Story by Gavin Bartolome
Staff Writer

Photo by Contributer

The catering company Sweet 16 and Savory collaborated with SPHS’s Jewish Mitzvah Club to hold a fundraising dinner on Sunday, Feb. 2, raising around $2,000. The money will be put toward reconstruction of the Pasadena Jewish Temple after it burned in the Eaton fire.

The fundraising dinner was hosted by SPHS juniors Viviana Williams and Scarlett Kirschenbaum, owners of Sweet 16 and Savory. The catering business was initially born as a culinary outlet for the two, but they eventually realized their capabilities could help give back to the people around them. Noting their Jewish roots, supporting Pasadena’s temple was the perfect opportunity to independently support the community.

“What’s really important about finding out how to make a difference is finding out something that you’re passionate about. Both of us are passionate about cooking, and we’re also passionate about our Jewish heritage, and so merging those two is what propelled this event to happen,” Kirschenbaum said.

Williams and Kirschenbaum proposed the idea of a dinner to the officers of SPHS’s Jewish Mitzvah Club, seniors Emett Mendel, Charlie Vogel, Benjamin Regan, and Gabriel Vogel.

The two groups began preparing the event after the Eaton fire broke out and burned down the temple in early January. Williams offered up her house to host the fundraiser, and the Jewish Mitzvah Club helped with setup.

The resulting dinner was a $75 four-course meal. The meal started with the catering company’s “Cherry Bomb Salad” with cherries, pecans, and goat cheese, along with bacon-wrapped dates called “Are You Asking Me on a Bacon-Wrapped Date?”

The main course included two pastas, “When Life Gives You Lemon Shrimp Pasta” and “Sugar Sugar Pasta.” The former was a tagliatelle lemon pasta with shrimp, and the latter a tortellini topped with brown butter and a brown sugar sage sauce. The meal was then concluded with a chocolate chip pizookie.

The education director for the Pasadena Jewish Temple, Jill Wright, gave a firsthand account of what happened to the temple in a speech during the event. After sharing how much participants’ donations meant to the temple, Wright finished her speech by thanking the contributors for coming.

“We don’t go to this temple, but seeing all of these people sitting there who directly can talk about what it’s like losing a big part of their communities, and hearing the specific names of South Pas students who lost their homes … really help[ed] us understand the devastation of this fire,” Williams said. “Our goal is to continue helping the families who lost their homes.”

Sweet 16 and Savory and the Jewish Mitzvah Club are looking to engage in the community more by offering as much help as they can. In the future, the Jewish Mitzvah Club has stressed that they will stay in close contact with the Pasadena Jewish Temple. Whenever the temple needs help, they will be more than willing to provide support.

“The rebuilding effort right now [is] so fresh  [in] our memories,” Mendel said. “These people aren’t going to have a home for two years [and] they’re really [going to] need support throughout that time … Just because it’s out of the media side doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”