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Dorothy Goldberg Delivers Comfort and Relief, Near and Far

Dorothy Goldberg witnessed a car accident in the Short Beach area last year and, while no one in that accident was severely hurt, she realized she didn’t know what to do if someone had been hurt in that scenario. So she enrolled in a first aid/CPR course with the Red Cross.

“I want to have skills so that I can be helpful in an emergency,” she says.

Now, Dorothy is a volunteer for a Disaster Action Team in the New Haven area with the Red Cross. She says team members respond when there’s a fire in the area, sometimes as far away as Waterbury and Ansonia, to provide comfort and financial support to those who need immediate help after a fire.

She loves the work because she gets to meet people she wouldn’t have met otherwise. The Red Cross has a mix of individuals from many different backgrounds, and they’re all there to help, she says. Dorothy also says she feels the team really helps people.

While the team can’t provide long-term solutions for fire victims, she says it can provide comfort in the immediate aftermath, including providing stuffed animals for children and information and resources for adults affected.

“I have found it really, really rewarding to be part of the team,” Dorothy says, “I wish more people would do it. We’re always short of volunteers, and honestly, it’s just the best thing ever.”

As a member of the Red Cross, Dorothy has also been active in the organization’s relief efforts in Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastation left behind by Hurricane Maria. She’s gone to Hartford three times in recent weeks to greet people from the island who have been flying in.

She says a group of volunteers have a table with comfort packs that include snacks and other helpful items. The volunteers not only greet and provide some comfort to those from Puerto Rico, but they also collect information to let municipalities know who’s going where.

Dorothy is particularly involved in the Puerto Rico relief effort. She has been traveling to Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan, almost every year for a month or two since 2012. There, she leads the congregation at Temple Beth Shalom.

A trained singer since early in her life, Dorothy (along with her husband, physician David Ross Russell) sings with the Con Brio Choral Society, traveling every Tuesday evening from East Haven to rehearse with the 75-member chorus in Old Saybrook. Dorothy is also a cantor in the Jewish faith. She served at synagogues in Madison and Cheshire, before deciding she didn’t want to be in congregational life full-time. Then she began doing interim work.

When a friend who is a rabbi told her that he travels to Puerto Rico for a month every year to lead a congregation in San Juan, Dorothy connected with the same congregation. She says that she spent March and April 2017 there.

“I’m very involved with that congregation now,” Dorothy says, “It’s a beautiful extended family for me.”

She was supposed to go to the congregation for an anniversary party in late October for a concern and to help lead a service, before visiting another congregation in St. Thomas Island, but the hurricanes prevented that from happening.

Dorothy asked the Red Cross if she could be deployed to Puerto Rico or one of the affected areas nearby, but the Red Cross was asking for three to four weeks for deployment because of the conditions, and she was not able to commit that much time due to her other responsibilities.

Dorothy says she’s heartbroken about the aftermath of the hurricanes, and that she couldn’t visit the island to help.

“I was sad not to be able to go and help, but I’ve been giving money, we started a campaign for the synagogue to raise money,” Dorothy says.

She even shipped D batteries to a friend down there to power a fan. She says they took six weeks to arrive after a problem delivering the first batch she sent.

She says everyone who is a part of the congregation in San Juan is alive, but it’s been hard to get in contact with them. She also says the people she knows still don’t have electricity and many still don’t have running water, but the sanctuary of the synagogue isn’t damaged, and members have been able to hold services on Saturday mornings.

In addition to her other work, she provides disaster spiritual care through the Red Cross, and to the best of her knowledge, she is the only one fully qualified to do so by the Red Cross in Connecticut.

Dorothy participates in the Sound the Alarm program, through which Red Cross members install up to three free smoke alarms in any home throughout the whole region for free. She says it’s one of the Red Cross’ best kept secrets, adding it’s open to everyone, and teams not only install the alarms, but talk about fire safety in the home.

“I really enjoy this because we meet people from all over the region,” Dorothy says of the alarm program.

She’s also a pastoral counselor for VNA Community Healthcare and Hospice of Guilford.

“Everybody knows them for home care,” Dorothy says, “We just started, in 2017, a hospice program, so I want people to know we’re there.”

She feels that people have to be God’s representatives and do the work, even in the worst of situations, because “God isn’t going to sweep down and fix everything.” She says people like her and others have to do that, and it’s one of the reasons she joined the Red Cross.

“I thought in my little way, maybe I can make someone’s life better,” Dorothy says.

To find out more about how to volunteer for the Red Cross in Connecticut, visit www.redcross.org/local/connecticut/volunteer.