EXTRAordinary PEOPLE Shirley Wachtel

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.