New York, New York, United States - The Jewish New York Week: Connection the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Friday, 12 September 2014|
Dear Reader,
As New York remembers the
9/11 attacks this week, staff writer Steve Lipman talks to Hatzolah's Heshey
Jacob about those first terrifying hours of
chaos and compassion.
NEW YORK
Remembering That Morning, Up Close
'Time stopped moving,' recalls Heshy Jacob, a volunteer at Ground Zero.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Two beams of light stood in the place of the missing towers at the 9/11 memorial site. Getty Images.
Heshey Jacob, a member of the executive board of the Hatzolah ambulance service, was about to leave his home on the Lower East Side for morning prayer services 13 years ago today — a day seared in his memory — when a call came in.
“A plane just went into the World Trade Center,” Jacob’s son told him.
“I thought it was a small plane.”
Within minutes, Jacob, who works as manager of East River Housing, was on his way to Lower Manhattan in a Hatzolah ambulance.
He spent the day there, till midnight, with only a break in early afternoon to take a man who had heart attack symptoms to Beth Israel Medical Center uptown, and to clean out his ambulance, which became filled with dust and debris when one of the Twin Towers collapsed.
“Time stopped moving,” Jacob, who doesn’t often speak of the 9/11 experiences, told The Jewish Week.
He was among more than 180 Hatzolah volunteers, all from the boroughs of New York City, who worked that day at what came to be known as Ground Zero.
Jacob saw people running in terror from the burning buildings. He treated injured people. “Cuts and bruises. Wounds, glass cuts. Some minor injuries.” He saw people jumping to their deaths. “That was the most difficult thing to see.” He witnessed one of the buildings collapse. “You prayed,” he said, “that you wouldn’t be hit with anything large.” He wasn’t; he escaped unscathed.
The other Hatzolah volunteers also emerged without any casualties. “Some broken arms — nothing serious.” Several EMT volunteers from other corps lost their lives that day.
“Tomorrow I’m staying with you,” the chief of one of the EMT corps told a Hatzolah volunteer that day. “God is with you.”
The next day, Jacob went back to Ground Zero, to look for people to help.
“I try not to think of this too often, I try not to talk about it,” Jacob said. “It brings back horror thoughts.”
When he passes the site of the former Twin Towers, after an absence of more than 30 days, he recited a Hebrew blessing, in accordance with Jewish tradition, for a location where God performed a miracle. “God did a nes [miracle], an open miracle for all of us” — for the Hatzolah members who survived their time at Ground Zero.
Jacob said he understands why Holocaust survivors often are reluctant to discuss their wartime experiences, since they tend to be too painful.
This week the Jewish community, along with the rest of the city, paused to remember the losses of Sept. 11, 2001. DOROT, which serves isolated members of the Jewish community, sent 1,000 handmade cards to members of the U.S. Armed Forces Abroad. At SUNY Binghamton, the Rohr Chabad Center for Jewish Student Life and Hillel sponsored a Mitzvah Marathon Fair, in which thousands of students, faculty and staff participated.
The main commemoration event here took place at the National September 11 Museum at the site of the rebuilt Twin Towers.
Jacob didn’t go.
Invited to such 9/11 memorial events, he said he rarely goes to them. Relatives of men and women who lost their lives at the World Trade Center usually turn out in large numbers for the annual ceremony at the site.
“The families weren’t there,” Jacob said. “I was there.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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This was also the first full
week of the city's massive expansion of free pre-K. It funded 2,000 seats at
Jewish schools, but, despite all good intentions, most Orthodox schools were
shut out of the program. Jewish Week education and politics reporter Amy Sara
Clark explains why.
NEW YORK
Jewish Winners, Losers In New Pre-K
DOE rules favor schools on far left and far right.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
Mazel Day School in Brighton Beach, above, is not participating in New York City's pre-K program. Amy Sara Clark/JW
More than 50,000 4-year-olds headed off to the city’s expanded free preschool program last week. But for Jewish preschools, the new program has only benefitted those at the ends of the religious spectrum, leaving schools in the middle shut out.
“What we hear from the schools is that it’s a very tempting and attractive [public funding] package, and there’s a lot of disappointment that the structure is as rigid as it is,” said David Tanenbaum, education affairs associate for Agudath, Israel who advocated on behalf of charedi yeshivas during the pre-K expansion.
“A lot of schools feel that they can’t take advantage of the opportunity, and they would like to,” he added.
Of the approximately 2,000 publically funded preschool spots that went to Jewish institutions, more than 90 percent went to schools at either the charedi or secular end of the spectrum. While the city could not provide a list of participating Jewish preschools, of the 87 Jewish programs listed on the Department of Education’s website, all but a handful are of the Bais Yaakov/Talmud Torah variety, serving primarily charedi children, or on the JCC/YMHA/Temple side serving primarily secular and non-Jewish students.
“The major issue right now is the hours,” said Jeff Leb, who represented day schools for the Orthodox Union during talks with the de Blasio administration. “A lot of schools that we deal with chose not to join the UPK [universal pre-K] program because they weren’t really sure of the religious and the cultural ambiguities, and a lot of them determined that the timing — the 6-hour-and-20 minute school day”— simply wouldn’t work for them.“
Leb pointed out that because Jewish schools close early on Friday, the extra time is added to the rest of the week, resulting in 7 hours of secular programming Monday through Thursday — too much for a 4-year-old with religious instruction on top.
Non-public preschools accepted in the city’s universal pre-K program receive public funding of approximately $4,000 for each half-day spot and $9,000 for each full-day spot, tuition relief the schools pass on to parents. In the past, religious schools have generally participated by offering the city’s 2.5-hour half-day slots and providing religious education during the remaining hours of the day.
But the crux of the de Blasio administration’s vision is 6 hours and 20 minutes of secular education each day, which doesn’t leave enough time for religious instruction, schools say. And the result is a conflict between pedagogical ideals of an administration hoping to transform a city though early education for all, and schools dedicated to providing both secular and religious education to the next generation of observant Jews.
Over the past months, Jewish schools have been pushing the city to drop the minimum for full-day pre-K at 5 hours, following the state minimum. But Deputy Mayor Richard Buery told The Jewish Week that after studying successful pre-K programs across the country, the administration has determined that 5 hours is simply not enough.
“There’s not going to be a change from that basic principal [of 6 hours and 20 minutes] because we think that in order to achieve the extraordinary and transformative educational outcomes that we know pre-kindergarten can provide, you really do need that full day program as defined by 6 hours and 20 minutes,” he said.
To be sure, the city still offers half-day spots, and most Jewish schools that had half-day UPK spots last year were able to offer them again this year. But for new schools wanting to join the program, half-day spots were hard to get.
According to a city spokesman, of the 2,000 UPK spots allocated to Jewish schools this year, 1,300 were full-day while just 700 were half-day seats.
School representatives say that despite the rigidity on the 6-hour-and-20-minute day, the de Blasio administration has worked hard to include Jewish schools in the program. “The de Blasio administration has done a really stupendous job in reaching out to include the nonpublic school community,” said Leb.
They have met repeatedly with Jewish leaders and given religious schools as much leeway as the law allows to incorporate Jewish culture — but not religion — into the UPK school day; they have advised schools, for example, that they can teach about Noah’s Ark or celebrate Purim, as long as the instruction is from a cultural perspective, or teach classes in Yiddish, as long as some lessons are taught in English.
Schools on the secular side say they’re able to abide by these guidelines. And the charedi schools? Because schools are allowed to give preference to students already at the school, students filling the UPK spots are all charedi. Although representatives of the schools have said on the record that they will genuinely try to follow the DOE guidelines, a source with knowledge of UPK programming at religious schools, says it’s more likely to be a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. (None of the some dozen charedi schools contacted by The Jewish Week would comment for the story.)
“They’re not going to be able to adhere to the regulations of UPK if they’re actually doing lunchtime [as part of full-day UPK]; it’s not possible,” the source said of religious schools. Rather, he said, most of the schools have the philosophy that they’ll participate in the program as long as possible, and if they get kicked out, nothing will be lost.
“The chasidic organizations are going to be playing fast and loose on this,” he said. “The DOE isn’t going to go crazy on enforcing this.”
Nor would they be able to even if they tried. “They have a tremendous learning curve. They don’t have any staff who speak Yiddish,” he said.
That said, only a fraction of the city’s charedi schools are participating in the program. None of the Satmar schools in Williamsburg are, for example, because of the 6-hour-and-20-minute mandate. For them and the rest of the dozens of observant schools, the pre-K expansion has resulted in frustration, along with hope that next year, more half-day slots will be offered.
“This is a tremendous opportunity if you can do it,” said Martin Schloss, director of government relations at the Jewish Education Project and chair of the New York State Education Commissioner’s Advisory Council on nonpublic schools. “But we have an obligation to provide religious education — it is the expectation of parents who send their children there.”
But for all the disappointment, representatives of Jewish organizations say they’re hopeful that next year more half-day slots will be offered, or that the city will bring the full-day minimum down to 5 hours. And while Buery said the administration is committed to having primarily full-day spots, he said that it is planning to re-evaulate the program throughout the year. For the majority of the city’s Jewish schools, they’ll have their fingers crossed.
“Seven hours in secular programming without any sort of religious programming is not OK for Jewish day schools to have,” said Leb. “We’re not asking for time out of the UPK day to teach religious studies. We’re just asking that it just adheres to the state regulations, which are 5 hours a day and not 6 hours and 20 minutes a day. That’s all we’re asking for.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
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In other news, two new venues
to explore the Holocaust were also explored this week: Staff writer Steve
Lipman discusses an online archive of
Holocaust photos that allows survivors to identify images of their relatives
from home and Jewish Week theater critic Ted Merwin previews "Olympics
Über Alles," a new play about
anti-Semitism and the 1936 Summer Olympics.
NEW YORK
Old Holocaust-era Photos Find New Life Online
Digitalized archives of Roman Vishniac will enable survivors to identify relatives’ images.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
A native of Russia who settled in the U.S. Courtesy of ICP
In a black-and-white, undated photograph from an unidentified cheder in pre-World War II Europe, a row of young Jewish boys, caps on their heads, are sitting at wooden desks, brittle old books of Torah spread before them.
It was a familiar image for Rob Fried, who grew up in East Meadow, L.I.
He’d often visit his grandparents in Borough Park, the Brooklyn neighborhood where thousands of Holocaust survivors settled after the war ended and the death camps were liberated; his grandmother, Auschwitz survivor Rebecca Fried, would show him that picture. On a page of “Polish Jews,” a 1947 pictorial record of Europe’s lost Jewish culture, one boy, second from the right in the photo, his face a few inches from the Torah, was her younger brother, Simcha Weiss.
Simcha, who was growing up in a chasidic family in Czechoslovakia, died at 7 in Auschwitz, where Mrs. Fried’s parents also perished.
Two decades after he first saw the photograph of his deceased great-uncle, Rob Fried recognized that same photograph in 1983’s “A Vanished World” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Roman Vishniac’s instant-classic pictorial history of Jewish life in Germany and Eastern Europe before the war. Fried recognized that Vishniac — who traveled throughout Central and Eastern Europe several times on assignment from the Joint Distribution Committee between 1935 and 1938 — had assumed the unofficial role of the photographic chronicler of disappeared Jewish life in the Old Country. Vishniac had also produced the 1965 book “Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record.”
Fried contacted the International Center of Photography, in Manhattan, which last year hosted an exhibition about Vishniac’s work, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, a repository of Shoah artifacts, with information about the photograph of Simcha Weiss.
Both institutions thanked Fried for the information, and indicated that they would include the facts in future educational materials, said Fried, a computer forensic scientist who lives in Valley Stream, L.I.
More identification of faces in Vishniac’s photographs will likely take place in the next few years.
Last month, the ICP (icp.org) and the Museum (ushmm.org) announced a joint project that has digitalized more than 9,000 of Vishniac’s negatives (most of them not previously printed or published) and some 30,000 of his other assorted written materials, recordings and photographic records. The archival project is making all the items available, at no cost, at vishniac.icp.org, and is encouraging relatives of survivors — most likely, children and grandchildren — to contact either institution if they recognize people in the photographs, few of which contain any identifying details.
The missing names will add to the historical record of the Shoah era.
“Within a decade our ability to do this will run out,” said Maya Benton, curator of ICP’s Vishniac Archives, alluding to the survivor generation’s mortality. An authority on Vishniac since her graduate studies at Harvard University a decade ago, Benton is editor of “Roman Vishniac Rediscovered,” which will be published next year by ICP in conjunction with DelMonico Books/Prestel.
While Rob Fried reached out to ICP and the Museum last year, neither institution has yet been able to verify the information that survivors or survivors’ relatives have submitted of relatives’ identification information in the few weeks since the digitalized images went online, she said. The institutions have publicized the project through social media, survivor organizations, Jewish museums around the world, and other Jewish groups.
Though the website is only in English now, translators are available who can speak and read many languages, Benton said. The photographs, she said, are likely to draw more interest — especially among survivors’ descendants — than written history or similar documents. “Images are universal.”
“This project will introduce many people to one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent photographers while greatly increasing our understanding of his subjects,” said Michael Grunberger, director of collections at the Museum, in a statement. “We are excited to bring this collection to an even-wider audience,” said Mark Lubell, ICP executive director.
Michael Berenbuam, Holocaust scholar and author, called the archives project a “wonderful contribution [to Holocaust documentation]. Would that it was done 25 years ago, would that it was done 50 years ago” — when more survivors were alive. “Time is limited.”
The archival project follows a retrospective exhibition of Vishniac’s photographs at ICP last year; the traveling exhibition recently ended a four-month run at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, and is to be hosted this month at Paris’ Museum of Jewish Art and History, then next year at Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews (vishniac.icp.org/traveling-exhibition).
Vishniac, who was born in Russia in 1897 and then immigrated to the U.S. in 1940, died in 1990.
In Moscow he studied biology and zoology; though he spent much of his professional career as an expert in photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography, he is best known for the pictures he took of European Jewry.
According to a 2010 New York Times Magazine story about Vishniac, he intentionally shaped both his photographic images and the details of his past (indicating that he had set out through Europe on his own initiative, rather than on a JDC assignment; that he had selectively released only the most emotive photographs; that he was sometimes less than accurate in some images’ caption details.
The range and quality of Vishniac’s photographs are their own best witness, Benton said. “In both the exhibit and the book we deal with Vishniac’s evolving reception and legacy, and how the photographs have come to symbolize Jewish life in Eastern Europe. We have also been correcting misinformation and working to verify captions, dates and locations.
“The negatives are the negatives, they were not spliced, in-painted or manipulated in any way,” Benton said. “They represent what he saw and captured through his camera’s lens. The photographs/negatives … present a visual document of the people and towns that ceased to exist after the Holocaust.”
Vishniac, Benton said, “was a Jewish photographer” — it turns out he photographed the DP where her mother was as a child. “This is a very personal project. I grew up with his books,” Vishniac’s photographs serving as “visual reference points.”
In research at the Vishniac estate, Benton found that Vishniac, whose assignment was to document Jewish poverty, had taken pictures of Jews of various religious and economic levels, both rural and urban. “He was a very versatile photographer.”
Benton formed a friendship with the photographer’s daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, who is donating many items from her father’s estate to ICP. “She wanted to figure out how to best honor his legacy.”
The Center has partnered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in creating the online archive, Benton said, because “ICP is not a Jewish institution. [The project] needed an interdisciplinary approach.”
The new online archive is similar to “Our Shared Legacy,” a three-year-old database of JDC documents, part of the organization’s Global Archives, which also encouraged survivors’ input in identifying faces in old photographs. (The website: jdc.org/sharedlegacy).
Linda Levi, director of the Global Archives, called Shared Legacy “a proven success. Thousands of people visited the site, making it actually the most popular feature on the JDC Archives website. Thousands have found documents that helped them in their genealogical and family history searches, primarily documents listing help extended by JDC to family members. We received many responses from people identifying family members in our photographs. Often, people were extremely grateful as they did not previously have photos of themselves and family members from this period.”
Rob Fried, who last year published “From Generation To …” (WingSpan Press), an illustrated book of his Holocaust-themed poetry and reproductions of family Holocaust-related documents (fromgenerationto.com), said the digitalized Vishniac Archives are an important tool in helping survivors complete the record of their wartime experiences.
“I think it’s really important that we [share] our grandparents’ stories,” he said.
His grandmother, now 86, who was one of the 4,515 passengers on the SS Exodus in 1947, still lives in Borough Park.
The Vishniac photograph of Simcha Weiss is the only picture she owns of her brother; Rob Fried made an enlargement of the photograph for his grandmother.
Framed, it now hangs on her living room wall.
steve@jewishweek.org
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THEATER
Sprinting Toward Understanding
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Joshua Quat, Michael Engberg as the Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller in “Olympics Über Alles.” Carol Rosegg
It was the disappointment of a lifetime. Two Jewish sprinters, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were suddenly dropped from the U.S. track team at the 1936 Summer Olympics (known as the “Nazi Olympics”) in Berlin in favor of two African-American athletes, Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. In “Olympics Über Alles,” a play by Samuel J. Bernstein and Marguerite Krupp, the incident becomes the catalyst for a controversial contemporary museum exhibit in New York. The play began performances last week in Midtown.
Directed by Debra Whitfield, “Olympics Über Alles” comes just a year after the release of the HBO documentary, “Glickman,” which shows how the athlete overcame the crushing disappointment of his ouster from the Olympics to become one of the great sportscasters of the 20th century.
It focuses on a modern-day Jewish professor, Steve Feinstein (Tim Dowd) who pressures a Catholic museum curator, Kate McCarthy (Amy Handra), to devote an exhibit to the Glickman-Stoller episode. But the curator sees the proposed exhibit as at odds with her museum’s focus on the history of underprivileged groups in America: African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos.
As the play moves between 1936 and the present, it shows how exclusion and lack of empathy can be at play in both political and personal contexts. As the professor and curator wrangle over their different perspectives, a relationship between them begins to blossom.
Bernstein is a longtime professor of English at Northeastern University; Krupp is a former student of his who now also teaches at Northeastern. In an interview, Bernstein said that the play, which is based partly on Glickman’s 1996 autobiography, “The Fastest Kid on the Block,” is about the “inability of people to see through their own backgrounds, upbringings or life orientations to find value and beauty in others. Ultimately, the professor and curator go from exploring the issues surrounding the exhibit to learning about each other’s families, religions and beliefs.”
Scholars continue to debate whether or not anti-Semitism motivated the roster change, although Avery Brundage, who was the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was a member of the America First organization, which was virulently pro-Nazi. Allen Guttmann, an emeritus professor at Amherst College and an eminent historian of the Olympics, told The Jewish Week that the change was most likely made simply to favor Owens and Metcalfe, who had been members of assistant head track coach Dean Cromwell’s team at the University of Southern California.
Nevertheless, Glickman told historian Peter Levine in the 1980s that he was still irate at both Brundage and Cromwell for “not allowing an 18-year-old kid to compete in the Olympic Games just because he was Jewish.”
“Olympics Über Alles” runs through Sept. 21 at the St. Luke’s Theatre, 308 W. 46th St. Performances are on Wednesdays at 2 p.m., Thursdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 1 p.m. For tickets, $39.50, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or visit www.telecharge.com.
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Have a great weekend
everyone.
The Editors.
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The Jewish Week
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New York, New York 10036 United States
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