EXTRAordinary PEOPLE

Larry I. Brandspiegel joined the East Brunswick Jewish Center in August 2018 as Cantor and Director of Education before being ordained as a rabbi. Affectionately known as Rabbi/Cantor Larry, the spiritual leader now serves as the President of Jewish Educators Assembly and spiritual advisor of the Northern New Jersey Region of the Federation of Jewish Men’s clubs. With over 30 years experience, he continues his work as cantor while infusing the evolving congregation with renewed energy.

Kate Lancaster is in her ninth year working as a middle school teacher at Jamesburg Public Schools. She is also a certified Reading Specialist and was recognized as an Exemplary Educator for the 2023-2024 school year for her strong knowledge and skills, inspiring presence, and positive impact on students, colleagues and the school community as a whole. Kate's own experience, as well as her work in the public school system, connected her with the Minding your Mind nonprofit and she is now heavily involved volunteering for their organization through the annual A Celebration of Life gala in Spring Lake, NJ. Her efforts have assisted in fundraising close to $300,000 over the past three events. She is passionate about ending the stigma associated with mental health issues and takes pride in her commitment to making a difference in her community.

Aparna Parthasarathy is a high school senior passionate about remedying structural inequalities, closing educational gaps and representing Generation Z’s values to shape legislation with elected officials. Aparna is a literary advocate and author of Tales of the Invisible, a book that addresses the intersectionality of feminism and the importance of representation. Aparna served as a board member of She’s the First and was nominated as a liaison to the local women’s commission and is a youth advisor for the town’s center for domestic violence and educates peers on dating violence and women’s empowerment. Aparna is on the executive board of Model UN, educating younger students on foreign affairs and international relations and is a state advocacy lead for Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) and contributes to increasing awareness on human rights crises and ending genocide. She is also the founder of PoliText, an organization that focuses on civil education among young adults and the importance of political knowledge and has been awarded the Presidential Volunteer Service Gold Award.

Marc Korpus, having had a fascination with maps since youth, took up the creation of of them as an occupation at age 42. He found that mapmaking is now one facet of the discipline of "geographic information systems" (GIS), which marries cartography with databases and statistics and is performed on a computer rather than a drafting board. Until his recent retirement, Marc was a GIS analyst for a nationwide engineering firm, helping engineers and scientists in such endeavors as planning freight railways in New Jersey, monitoring the fish species in New York Bay and routing power from Quebec to New York City. 

Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current vice-president of RLA Conservation, LLC, the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials conservation practice, based in Miami and Los Angeles. A fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa writes regularly for popular and academic media about conservation, the arts, and Cuba. She holds an M.A. in art history and conservation from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and divides her time between Los Angeles and Miami. Her debut memoir will be out in October, in time for National Hispanic Heritage Month. DWELL TIME: A Memoir of Art, Exile and Repair  entwines the details of conserving historic buildings and works of art with the story of her family's double exile as Jews from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and then Cuba in early 1961 (Row House Publishing; October 10, 2023). 

Neil O. Lawner’s interest in photography began when he served in the Air Force on Guam from 1966-1968.  During that time, Japanese cameras such as Nikon and Pentax were being manufactured and were available at the Base Exchange. He soon became part of the Kodachrome generation and learned the basics of operating a SLR (single lens reflex) camera.

Some of his work was noticed by a gallery owner in New Brunswick who provided artwork to some of the big pharmaceutical corporations in NJ.  The gallery sold many of his black and white images to these companies over the years, and this orthodontist soon would make a switch in careers to fulltime photographer.  Fifteen years ago, when he moved to New York City, he began to capture colorful images of people, culminating in his first self-published book Coney Island, Merriment, Mermaids and Memories in 2019, followed by a second book, Masked in Manhattan, images of people going about their daily lives in the city during the pandemic. Neil joined Soho Photo Gallery on White Street in Tribeca and exhibits there on a regular basis.

SHIRLEY RUSSAK WACHTEL is an author, college professor, and host of the podcast, EXTRAordinary People.  In December, just before the launch of her successful novel, A Castle in Brooklyn (Little A), she appeared on the podcast, Too Jewish Radio.  We hope you enjoy her intriguing interview with Rabbi Samuel Cohon.  For more information, go to shirleywachtel.com

Steve Cohen has over 50 years of involvement in rugby.  He has been the catalyst in developing player safety, refereeing, and promoting the game at the grassroots level.  USA Rugby Eagle, Steve Hiatt, has said that “No conversation could take place regarding administrators and contributions to American Rugby without Steve’s name being mentioned.”  Among his many contributions was pioneering rugby safety by publishing the “Safer Rugby Program” to promote and encourage safe rugby practices.  Steve’s work in the USA Rugby Collegiate Committee led to the creation of the Division 2 playoffs.  He formed the National Small College Rugby Organization to serve Division 3 which put small colleges on the map and gave them a platform to grow and succeed as well, inspiring coaches and players. NSCRO was rebranded as National Collegiate Rugby in 2020 and now serves more than 700 men’s and women’s college teams.  In addition, Steve refereed for nearly 40 years and was a charter member of the USARFU Referees& Laws Committee.  Steve supported the growth of women’s rugby as head referee for the first five Women’s National Championships, writing articles for Rugby Magazine and providing training for women referees.

Corey Caplan is the co-founder of Dolomite, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX for short). Prior to co-founding Dolomite, Corey graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in Computer Science and Business. Corey is passionate about the democratization of financial assets and self-sovereignty that cryptocurrencies and digital assets can offer the world. He has been working in the industry full-time since 2017, contributing to open-source repositories, building Dolomite, and pushing the boundaries beyond what's possible with digital assets.

AnnMarie Karczmit has a passion for volunteering.  A general manager at NJBIZ, a business to business newspaper, she is a wife and mother of a 21- year- old son. She started volunteering when she was 13 years old working in a nursing home and never really stopped.  AnnMarie has volunteered as a docent at a small museum, den leader/committee chair for the Boy Scouts of America, and various roles at her church, to name a few. In the past few years she took her love of volunteering and paired it with her desire to help empowering teenage girls and created a group called Girls Gifts. Girls Gifts is open to middle and high school girls and uses cooking, crafting, mentorship, and faith as a way to begin an open dialogue about what is important to them. She also runs a similar program for women called Coffee, Cake and Conversation.