Ira Riklis Blog

There are many ways to support others. You can make donations of money. You can give of your time by volunteering to help out where needed. And you can be a blood donor who helps save the lives of people in medical need. Ira Riklis does all of these, but wants people to know of another way to donate. He’s registered with a national registry as a potential bone marrow donor.

Unlike with other forms of giving, those on the bone marrow registry may never be called on to make a donation. It’s much harder to find a suitable donor for a patient who needs a bone marrow transplant than it is to match blood types for those who need blood. And where blood can be processed into different forms and stored for a while, bone marrow needs to be taken fresh when the time comes for it to be used. For a transplant to succeed, doctors must look through a database of tissue types (determined through a simple cheek swab) to find the closest possible match. If no match can be found, the patient can’t be treated. The more potential donors on register, the more likely it is that matches can be found, which is why Ira Riklis encourages others to sign up for the list.

Ira Riklis credits ski instructor Mike Bartasuis for helping turn a self-described “fat, Jewish kid from New York” into an expert skier. While skiing is intrinsically a complex ballet of rhythm, motion, movement and shifts of balance, most of his previous instructors taught it as a series of discrete steps. You then try to think your way through the process step by step. But as anyone who’s tried that knows, you’ll inevitably still be thinking about step three when you should performing step twelve! Thus, it won’t be long before you take a tumble.

The whole process reminds Ira Riklis of a cartoon where Goofy was learning to play golf. The narrator tells Goofy to lower his left shoulder, raise his right shoulder, lean his torso in, push his bottom out, bring in his left elbow, lower his right elbow, balance his weight evenly on his feet but bend his knees, lean into the ball, etc., etc., etc.… until Goofy looked like a rubber band wound up tight in a toy airplane. And when the order “OK, now SWING!” finally came, Goofy unwound like an out of control rubber band.

In talking about his progression from a rank beginner to an expert skier, Ira Riklis takes issue with an old joke about how one gets to Carnegie Hall. In his experience, you can practice, practice, practice, but without a great teacher, you can’t get to where you want to be. Over the course of twenty years, he took many lessons, both group and private. And while he improved to where he felt comfortable on virtually any slope, he still lacked grace and confidence. He’d become an advanced skier, but not a master of the sport. He felt he was a hack skier and would be for the rest of his life. He watched longingly those skiers who could master any terrain with fluid, beautiful motions. But he had pretty well resigned himself to belief that “fat, Jewish, kids from New York don’t ski like that.”

That all changed once Ira Riklis met Mike Bartasuis.

For more than twenty years now, Ira Riklis and his family have supported the Tel Aviv Foundation through their American Friends program. The Foundation—which provides for the needy, and creates opportunities for a better future for Tel Aviv and all of Israel—has drawn the support of many here in America and around the world.

Other donors give larger amounts, but none have supported as many different projects as the Ira Riklis family. And to ensure that their support has the greatest impact possible, they have focused it towards projects in a single Tel Aviv neighborhood, Schoonat Ezra. Over the years, they’ve helped build numerous parks and playgrounds along with kindergartens, science centers and a school with Arts, Science and Library facilities. In so doing, they’ve enriched the lives of those living in this economically depressed neighborhood.

With all the misadventures, discomforts and near misses on his first skiing trip, Ira Riklis was lucky to escape uninjured and without injuring others. Through it all, he persevered and managed to make a short downhill run that left him wanting more. After that rather inauspicious start, he went many times on daily and weekend ski trips. He enrolled in classes and learned how to turn and stop. And he used some of the money he got from my bar mitzvah to buy himself a comfortable pair of boots without laces (early buckle closures), high quality skis and (perhaps best of all!) step-in bindings.

It wasn’t an easy start, and it was sometimes a slow, hard process to learn proper technique and to improve over time. But for Ira Riklis, the thrill of skiing has provided him with one of his greatest pleasures in life. He can tell as he ages that his reflexes are slowing, that his body is less forgiving of the stress and strains caused by skiing and that he’s becoming more cautious. And he knows that one day he will have to give up skiing for good. He only hopes that day won’t come for many years.

Bet Elazraki Children’s Home, located in Netanya, Israel is an orphanage. But five years ago when Ira Riklis attended a bar mitzvah there for the son of friends Scott and Debra Korman, he saw first-hand that it’s really more like an extended family. The two-hundred children, ages four through eighteen, who live there, are given not only the essentials of housing, food and clothing; they are brought into a family environment.

Director Yehudah Kohn and his wife Riki tend to the children—who would otherwise be at risk of falling between the cracks of society—in every way imaginable. One moment in particular stood out for Ira Riklis. That was when he realized that staff at the home take pictures of every child all through the time they live there just as birth parents do of their own children. When children leave to take their place in society, they take those photos with them as reminders of their childhood, the love and care they received and their enduring connection with the home—their home.

Ira Riklis’ first skiing trip came to a fortunate close. After overcoming the challenges of getting into his skis, locking down the bindings, learning to sidestep and making his way to the top of a small (though it seemed large to him at the time) hill he was at last heading downhill. It was a thrilling ride that became a bit scarier when—as he was speeding directly towards the entrance of the base lodge—he realized that he didn’t know how to stop.

God was watching over him, though. Just before he hit the front door, Ira Riklis grabbed hold of a column supporting a canopy over the entrance. He came to an abrupt stop, amazingly without causing any damage to the lodge, other skiers or himself! It wasn’t the most graceful of moves, but it worked. If he had crash landed, his skiing career might have ended right then and there. Instead, that first experience led to a lifelong love of the sport.