Ellen Rudolph and her husband, Steve Lewis, were still trying to repair their Pacific Palisades home and rebuild their lives after last year’s fires when, two months later, the devastating news came. Lewis had Stage 4 lung cancer.
Chemotherapy and immunotherapy didn’t work, she said, and doctor appointments, therapy and insurance issues took precedence over home repairs. Rudolph, 71, said she struggled to keep up with her husband’s illness and mounting financial responsibilities. Lewis died at their temporary Playa Vista apartment on Oct. 6.
“It was like a freight train,” Rudolph said. “It went so fast, we didn’t have time to pull our act together.”
By January, Rudolph said, she’d received an insurance check and saved some money for repairs at her home. But then, she said, she received a suspicious text message about her PayPal account being used to buy $450 in cryptocurrency.
She had been so focused on handling emergencies, one tragedy after another, that she clicked on a link in the text in an attempt to put out another potential crisis. Instead, scammers took over her computer and targeted her bank accounts, and before the end of the month, she lost $38,000 meant to fix her home.
“I felt that I had been managing things pretty well, until the scam,” she said. “And then the floor got ripped away from under me completely.”
Rudolph said she contacted police and her bank, but she was emotionally drained. Not knowing what else to do, she texted her friend, Cantor Chayim Frenkel from her synagogue, Kehillat Israel, in Pacific Palisades.
“I was a mess, I felt so shameful,” she said.
It wasn’t just the list of tragedies that she’d had to face in a single year, but a sense that she’d somehow let down her family and her late husband by falling for the scam, Rudolph said.
Frenkel had been an old friend, introduced her to her husband in 1999 and officiated over their wedding in 2012. He was there the day before Lewis died, she said, praying.
“I told her, ‘Ellen, I’m not going to accept this, and I’m going to figure this out,’” he said.
The synagogue had already started a fire fund and raised more than a million dollars to help those affected by the 2025 fires in Southern California, Frenkel said.
Rudolph had not received any help from the fund at that time, but Frenkel said the synagogue was able to give her a $10,000 grant to help fix her home.
After that, Frenkel set up a GoFundMe page on Feb. 4 to raise the rest of what she had lost. As of Monday, the fundraising effort had already surpassed the $28,000 goal.
Many of those donating are current or past members of the synagogue. Others had similarly had their lives uprooted by the fire, he said.
But the fundraising efforts have been an extraordinary example of the community that continues to exist, Frenkel said.
“The fire did not take away our spirit, it did not take away our hope, it did not take away our community,” he said.
For Rudolph, the damage to her home, the loss of her husband and becoming a victim of a scam shook her, she said, but the reaction of the community has given her hope.
“It’s incredible how amazing some members of the human race are,” she said. “They are generous and thoughtful and caring and loving, and get it.”
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