(Family photo)
SAN DIEGO — While attending the Catholic Saint Augustine High School, it never occurred to Phil Lorang that many years later he would be serving as president of the Men’s Club at Tifereth Israel Synagogue as well as a member of the Conservative Jewish congregation’s Board of Directors.
But after obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and joining the staff of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he was enchanted by a woman who called down the hallway, “Who is going to give blood?”
After dating for about a year and a half, he and the former Ellen Fox were married in 1980, and by 1982 were the parents of two daughters: Janet, who today is a nurse practitioner at M.I.T. Health Services, and Amy, today a commercial pastry chef in North Carolina. Phil and Ellen Lorang had lived in Durham, N.C., immediately before moving to San Diego.
Two sons also were born to the couple: David, today an engineer involved with the manufacture of computer chips at a Samsung plant in Austin, Texas; and Noah, who today feeds satellite imagery into a computer to manufacture topographical maps that can be as large as a wall or as small as a refrigerator magnet.
The Lorangs initially didn’t give much thought to what religion they would raise their children in. However, “Ellen got a job as a school secretary at a synagogue [Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor], which drew us into the synagogue circle,” Lorang said. “She wanted to start going to the synagogue, so I started going too. After the two daughters were born, we decided to get them named together, which was a nice experience. I thought about it some more, and clearly, we were not going to be a Catholic family. We were going to be a Jewish family and I didn’t want to be the odd guy out at the Passover seder table. So, I decided to convert when I was 29.”
He studied for conversion under Conservative Rabbi Allan Kensky, who years later, in 2013, was honored by The Forward as one of “36 rabbis shaping 21st-Century Judaism.”
Asked the reaction of his parents in San Diego to his religious conversion in Michigan, Lorang confided, “I later heard that my mother felt that I had abandoned her background. But I don’t think that lasted a long time. In not that many more years after the conversion, we came home for Thanksgiving, and she had bought a kosher turkey without discussing it with us.”
His mother LeWayne, a nurse like his daughter Janet, was a member of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), who had been mainly stationed in Hawaii during World War II. Following her demobilization, marriage, and five children entering school, she returned to the nursing profession. Lorang’s father, Alphonse, who had repaired bombers at a Navy airfield in the Aleutian Islands, remained in the Navy. After 29 years in uniform, he became a civilian contractor for the Navy, and, when the years of both jobs were added up, he had served his country for approximately a half century.
Public service became something of a tradition in the Lorang family. Three of his four siblings had careers working mostly for government agencies and institutions. The fourth sibling was a devoted volunteer worker, particularly for the San Diego City Schools. Like Phil, his siblings are enjoying active retirements, three of them in the San Diego area and the fourth in Arizona.
Phil Lorang focused on combatting air pollution during his career from 1977 to 2019 with the Environmental Protection Agency. He rose to a supervisorial position, with a staff of 40 persons, in Ann Arbor, and after transferring to Durham, he continued to be a supervisor, although with fewer staff members. His last several years with the E.P.A., he became a policy advisor to the agency’s senior staff, a role in which he was able to telecommute from San Diego.
“In Ann Arbor, for 23 years, I dealt with things that moved – cars, trucks, planes, trains, and so forth,” Lorang commented. “Then I moved to North Carolina and we regulated things that didn’t move – power plants, paint shops, and things like that.”
One of his proudest accomplishments was to promulgate rules requiring highway planners to examine the environmental impacts of proposed new routes on air pollution. “When the first President {George H.W.} Bush was President, Congress passed a bunch of amendments to the Clean Air Act. It was pretty controversial, but what our team put in place really changed how they had to do their work – the studies they had to do before they adopted a highway building plan.”
He explained, “You build a road and people are going to use it. The land next to it will get developed, so how you build roads in an area shapes the way a city grows and how much travel there is. If you build roads instead of transit lines, that makes a difference too. Prior to 1990 (the year Congress adopted the Clean Air Act amendments), the road builders did what they wanted, and the air pollution people tried to find a way to make the air clean afterwards. After 1990, they had to work together. They thought ahead, making projections 20 years out.”
Compared to the early days of his career, air pollution has been greatly ameliorated, Lorang said. “People may say that the air is dirty, but they don’t remember how dirty it really was. Cars these days are so clean compared to when I started my career, 99 percent cleaner!”
Now, and in the future, climate change will provide the biggest challenge for maintaining clean air, Lorang said. Planners will worry about “carbon dioxide emissions, methane emissions.”
After moving to San Diego, at the suggestion of his wife Ellen, the family set about finding a Conservative synagogue. Departing their home in Tierrasanta, the first one they sampled was Tifereth Israel Synagogue. “We both liked it,” Lorang recalled. “We never visited any of the others.”
The Lorangs became active members, thanks to Bill Sperling, Seth Krosner, and Sue Braun. Sperling persuaded Lorang to join the Men’s Club and before long, Lorang was serving with Sperling as a co-president. Later, and currently, he became the Men’s Club president in his own right. Meanwhile Norman Kort wanted to be relieved of his position as the congregation’s vice president of finance, and Krosner, a former congregational president, zeroed in on Lorang to serve as Kort’s replacement.
The two positions keep Lorang very busy. Not only does he preside over Men’s Club meetings and attend to the congregation’s financial affairs, but he also collects the dues for the Men’s Club, plans such events as Men’s Club Shabbat and Veterans Day commemorations, and keeps some 55 members of the Men’s Club well informed on upcoming synagogue events and field trips.
In his view, the Men’s Club “should be conducting activities that let Tifereth Israel men (and its women’s members too) to get together and socialize and in the process do good things for the congregation.”
Ellen Lorang, meanwhile, was persuaded by Sue Braun, a longtime synagogue member and former trustee of the San Diego Unified School District, to serve as the congregation’s librarian. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ellen switched the cataloguing of the library’s collection to an upgraded computer platform. In the process, Phil noted, “every book in the library came home and was examined and compared to the data base.” Active like her husband, Ellen also has served on the board of the Sisterhood.
In addition to a full schedule of synagogue activities, Phil Lorang also volunteers for Jewish Family Service. He delivers meals twice a week to the homebound, and occasionally transfers food from the JFS Pantry on Balboa Avenue to parking lots that have been specially established for homeless people who live in their cars. Additionally, during tax season, he helps low-income families prepare their returns.
The Board of the Tifereth Israel Synagogue’s Men’s Club honored Phil Lorang as its 2022 Man of the Year at a “sausage and beer” dinner in the sukkah on Sunday evening, Oct. 9.