literally rotting away. We toured the 9th ward, the breach at the 17th Street Canal, poor areas and wealthy areas. While the story told most frequently in the media immediately following the storm was the story of the poor neighborhoods and the racial and sociological divide between black and white, rich and poor, Katrina was an equal opportunity disaster. While those with some means may have had an easier time evacuating the city, the devastation destroyed many well off neighborhoods as well. Nearly 800,000 housing units were either totally or substantially destroyed by the flood waters that rose as high as 10 -15 feet in some areas. Most of these have not yet been repaired or replaced…in fact a large majority haven’t even been gutted or torn down. They just lay there, as a constant reminder of the horrors.

We drove by the homes marked on their roofs or siding with giant “X” marks…with each quadrant of the “X” indicating the date that rescue and or recovery took place, the intials of the rescue/recovery worker and with the bottom quadrant indicating how many people were found dead. As we went through block after block, all I wanted to do was pray that that bottom quadrant was marked with a zero.

We visited the orthodox shul…totally destroyed with no hope of being rebuilt. The shul president met us and talked about burying over 3,000 prayer books and six torahs nearly six months after the storm. As we walked through one partially gutted room, faded and stained pictures of the shul’s past president still hung on the moldy walls. Memorial plaques and honoree plaques were strewn on the ground…those few things that were even partially salvageable had been removed. The sanctuary sat lifeless and abandoned with pews broken apart and scattered.

And then finally we arrived at our target destination…the one full service YMCA in New Orleans. The neighborhood around the building was speckled with a few homes in the process of being rebuilt and others still showing no signs of present life or even any likely signs of future life. Here, we all filed out of our buses, met by representatives of Nechama, A Jewish Response to Disaster. Two African American women, board members of the Y, also greeted us to thank us for coming to New Orleans, to their neighborhood, and to their Y to help. Our task as a board (to be continued on Monday with the executive directors) was to totally gut the inside of this Y so that the rebuilding process can hopefully begin. This wasn’t one of those “dress in your finest and let’s paint a few walls” type of activity. This was hard physical labor…tearing out heavily molded sheet rock, ceiling tiles and grid work, studs, and carrying out not only the product of our labor, but also the abandoned contents of the building.

When we entered, tears came to my eyes as well as so many others. While the building was a damp and dark cesspool of bugs, mold, and waste deteriorating daily for nearly 1 ½ years, the contents looked like something we would find in our JCC. The early childhood wing had children’s books, toys, blocks, kids desks and chairs and much of what one would expect in a facility housing a day care program. When the storm came and the waters rose, everything was just frozen in time. It’s one thing to tear down walls…an entirely different experience to cart away the soaking, molded contents that kids had been using only days before the Hurricane struck. I’d imagine that the offices looked much like ours…as we carted away abandoned desks, computers, refrigerators, air conditioning units.

Finally, as the day began to draw to an end (we needed to get back to the hotel to prepared for Shabbos), we gathered as a board…as a community, in front of the building and planted a tree, a traditional Jewish sign of renewal, as together we all said the shehekianu. We didn’t complete the task today, and we may not complete it on Monday, but just being a part of this experience allowed all of us who preach to value, importance, and obligation to tikun olam to live it.

Will New Orleans ever recover? To some degree it has…the human spirit and desire to renew competes each and every day with the sense of hopelessness that so many must feel. But the job has barely just begun. It’s a job that doesn’t just belong to those who live here, either now or pre-Katrina. It is a job that belongs to all of us…as Americans, as Jews and as caring and compassionate human beings. While we may not ever return New Orleans to its future glory, neither can we abandon it.

I’m sorry if this seems to run on and if its grammer and spelling is off…sitting down and writing this has been as much a part of my catharsis as it has been about sharing the experience.

Shabbat Shalom to all of you…have a wonderful weekend.

Gary