Although December may be known as the “season of giving,” for many North Shore Towers residents the season of giving lasts throughout the entire year. Here are just some of the residents who help those in need all year long.
Zelda Altman
Zelda Altman had been involved with her community her entire life, which is why she took it very seriously when she heard about some inconsistencies in a member of the Board of Trustees’ voting record.
A group of five concerned residents of North Shore Towers decided to do something about it. They ran together as a group for the Board of Trustees.
And they won.
Now, 10 years later, the Board of Trustees rewards a member of the community who has dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and effort to North Shore Towers. Altman received the first award in 2002.
“It’s very fulfilling to work for your neighbors,” Altman, 86, said. “I had fun and it was very interesting and I met some wonderful people who remained my friends until the end.”
Chuck Robbins—one of the six members who ran with Altman and who is still on the board—said he counted Altman among his dearest friends as well.
“All she wants to do is the right thing for her neighbors at North Shore Towers,” he said.
Robbins said all of the accomplishments of the board those six years — “you can put Zelda’s name right up front.”
Community organizing was nothing new to Altman when she moved to North Shore Towers 24 years ago. She had always been active in her temple, Jericho Jewish Center, teaching adult education and serving on the board for many years.
A lifelong New Yorker, Altman has lived all throughout the city, but never in Manhattan. Born in Brooklyn, she also lived in the Bronx and Queens. She graduated from Hunter College—then an all-girls school—in 1942 and then later went on to graduate from Brooklyn School of Law.
Altman graduated from law school in 1946, where she was one of only three women in her law school. She was admitted to the bar in 1946, and immediately went on to practice law with her father.
“It was a good time in my life,” she said.
Her background in law not only provided her with the expertise to fight the Board of Trustees in the 1990s, it also allowed her to meet her husband, Milton Altman. They worked for the same firm, Milton Pollack, before he became a federal court judge.
Two children soon followed—a daughter, Carol, and a son, Jonathan—and Altman soon had her hands full. She left the law practice after her children were born—“different times,” she said—but she never forgot her knowledge of the law.
“She’s very bright,” said Shirley Wershpa, who has been friends with Altman since they were both 12 years old. “She’s wonderful—we wouldn’t have remained friends all these years if she weren’t.”
While Wershpa and Altman can trace their friendship back some 74 years, Altman has also met some lifelong friends at North Shore Towers. Her fellow running mates—Bea Charney, Evelyn Meltzer, Chuck Robbins and Sidney Rosenwasser—became lifelong friends. Robbins and Altman, however, are the only two still alive.
Her favorite projects with this group include the landscaping on the North Shore Towers grounds, as well as the deal with Time-Warner cable which saved residents a bundle.
Even though not on the board, Altman is tireless. She is involved at the country club and is working toward making residents who are no longer able to use the gym and the pool at the country club still pay for social membership.
“I like everything about living here—I think this is a fabulous place to live,” she said.
Werner & Daisy Nass
Residents of North Shore Towers for eight years, Werner and Daisy Nass have a good friend who, along with his wife, volunteers at LIJ. It was through him that they began doing the same.
“There’s a good friend of ours that’s here who’s been volunteering and doing this patient advocate thing for a long time,” Werner said, adding that he decided he wanted to do it and had the friend introduce him to the Director of Volunteer Services.
Werner first began as a patient advocate. He explained that he would go to a particular floor and talk to patients about how they were doing and how they felt about the service and their care.
“You go and just talk to them, make them feel a little better,” Werner said. “Some have questions and some have some problems.”
Everything is written down and then given to the Director of Service Excellence.
Werner did such work as a patient advocate for three years, stopping for a little while and returned to it about two years ago.
Daisy has been working at the gift shop at Schneider Children’s Hospital for the last two years.
“I always wanted to volunteer and decided that that would be a good place to work,” Daisy said.
Because of having worked in retail her entire life, the person at the volunteer office immediately said that Daisy was needed to help out in the gift shop at the children’s hospital.
“It’s a very, very enjoyable job,” Daisy said. She also said, “We see a lot of children that have many problems come in but it’s also very gratifying because when they come in the store…they look around and they get happy no matter what is wrong with them.”
As part of her work in the gift shop, Daisy said that relatives will call and ask the workers to pick out and send up balloons or gifts to a sick child.
“When we go see those little kids in their bed scared and we bring up these beautiful balloons, their eyes light up,” Daisy said. “It’s wonderful to see.”
Recently, Werner also has been acting as a “lobby ambassador” at LIJ after the Director of Volunteer Services asked him to do so. Because the hospital is constructing a new building, the main entrance had to be changed. The lobby ambassadors assist people in getting to their destinations and answer their questions.
“I feel that we’ve been very fortunate,” Daisy said. “We’ve had a life that’s been fulfilled with a lot of wonderful things. I feel good about [giving back].”
Along with their work at the hospital, Werner and Daisy also assist a 92-year-old woman who was Daisy’s mother’s best friend. Werner assists with the woman’s financial affairs since she can no longer do it on her own and Daisy visits her every couple of weeks.
Werner has also applied for a part-time position to assist with the national census in 2010.
Daisy and Werner Nass have two daughters and five grandchildren, who range in age from 13 to 19. Werner plays golf and tennis, and Daisy used to also play tennis. They said that they have made many friends at North Shore Towers.
Eneas Arkawy
Eneas Arkawy’s dedication to giving to others stems back to her days as an elementary school teacher in Queens.
Arkawy, who said that she loves children, spent 25 years as a teacher, describing it as “giving of myself to young people.” She said that through her work she gave her students a love for learning and a respect for each other.
Although Arkawy has retired from teaching, she is still active in giving back, being heavily involved with the UJA Federation. When she first moved to North Shore Towers 17 years ago, she met several people who were involved with the organization. She went to a luncheon and tried to help out.
“I found the people to be giving with their love and doing something to be helpful,” said Arkawy, adding that although some of those people have gone in different directions they have still left an imprint on her heart and mind. “I just became more and more involved in it [UJA].”
As she began working with UJA, Arkawy said that she met many wonderful people in the organization. They soon began to offer her different positions.
With UJA, Arkawy is now on the Caring Commission for the Aged, the board of the Women’s Interboro Committee and is involved with the organization’s fundraising aspect.
“I became so deeply immersed in it and I have so much love in my heart knowing that I’m going to be doing something that’s so helpful to others,” Arkawy said.
She has also endowed a gift to UJA.
“I feel like part of me will live on being able to give and help others,” she said, adding that she would like to do more with UJA and continue to give as much as she can.
Arkawy is also a founding member of the Alley Pond Environmental Center. An Audubon graduate, she said she has always had an interest in the environment and used to take her students on nature walks. She still helps with the center’s wetlands project at times.
In addition, Arkawy, a former president of a Brooklyn chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, belongs to the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York and is a member of the Brandeis Women’s Organization and Hadassah.
At North Shore Towers, Arkawy is a member of the Country Club Committee, the Tower’s Ladies Golf Association and the Greens Committee. She is also involved with the Holocaust memorial held in the Country Club each year, assisting organizer Manny Werdinger.
“The most rewarding thing for me is I’m able to reach out and help others,” Arkawy said.
When it comes to giving back, Arkawy noted that there are many different ways to do so. Although at times it is through financial means, she said that other times it can be just by reaching out to another person.
Arkawy said that she would like to also place Sedaka boxes at various locations in North Shore Towers. Residents would drop in money, which would then benefit UJA.
Arkawy, who plays golf and tennis at the Towers, has three daughters, five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Joan Lieberman
Joan Lieberman’s first activity at North Shore Towers was being a tennis player, nothing more.
It’s hard to imagine the woman who since become an active fundraiser for the American Cancer Society and who writes The North Shore Towers Courier column about cancer, but Lieberman first learned about her signature fundraising organization, the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Foundation, after a game of tennis.
While on the court one day, she saw “all these ladies dressed in pink,” and they told her they had just played in the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Foundation annual golf tournament. She asked if she could organize a similar event for tennis, and the rest is history.
“I never in a million years believed that I would become so involved, but I did and I wouldn’t regret it for a day,” she said.
But that “casual question,” as she said, led to a dinner dance with Lieberman’s tennis friends, but in the following years, her commitment to the cause has led her to serve as the president and vice-president of the Board of Advisors for the American Cancer Society. She also organized a cookbook full of recipes from the community called “Simply Delicious” to raise money for the ASC.
The cookbook was a “huge job,” she said, collecting recipes from the entire community, editing the actual book and then printing it. The whole thing took about a year from start to finish, and afterward, Lieberman and everyone involved celebrated by having a huge party where each participant cooked his or her own recipe from the book.
The American Cancer Society named her Volunteer of the Year following the publication of “Simply Delicious.”
Like the tennis tournament, “Simply Delicious” also led to something more: Lieberman became more directly involved with the American Cancer Society. She traveled to Albany for a conference held by the organization, and she learned more about the research aspect of the ACS’s work. She decided to start writing about cancer for The North Shore Towers Courier in order to help people understand more about the scientific research being done.
“I realized that living in a community like North Shore Towers, not everybody has a computer or is computer literate and I wanted to bring information that was easily understood about cancer to the community,” she said. “Cancer very frequently affects aging residents and because of the demographics of the community, cancer affects them.”
Lieberman describes herself as “always fascinated by science,” and she said she has been so successful by taking the skills she learned working and applying them to fundraising.
“It worked and I’ve been doing it for 20 years,” she said.
Before retiring, Lieberman owned her own business dealing with ear piercing and hypoallergic studs. In the 1980s, she realized many ear piercings were not required to be nickel, which was a “perfect” way to get a lifelong allergy to the metal. She developed a new earring that had no nickel, and she and a team of doctors and scientists traveled the country to make sure that no new ear piercing contained nickel.
“That became a very important business,” she said. After her three children—Lori, Debra and Steve—moved out, she decided to move from her house in Great Neck to North Shore Towers.
Since moving to the community, she has been able to provide much-needed layman’s information about cancer to the community.
“It is something that is satisfying to me that I can provide good information to people,” she said.
