Avi Kamionski // Nathan & Kamionski LLP, Pointed Discovery LLC

I grew up in a town called Tarzana, California, located in the San Fernando Valley. My father was born in Israel, but my grandparents struggled to make a living there, so when my father was five years old, they moved to America. My father grew up in the Bronx. He didn’t have any formal Jewish education because my grandparents couldn’t afford it, but he remained traditional. He got a chemical engineering degree from Columbia University and took a job with a large defense contractor in California, so he moved there and eventually met my mother. As an aerospace engineer, my father worked on a laser program that the United States was developing for Israel that was a precursor to the Iron Dome. My father has boundless energy and loves to learn. You wouldn’t notice that he’s officially retired, because he got smichah, became a lawyer in his late 40s, and still actively practices law.
“My paternal grandfather was from Grodno, Poland, and lived in the same building as Rav Shimon Shkop, zt”l. The person I’m named after, my great-grandfather, regularly repaired the benches in Rav Shimon’s yeshivah. When I was a boy, I had assumed that my paternal grandfather hadn’t grown up religious. One day, I was playing with gedolim cards and one fell to the floor. My grandfather picked it up and said, ‘Why do you have a picture of Rav Shkop? How do you know him?’ And then he started rattling off the names of Rav Shimon’s family members.
“My mother grew up in Brooklyn. I was very close with my maternal grandfather, Reb Reuven Yaakov Lewkowicz, who was very involved in the community in Boro Park. After surviving Auschwitz and settling in Brooklyn, he was a crucial member of Bikur Cholim of Boro Park. He volunteered there for many years and helped other survivors bring compensation claims against the German government. For many years, I would fly to New York monthly to visit my grandfather. He continued working to help fellow Holocaust victims into his 90s—and sometimes even from his hospital bed.
“Growing up in California, my parents davened at Chabad of Tarzana, under the auspices of Rabbi Mordechai Einbinder. The shul, which was the closest to our house, was 1.6 miles away. Eventually, my parents made a shul in their house and regularly invited the local community for Kiddush and the seudos. My parents’ home was always a gathering place for our local community and open to anyone who needed a meal.
“Growing up, I went to a school in the Valley, Emek Hebrew Academy. Then I went to Yeshivah Gedolah of Los Angeles for two years. For 11th grade I went to Skokie Yeshivah in Illinois, which is how I ended up in Chicago and eventually met my wife, Rachel.
“I have three brothers and a sister. We boys are closer in age, but my sister is 16 years younger than me. My brothers now live in Israel and my sister lives in LA.
“I guess you could say I was entrepreneurial as a kid. My mother likes to tell a story about how she sent me to camp as an eight-year-old boy with $2 and I came home with two bags of toys. She called the camp to see what happened, and they told her that I was trading this for that and so on. She was worried that I was stealing, but I was just doing business. I’ve done my fair share of getting involved. It’s hard for me to sit around and do nothing. I see things that need to get done and want to get involved, especially when it comes to helping people or spreading Torah.
“When I was a student, my father was a constant source of motivation; he encouraged me to stay focused and get everything done that I needed to. Baruch Hashem, I didn’t have to support myself throughout school; I was able to just focus on learning. I did work briefly at a famous Chicago burger place called Ken’s Diner when I was in high school. I also made extra money as a barber, giving haircuts to the boys at school. I ended up going to college in Chicago, at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where I worked at a barber shop on the campus for some time. I learned a lot about people through the barber shop scene on the South Side of Chicago.