This spring, a drainage pipe intended to roll back the shoreline of Shell Lake in northwest Wisconsin failed. The ensuing flood has threatened, damaged or destroyed nearly one-third of the some 350 homes in the town of Shell Lake, according to Mayor Larry Fletcher, leading to the town being declared a state disaster area.
But the town is not facing this crisis alone. It is receiving assistance from many sources, including one that it didn’t expect — a group from Minneapolis calling itself Nechama-Jewish Response to Disaster.
Nechama members heard news reports about the Shell Lake flooding and called Fletcher to offer assistance, which he accepted. Some members visited the town to survey the situation.
Then on June 8, about 35 volunteers — a fairly typical participation for a Nechama “deployment” — went to work in Shell Lake. According to a release by Nechama member Dr. Myer Leonard, they filled some 3,000 sandbags and worked in often thigh-high water to build walls to protect some of the homes near the lake.
“I’ve never seen anybody work so hard in my whole life,” Fletcher said in a telephone interview of the volunteers. “And they are extremely well-organized…. I’m so impressed with them and happy they came up.”
And that isn’t all. On June 22, 13 Nechama volunteers went to Shell Lake again, this time to help homeowners with the clean-up process, working to remove dead trees, throw out items damaged beyond repair, power-wash and dry out walls and floors, and treat flood-damaged homes to prevent growth of mold. More will go this coming Sunday, June 29.
This service is one of the traits that makes Nechama unique, according to Michael Morris, the organization’s director and volunteer coordinator. “Nechama has a specialized niche: personalized clean-up in people’s homes,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is something that no other volunteer group does.”
Another unique trait is that this is a Jewish group — in fact, according to Nechama members, the only Jewish group of its kind in the country.
‘ Hands-on tzedakah’
This is significant for several reasons, Nechama members say. For one, it breaks a stereotype.
The Jewish community, according to Nechama board member and volunteer Gene Borochoff, is usually “thought to be one that solves problems by writing checks, rather than rolling up their sleeves.” Nechama is an “excellent tool” that “deals with that perception.”
Or as the organization’s founder, Steve Lear, put it, Nechama provides “hands-on tzedakah.” Added Borochoff, this is “one of the issues that really resonates with our members.”
And Nechama does do direct, “physically demanding” work, said Borochoff. “We get the fun of mucking out sewage,” he said. “That’s why there aren’t a lot of organizations that do this.” That, plus clearing debris, chain-sawing dead and downed trees makes working for Nechama “a fantastic physical fitness program,” he added.
That Nechama is a Jewish organization — and has connections to several Minneapolis and St. Paul synagogues — also helps build good relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities, members say.
The kinds of disasters Nechama responds to — to date, primarily floods and tornadoes — occur in places where people may never have met a Jewish person before in their lives, said Nechama board member and medical advisor Dr. Anna Schorer of St. Paul.
Nechama’s work “is a very concrete demonstration of Jewish values,” Schorer said. “It’s important for people to see what Jews do.”
Morris added that Nechama does not deploy on Shabbat or on Jewish holidays, but will loan its equipment to non-Jews for use on those days.
Nechama has also served the Jewish community by bringing Jewish families closer together. Schorer and Lear both have brought their teenage children to deployments.
“It is an unbelievable opportunity for parents and high school-age children to bond,” said Lear. “They know what it’s like to help somebody” in real need.
“There aren’t a lot of things parents and teenage children can do together without grousing,” said Schorer. But even someone who is “into being a surly teenager” — like her son, Alex, 17 — “can get into power-washing” a flood-damaged home.
The seed for Nechama was planted in 1993, when Lear, a financial planner who has Milwaukee in-laws, heard about a flood in Des Moines, where he has friends. “Listening to the news day after day simply got me anxious and depressed, and I needed to do something,” he said.
He traveled to Des Moines and ended up working with a husband-wife business team whose warehouse and offices had been flooded. “From that experience, I recognized that there was a need at the time of disasters to help people get cleaned up,” Lear said. “It would restore hope for those people.”
So Lear gathered an informal group of friends who put together a kit of tools in a trailer and went off to help when floods or tornadoes hit. But it soon became clear that “we needed to institutionalize” the effort to win the respect of other emergency managers, to recruit more volunteers and to raise money for tools.
So the group incorporated in 1996, choosing the name Nechama, Hebrew for comfort. Today, said Morris, it has a database of some 600 volunteers, 75 percent of them Jews, and a budget of about $100,000 a year, obtained from private and public foundations and individual contributions. This money primarily goes for purchase and maintenance of equipment, including chainsaws, pumps, dry vacuum cleaners, electrical generators, power-washers, plus a truck and trailers. The organization also has two paid staff members, Morris and deployment manager Ken Streiff.
Last year, according to the organization’s annual report, some 300 volunteers from Nechama and “other various agencies” worked in five different disaster areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin, assisting an estimated 175-200 homes.
Nechama has responded to several disasters in western Wisconsin in addition to the Shell Lake flood, including last year’s tornado in Ladysmith. However, it has no Wisconsin volunteers as yet.
But Nechama leaders want to help develop more than a corps of volunteers here. They want to see one or more Nechama chapters created in Wisconsin and in other Midwestern states.
“There’s unquestionably a need for this type of organization throughout the Midwest, which is plagued with floods and tornadoes,” said Lear. “What we’d really like to see is people from other communities step forward and say, ‘This is a great idea.’”
And Morris said Nechama members would be willing to visit Jewish communities to “explain how to set up a disaster relief organization.”
For more information about Nechama, visit www.nechama.org.
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