After facing unimaginable loss last year when her family home was badly damaged in the Palisades Fire, Ellen Rudolph was faced with further tragedy months later when her husband died from cancer. As she worked to pick up the pieces and rebuild their home, she had tens of thousands of dollars stolen by hackers.
Despite it all, Rudolph is still moving forward, thanks to the heartwarming effort of her community.
She remembers the day that she and her husband, Steve, were forced to evacuate as the flames closed in on their home. Somehow, it was still standing when they went back to survey the damage.
"It's all burnt, I mean, completely devastated. Completely," she said. "And how our house happened to survive? Is absolutely unknowable."
Ellen and Steve Rudolph. Ellen Rudolph
As they worked to rebuild what parts of their property the devastating fire had damaged, Steve was also in the midst of a battle with cancer.
"By the beginning of April, they had diagnosed him with Stage 4 lung cancer," Rudolph said.
He died in October, leaving Rudolph with another devastating loss. As she grieved, tragedy struck again.
She received an email in January from what she thought was PayPal, telling her that she had a charge for Bitcoin, which she could refute if she responded to their inquiry. In no time, the scammers had stolen $38,000 that she had been saving to repair their damaged home.
"It was the deepest, darkest, most horrific rabbit hole nightmare," Rudolph said.
Again faced with what seemed like insurmountable odds, she turned to a longtime friend and synagogue leader, Chayim Frankel.
"I immediately coined it the 'trifecta of disaster,'" said Frankel, who leads Kehillat Israel Synagogue in the Pacific Palisades. "I said, 'Ellen, I'm not going to put up with this. I'm going to do everything I can to make you whole.'"
The synagogue immediately gave her $10,000, and Frankel then started a GoFundMe for Rudolph's benefit. The response was overwhelming. Since its creation on February 4, the fundraiser that can be found by searching for the keywords "Rebuilding Ellen's Life After Tragedy" has garnered more than $29,000 of the $35,000 goal.
"I know in my heart this is what Steve would want me to do," Frankel said.
Rudolph says that the support of her community, who had also lost so much during the fire, has kept her going. She also noted that there's a lesson in her loss: be careful and lean on others when you can't do it alone.
She plans to return to their home in the Palisades in April.
"He wanted me to go back," she said. "I wanted us to go back."