It’s been more than six months since New Orleans and the Gulf coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina and Florida was pounded by Hurricane Rita. For those of us who live elsewhere, it seems as if a long time has passed. We’ve moved on – other stories occupy us, other sad situations tug at our heartstrings. To the people who live in hurricane-ravaged areas, though, the disaster is still fresh; it will take years before all the damage is restored. They still need help.

Many of our member synagogues have been extremely generous, donating both money and material goods. One of those shuls is The Jewish Center in Princeton, New Jersey; it has developed a relationship with Congregation Beth Israel in Biloxi, Mississippi, and with its president, Steve Richler. But the Jewish Center’s president, Linda Grenis, decided that she wanted to do even more.

“I wanted to go there and meet the congregation. I wanted to show them that they had more than just financial support,” she said. “It’s easy to just send money – and that’s a good thing to do, and they really do need the money – but it’s different when you go and see people’s faces.” So Linda, her husband, Michael, and their three children, Ricky, 17, Billy, 15, and Caroline, 12, went to Biloxi for Pesach.

On work days, Michael, Ricky, and Billy did a number of tasks, including mold removal. Mold’s a big problem, Linda said; nothing else can be done on a building until it’s scraped off. So the three Grenises, dressed in hazmat suits, wearing respirators, scraped away. Another day was spent hauling garbage out of houses that had stood vacant since the hurricane and then beginning the demolition.

Linda and her daughter worked at a distribution center, helping load cases of donated food into cars. “It was really shocking how long the lines were, and how much people needed,” she said. “Food is so abundant for us – we take it so for granted.” They went to an elementary school whose library had been destroyed. People from across the country have been sending in books to restock it, and Linda and Caroline helped catalogue them. They also went to the humane society. Not only were some pets separated from their owners during the storm, she reported, but some have been given up for adoption by big families living for too long in FEMA trailers that are far too small. That’s so hard, Linda said; those pets are part of the family. Giving them up is a sign of real distress.

The Grenises were in Biloxi for Pesach; they celebrated the first seder at a communal seder Beth Israel hosted in a local Methodist church. The next night, the Grenises shared the seder with a family, Amy and Martin Goldin and their children. “People always say that Jews everywhere around the world are doing the same thing,” Linda said. “And they are. Here -- the smell, the sounds, the tastes of a seder – they’re the same.”

According to most estimates, it will take about eight years for Biloxi to be rebuilt. The devastation brings up echoes of the biblical plagues. Because the town is below sea level many cemeteries held mausoleums rather than graves, and the storm broke them open. Bones and bodies swirled on the surface of the waters, Linda said she was told. The tide still brings in all kinds of debris – refrigerators, televisions, parts of houses – and the gulf won’t be swimmable for many years. Huge barrels of oil from an enormous refinery exploded, and the oil has now saturated everything. “What the wind and water hadn’t ruined the oil ate away; now the oil’s in the ground,” she said. “Who knows what diseases that may cause?”

“My hope is that now, when it’s not in the headlines, people will continue to support them, to think about them, to help them, to send them packages, to send them money, to go and volunteer,” Linda said. Her son Ricky, who is about to graduate from high school, has been putting together a group of his friends, who plan to go to Biloxi to work during the summer. She hopes that other groups form similar plans.

“It’s so important that we keep this message alive,” she said. “We can’t stop now.”