Hewlett's Samantha Schwarz wins Jim Adelis Good Samaritan Award for community service

Jim Adelis Good Samaritan Award scholarships were presented last month to five Nassau County high school seniors who have demonstrated selflessness and integrity in serving the community. Hewlett High School senior Samantha Schwarz was one of those who received a $1,000 scholarship.

Adelis, an East Rockaway community leader, founded the Trees for Troop event in 2003, and each year since then, volunteers have gathered at Dees Nursery and Florist in Ocean-side to pack and send Christmas trees to military personnel across the county and overseas. Adelis died of Covid-19 in 2020, which made this year’s 20th anniversary of Trees for Troops all the more poignant.

In November, Schwarz and the other students vying for the scholarships wrote 300-word essays detailing how they help others in the community, and how they make the world a better place.

Schwarz didn’t know Adelis, but after reading about him and the tradition he created, she felt a connection between him and her late grandfather Charles Schwarz. Her essay featured both men.

Schwarz was a Holocaust survivor who was housed in a Christian or-phanage in Switzerland after World War II, and later supported Bayit Lepletot, a girls’ orphanage in Israel. Inspired by his story, Schwarz began selling bead and string bracelets during her freshman year of high school at Andrew J. Parise Cedarhurst Park, and sent the proceeds to Bayit Lepletot in her grandfather’s honor.

The similarity of what her grandfather did, and Adelis’ Trees for Troops, resonated with her, Schwartz said.

“There was a lot of parallel between what Jim Adelis did,” she said. “It was amazing.”

In addition to supporting the orphanage, Schwarz is a member of Hewlett High’s Environmental Club, which tends the school garden, across East Rockaway Road from the campus. She is also president of the Best Buddies International Club, a role in which, Schwarz said, she is learning leadership skills. Best Buddies works with students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and Schwarz plans projects and activities for them.

Hewlett High School life skills teacher Anne Salerno, the adviser of the Best Buddies Club, which has around 30 students, said the group is lucky to have Schwarz.

“Samantha is an all-around amazing kid,” Salerno said. “We’re lucky to have her as part of our club, (and) to have her as our president, because she’s just one of those kids that works really hard in everything she does (and) because she always somehow finds the time to give what she needs to give.”

Winners of the Adelis scholarships were notified the week of Nov. 13. Hewlett High guidance counselor Mary Conrad, who nominated Schwarz, broke the news to her.

“The criteria outlined for the Jim Adelis Award, which caught my eye for Sami, was, ‘in remembering Jim Adelis, we are looking for a senior that goes above and beyond in supporting the local community and making the world a better place,’” Conrad wrote in an email. “Sami truly goes above and beyond. Whether it be in the classroom with academic or technical support, in her family, in the school community as a good citizen and consummate leader, with the special needs community … the list goes on and on.

“Sami is the most genuinely loving and caring individual, who deserves to be recognized,” Conrad added.

Schwarz was presented with the scholarship on Dec. 4 at Dee’s, in ceremony attended by members of Adelis’ family, police officers, veterans and Hewlett-Woodmere school district officials. Children from Hewlett Elementary School read letters that were sent with the Christmas trees to troops.

Cathy O’Reilly, who is on the selection board for the scholarships, wrote in an email that Schwarz “embodied Jim Adelis’s legacy of giving back and simple acts of kindness.”

Schwarz, who is undecided about where she will attend college in the fall, said she would use the scholarship to help pay for it.