Admissions against interest

New York’s Undocumented Day Laborers Fight for Their Piece of the Big Apple

On the Corner

The Village Voice

Week of July 25 — 31, 2001

Text and photographs by Michael Kamber

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Teresa’s attitude is not unique. Resentment is high between the Satmar Jews of Williamsburg and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for them. A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the Jews like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he or she will tell you, “We’re a community of Holocaust survivors.” They’re keenly aware that Poland’s large Jewish population was annihilated during the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore the question: “The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland,” they say. Echoing the Polish government’s longtime position, they add, “It was the Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people.”

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[…] We are poor people; the average family here has 12 children; many of the husbands make less than they’re paying the cleaning woman. How can we pay them more?” A prominent local rabbi asks simply, “If they can make more elsewhere, why are they here working for us?”

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By Bill O’Reilly

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?23430

Thursday, June 28, 2001

This “Pearl Harbor” movie still bothers me.

The Disney people re-edited the film for Japanese audiences because of “emotional sensitivity issues.” In other words they softened what was already a cupcake of a movie because Disney wanted to do better in the box offices in the Land of the Rising Sun, which is the largest movie-going country after the USA.

So I’m thinking to myself what would have happened if Steven Spielberg had re-cut “Schindler’s List” for German audiences so they wouldn’t be confronted with “emotional issues”? Well, you would have heard a worldwide howl that would have curled Ben Affleck’s hair. Demonstrations would have been ordered up, and outrage would fill the air.

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The Unknown Holiday

• The invisibility of Shavuot in the Jewish community is simply the reflection of a wider American problem.

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of Toward Tradition, a national coalition of Jews and Christians, and the author, most recently, of Buried Treasure: Secrets for Living from the Lord’s Language.

May 25, 2001 9:10 a.m.

[…] Our communal leaders may express deep concern about Jewish “continuity,” but when they fund Holocaust memorials more lavishly than day schools, we have reason to doubt their sincerity.

So in this vein, let us compare the observance of two revered days on the Jewish calendar: the entirely secular Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fell last month, and the ancient festival of Shavuot, falling this year on May 28 & 29.

In the former case, enthusiastic Jews young and old crowded synagogues, temples, and Jewish Community Centers around the country. Holocaust survivors had their pictures not only in Jewish newspapers, but also in lavish spreads in the major dailies. Community leaders of every denomination warned us not to forget our history. And yet, just a few weeks later, on Shavuot, the day commemorating the giving of the Torah, when the people of Israel became a nation, most Jews will prefer to forget history. Year after year, in spite of its centrality to all of Jewish existence and its three prominent Scriptural references (Leviticus 23, Numbers 28, and Deuteronomy 16), Shavuot is trumped by Holocaust Remembrance Day.[…]

An American Jew in … Not Quite Paris

Kellerman

MightyWords

May 3, 2001

Book writing is a solitary profession. As the sole author of my works, I take the credit, I take the blame. About once a year, usually when my hardcover book is published, I am encouraged to venture out of my cocoon to publicize my work on what is known in the biz as the book tour. I like book tours. They allow me to do some face-to-face interaction with those who buy and read my books. My fans are wonderful — honest and sincere. I get feedback — mostly good, sometimes not so good, but always given with an honorable heart. Why else would they stand in line, sometimes for over an hour, just to have their books inked with my scrawl?

I also like book tours because I like to travel. I’ve enjoyed visiting almost every state in the U.S., and most of the major cities. Once in a while, my husband, the New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman, and I have done joint book tours, mostly out of the country. Jonathan and I are close and doing the circuit together minimizes our time apart. Three years ago, when we went to the land down under, we also took the kids. It was fabulous.

But even the foreign tours could not have prepared me for my upcoming tour in Germany. First of all, I was going without Jonathan and the kids, for a full ten days. I would miss them terribly. And, there was that picayune fact that I was going to Germany. As a modern Orthodox Jewish woman, I had strong feelings about visiting a country that just sixty years ago, had played judge, jury, and executioner to six million of my people, ten million human beings in total. Though Hitler’s “final solution” never came to pass, damn if he didn’t die trying to implement it. How would I feel about Germany and the Germans? How would they feel about me? Come join me and find out.

By David Newman

The Jerusalem Post | April, 18 2001

cgis.jpost.com/cgi-bin/General/printarticle.cgi?article=/

Editions/2001/04/18/Opinion/Opinion.24802.html

[…]

In Israel, Holocaust education has become, for many, a last resort in creating a sense of identity and attachment for a younger generation which has become increasingly alienated from a country which is continually fighting for its existence and to which this same youth is being asked to fight and, perhaps, make the supreme sacrifice. The use of the Israeli flag as a blatant symbol of nationalism during the March of the Living is, at one and the same time, a moment of pride for the youth of a country which rose from the ashes of the mass extermination, but equally a cynical manipulation of history’s greatest human tragedy to promote nationalism and to cover up for the failures of the education system back home in creating a sense of identity and loyalty to the state in which they reside.

No country can continually resort to the darkest moments in its history as the only common denominator which brings youth of diverse backgrounds to identify with a common cause.

“Never Again” is an important slogan for Israel, but it cannot be the only slogan by which generations of children and young adults will be asked to swear their

allegiance to the state. But however important a message this may be, it can never replace the essential positive aspects of living within a state and contributing to its development and security — messages which the state education system has miserably failed to disseminate beyond the context of persecution and pogroms.

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(The writer is chairman of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.)

Actors gain painful look into the past

By Yvette Craig

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Updated: Saturday, Mar. 17, 2001 at 22:25 CST

FORT WORTH — It’s dress rehearsal at Sage & Silo Theater, and actor Kit Hussey is in the uniform of a Nazi SS captain.

Removing the costume’s black hat and lowering his eyes, Hussey asks 80-year-old Lena Factor to describe how Nazi soldiers treated her in the concentration camps.

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“Now, you all can ask anything more. I was there. I was one of the first to go in and the last one to get out.”

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In a thick Polish accent, she tells the players about a moment in Auschwitz that haunts her.

She was shoved into a shower stall with about 200 other women. An echo bounced off the walls as the door was slammed shut. They stood bald and naked, shivering with fear.

She held her breath and waited. Cold water spewed from the shower heads instead of deadly gas. Wails of disbelief, followed by cries of joy filled the chamber.

[…]

Charles Laurence

National Post

February 17, 2001

NEW YORK — As the fogs of obfuscation begin to lift from the latest mess of his own peculiar making, former president Bill Clinton is looking like the seasoned snake-oil salesman who has just been sold a pup.

[…] Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, called Mr. Clinton in the final hours of his administration, while Rabbi Irving Greenfield, head of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, wrote a missive in support of a pardon on official letterhead.

“This is squandering the moral capital that Israel needs, that was deposited by the blood at Auschwitz,” says Mr. Stein. “That capital is needed in Israel’s ongoing struggle for safety, even survival. To use it for [Marc] Rich is appalling.” The Yiddish word for Jewish feelings, he explained, is shondah (shame).

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