Carolyn Hoffman knew Andrea Stein — then Andrea Zoll — when they were both students in the Jewish communal service program at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in the late 1980s.
Stein, who died in Madison on Oct. 29 at age 49, left an enduring impression on Hoffman, as she wrote in a Nov. 15 “Memories” note at the Cress Funeral and Cremation Service website.
“I remember another student/friend exclaiming [about Stein], ‘She could be friends with a chair!’ — meaning she was reliably kind, forgiving and indiscriminate with her empathy,” wrote Hoffman.
These qualities plus her dedication to Jewish communal life made Stein a significant figure in the Madison Jewish community, according to Dina Weinbach, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Madison.
“She was a natural outreach person,” said Weinbach in a telephone interview on Nov. 19. When Jews moved to Madison, Stein “was often one of the first people that they met,” and “she was so friendly and nice to talk with” that she was readily able to connect the newcomers with the Jewish community.
At the time of her death, Stein was the editorial and advertising manager of the Madison Jewish News, published monthly by the JFM. But she had been active in the community since she moved to Madison in 1996, according to Weinbach.
Stein had been chair of the Gan Hayeled Preschool Committee and was a member of the Family Education Committee. In 2001, the JFM — then known as the Madison Jewish Community Council — gave Stein its Miriam Singer Sulman Young Leadership Award.
According to both Weinbach and written information furnished by Stein’s husband Jim, Stein would frequently quote a passage from Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Sages) 2:5: “Do not distance yourself from the community.”
And Weinbach said that hundreds of people attended the funeral on Oct. 30 at Beit Olamim Jewish Cemetery. “She touched a lot of lives,” Weinbach said.
According to information furnished by her husband and by Weinbach, Stein was born in Chicago and grew up in that area. She was a member of Congregation B’nai Yehuda in Homewood, Ill., and of the North American Federation of Temple Youth, the Reform movement youth group.
Moreover, Madison was not her first experience of Wisconsin. She attended the Reform movement’s Wisconsin camp, the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute in Oconomowoc, where she went from being a camper to a counselor to an assistant unit head.
She earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Michigan; but her time at OSRUI apparently inspired her to pursue study in Jewish communal service.
She earned a master’s degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis and another in Jewish communal services from Hebrew Union College.
She met her husband when she was working as a staff social worker at the University of Chicago Medical Center. They married in 1992 and moved to Madison in 1996.
Her family added that she owned two Havanese dogs and would regularly bring one of them to visit hospice patients; that she also wrote poems and songs; and “loved Israel and speaking Hebrew.”
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her children, Hannah and Jacob Stein; her mother Roberta (Henry) Nussbaum, her father Harvey Zoll and her brother Adam Zoll, all of Chicago; and her parents-in-law, Dee and Ken Stein of Milwaukee.
The family requests memorial contributions to JFM, Chabad of Madison or Dogs on Call. Weinbach said a special fund in Stein’s memory will be set up at the JFM.
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