The Legacy of Nancy and Joe Schifrin Lives On at CESJDS

CESJDS recently received generous bequests from trusts set up by Joe and Nancy Schifrin (z”l), who were the grandparents to CESJDS alumna Jacqueline Gutierrez ’99 (z”l). We are grateful for their generosity and their vision for the future of our school. The Schifrins were members of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, and the family was close with Rabbi Jack Moline. Below is an excerpt from Rabbi Moline’s blog post that invites us to get to know this extraordinary family, and we are happy to share it with our community:

Joe Schifrin thought he would be a bachelor his entire life. He was especially devoted to his elderly mother despite the fact that his childhood had not been a halcyon time. Later in life he met Nancy—and before they married, she embraced the Judaism that was so important to him. Nancy’s daughter had a complicated life. So when her two oldest children were still little, Joe and Nancy took them in and raised them as their own. So there was Joe—just a few years earlier quietly resigned to life as a single man now raising grandchildren he hardly knew. I know it was not always easy for Joe. Though he was possessed of a gentle demeanor, he never had a good role model for dealing with frustration. I was the family rabbi, and Joe and I had many discussions about childrearing. He was reluctant to believe he was doing as good a job as I assured him.

Luis is one of those children. His gentle and beautiful sister Jacqueline died tragically young as his grandmother Nancy declined into dementia. In the end, Luis was all the family Joe had. When Joe died, Luis had become the remarkable and successful young man Joe had raised him to be.

Jackie's classmate at Gesher and JDS, Ilana Garon ’99, shared with us about Jackie:

“She was a super talented distance runner and a really good athlete in general. She also played soccer and softball as I recall, but running was her specialty. In 4th or 5th grade, for instance, she ran the mile in 6:48—which is an outrageous time for an elementary school student and just blew everyone else out of the water. I'm amazed I still remember this 30 years later, but that goes to show it made an impression!

“She was also hilariously mischievous; she'd be the one suggesting to me that we should TRY to get lost on class trips, for instance. She constantly drove me crazy (and in hindsight I love remembering this because it makes me laugh) by breaking into my locker—for whatever reason she always knew my locker combination—and ‘borrowing’ my books, which I would then think I lost, only to have them suddenly reappear in my locker days or weeks later. Oh, and my snacks, and occasionally spare/clean gym shorts—she'd help herself to those too. It was hard to be bothered about it because she was so cheeky. She'd be like, ‘Oh, this book? I looked at your schedule, you weren't using it this week!’ And there was no question that if I'd needed something, she'd have been perfectly happy for me to raid her locker for it too. It was very much a ‘what's mine is yours, and vice versa’ type of thing.

“Jackie was interested in science, and she was actually pretty good at biology—definitely better than I was. She was helped by the fact that she had an extremely good memory. At one point she told me she had the goal of being an osteopath because she was always interested in bones. It's one of the great tragedies of our community that Jackie didn't manage to become all the amazing things I believe she could've been."

Ilana and her husband named their baby daughter after Jackie.

Judaism was very important to Nancy and Joe. They enrolled Luis and Jackie, as young children, at Gesher, and then Jackie continued at CESJDS. We are in touch with Luis now and thank him for the extraordinary gift his grandparents made to our school. Joe and Nancy were blessed to raise two wonderful grandchildren, and the Schifrin's legacy will live on at CESJDS forever through their gift.