Rockland synagogue seeks holiday volunteers

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Members of Adas Yoshuron, Rockland’s only synagogue, need your help to ensure that meals are delivered to the Methodist Home and served at the soup kitchen of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in that city on Christmas Day.

John Batty of Adas Yoshuron, coordinator of the Christmas Meals On Wheels and Methodist Home dinner for that day, e-mailed saying, “We still need two drivers and two runners; three servers and two kitchen people,” to help deliver and serve meals.

“We have the onions and dessert, but still need the potatoes, beans, stuffing, celery and 12 to 15 cans of cranberry,” he added.

The program has 11 volunteers, but it needs seven to 10 more to complete this task successfully.

Anyone who would like to help on Christmas Day can call Batty during the day at 596-6989; evenings at 596-6356; or e-mail johnb@jbprinters.com.

According to a Bangor Daily News story last December, the synagogue has been collaborating with organizers of the soup kitchen at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church for more than a decade by serving holiday dinners to the community.

Members of the synagogue also offer to deliver meals to the Methodist Home as part of that area’s Meals On Wheels program.

As previously reported, the Yiddish word mitzvah means good deed, which is why these Jews run the soup kitchen and deliver meals on the two most important religious holidays on the Christian calendar, Christmas and Easter.

Anything you can do to assist in this effort would be greatly appreciated by everyone helping with, or receiving help from, either program.

Gaile Nicholson, director of communications for Katahdin Valley Health Center in Patten, e-mailed that KVHC will hold a free flu shot clinic, from 1 to 3 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 27, at KVHC, 30 Houlton St., Patten.

“The free flu clinic is open to everyone,” Nicholson wrote.

“All ages are welcome,” she added, and no appointment is necessary.

“If you, or someone you know, needs a flu shot, be sure to attend.”

For more information, call KVHC at 528-2285.

Sometimes, decorating for the holidays forces one to pick up, clean up, straighten up and generally clear out a space that otherwise might have needed a little attention.

In doing so, you might come across something that is not useful to you, but could be very useful to someone else.

For example, Mary-Anne Saxl of the Warren Center for Communication and Learning in Bangor wonders, “Do you have a pair of hearing aids in a drawer?”

If you do, she suggests you “put them to good use” by mailing them to the Warren Center, 175 Union St., Bangor 04401.

Saxl reminds readers the Regional Hearing Aid Bank, or ReHAB, “is designed to provide hearing aids to those members of our community who are unable to afford them, at no charge to the client.

“It is also a community effort which utilizes donated, behind-the-ear hearing aids that are refurbished and programmed for use by another person.”

ReHAB clients who are able may be asked to make a donation of $2 to $25 to help continue the program.

Applications for the ReHAB program are available through the center.

So, if you come across hearing aids you are not using, consider the good they could do somewhere else, for someone else.

Christine Robinson of Presque Isle owns Critter Hill Rescue and is president of Central Aroostook Humane Society.

She wrote recently to extend “a huge thank-you to Dawn Webber and staff at the Bangor Humane Society,” who came to the rescue after a dog that Robinson’s husband was taking to new owners in Bangor got loose from its new owner and could not be found. Robinson immediately contacted BHS.

With “dogged” determination and sensitivity to the issue, Webber and the BHS staff set about to locate and catch KC Marie, who had been observed hiding “in survival mode” in the Essex Street area.

Robinson wrote Webber and other BHS staff had been regularly observing the dog, “like a recon team,” and when they were finally able, eight days later, to lure her into a carefully baited trap, Robinson breathed a “big sigh of relief.”

Robinson wants the public to know how “much of their time” BHS staff put “into saving this poor dog” by going “that extra mile, and then some, for an animal they had never met.”

Joni Averill, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402; 990-8288.