The outragous hit on Debbie Almontaser and the Arabic school in Brooklyn

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14422The above link is to Larry Cohler-Esses' superb article--much better than the one in the NY Times--concerning how Daniel Pipes, the New York Post, New York Sun and other extremists out to stigmitize every Muslim in America as a potential terrorist managed to get Debbie Almontaser, a Yemeni-American who worked hard to effect trust and reconciliation between New Yorkers of all faiths, dropped as the principal of a new Arabic language and culture public school school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. It is a sad story in which a Post reporter used trick questioning about a tee-shirt reading "Intifada-NY", which had nothing whatsoever to do with the school or Almontaser's own work, to paint a blatantly false picture that she somehow endorsed violence against non-Muslims here. Everyone who knows Almontaser, who invited hundreds of Jews and Christians to her own home in the wake of 9/11 attack, and who joined social action groups, such as We Are All Brooklyn, an inter-ethnic initiative supported by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) to combat hate crimes in the dense, mixed neighborhoods of Brooklyn, understood that the Post's characterization of Almontaser was a sleazy, disgusting McCarthyistic fraud. Yet neither Teachers Union chief Randi Weingarten nor Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom previously supported the school, had the guts to stand behind her, and, as a result, Almontaser was forced out. She was replaced as principal by an Orthodox Jewish woman, Danielle Sulzberg, who through no fault of her own, is unlikely to have much credibility with the New York Arab-American community, especially given bitterness among Arabs and Muslims that prominent right-wing Jews like Pipes aided and abetted a local body called Stop the Madrassah (though the school was to be completely secular), and groups like JCRC and the Anti-Defamation League which had worked with Almontaser in community projects over the years, did not stand up uncategorically for her when the chips were down.


What a shame. As Rabbi Michael Paley of UJA-Federation rightly put it; “The idea that unless they pass an acid test — that Muslims are terrorists until proven innocent — will mean that none will pass. We are ultimately blocking them from becoming American,” he warned. The result, he said, would be an Arab immigrant community more isolated and less assimilated, “like the Arabs in France.” The message to the Arab-American community as a result of this debacle was, “You’re a fool to think they’ll accept you,” he said.

That in fact is certainly the message of the fear and hate-mongering Pipes, who told Cohler-Esses that a school catering to the Arab community should get "special scrutiny" above any other community, and in a piece published in both the New York Post and Jerusalem Post, argued that “learning Arabic in itself promotes an Islamic outlook...“Arabic language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.”

The successful Pipes-led onslaught on Debbie Almontaser and is not only morally
repellent, but incredibly short-sighted. There are tens of thousands of Arab-Americans as well as Muslims from South Asia and elsewhere living in New York with the majority concentrated in Brooklyn in close proximity with large Jewish populations, including the Russian-Jewish community. Instead of building ties to this community through coalitions like "We are All Brooklyn" that encourage communication and reconciliation, Pipes and company are intent on infuriating and humiliating them; giving the message to young people in those communities that there is no place for them in American society and they might as well affiliate with Islamic extremism. From his perch in Philadephia, Pipes seems intent on inciting a religious war in Brooklyn; something he and his family will not be indirectly impacted by.

One has only to read Larry Cohler's piece to understands that a monstrous injustice has been done here that may set back for years quiet efforts at dialogue and understanding. The question is; 'Why was the outrageous hit on Debbie Almontaser allowed to succeed? Why didnt more people of conscience and good will, in the organized Jewish community, the Bloomberg Administration, the New York educational establishment and beyond stand up to the bigots and fear-mongerers? As the English-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke said a couple of centuries ago, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." This was a classic case of exactly that phenomenon.


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back from the FSU

I am back from my family-history jaunt through the FSU (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania) in one piece, excited capitivated and in one piece, despite getting bizarelly mugged in Kaunus, Lithuania, while on a guided tour with Tanya of some of the old buildings associated with my great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor, the Gaon of Kovno (1817-1896). Sadly, my attacker managed to snatch my camera with my photos of the whole trip and while the guy was quickly caught and delivered to the police by some local youths who heard my cry for help and corraled the guy, in the process the memory chip in my camera was lost, and with it, all oif my photos of the trip. I was lucky though, because after the police frisked the attacker, it turned out he was carrying a loaded pistol. Such a thing had never before happened in Lithuania to a western visitor on a roots trip, and there was semi-serious speculation that the attacker may have been some kind of dybbuk summoned by Rabbi Spektor who might have been upset I intended to visit his grave and snap photos there--but that he showed mercy on me by sparing my life. The story of the attack on me ran on Page 5 of the main Lithianian daily paper, Lietuvos Rytas, and I was interviewed also on the main interview program on Lithuanian Radio. Honestly, I've had a hard time writing about my trip since returning because didnt want the mugging incident to overwhelm everything else, but its hard not to start with it. Here are other impressions and results. Our first heritage stop was Rostov-na-Donu, where one side of my father's family, the Tulbowitz's lived back in the 1870's and 1880's. We didnt' find what we had hoped to find; records of the home and or tavern owned by Shalom-Aharon and Sophie Tulbowitz, or of their daughter Rose and her husband Abram Bloch, who emigrated from the city for America in 1890 together with Sophie, (the rest of the family left several years later), partly because the best census of Rostov residents, including Jews, was done in 1895-96 and my family had already left for the Goldine Medina, but we did find Jewish community documents from 1878 and 1879 announcing the birth and corcumcision of their son Gabriel and death of three year old Isai, neither of whom we had, until now, on our family tree. Even more exciting, the documents identified them as "meshanin" (townspeople) from Rechica, a small town in south-eastern Belaurs. So now we know where the Tulbowitzes came from before Rostov, though we dont know yet when they left Rechicha (an archivist in Minsk will shortly check Rechica archives for clues).

Rostov itself, which had been rundown and shoddy the last time I was there in 1999, was now flush with money with the once empty left bank of the Don filled with restaurants, discos, and resorts. They are doing a good job thankfully, of preserving the integrity of the old city's 19th Century architectural core even as sleek new buildings rise in adjoining districts. Indeed, Rostov looked every bit as prosperous as Kiev where we had just been and no comparison with other parts of Ukraine, that are still terribly rundown and depressing. I knew from reports that Moscow had become incredibly rich, but I hadnt expected to see such a transformation in Rostov. We did then spend a day in Moscow, which was ludicrously expensive and choked with traffic, but we were taken to one of the best restaurants in the city by two old friends who have done very well (she is the co-owner of a winery using Bordeaux grapes in Anapa near Russia's Black Sea coast) and treated to a bottle of their best white, so left town on the train to Minsk feeling no pain...We only had a day in Belarus, but it was something of a surprise in that people we spoke to--including members of the Jewish community seemed genuinely appreciative of the social policies followed by their dictator Lukashenka, who of course has a very very bad image in the West. In short, they say, he has avoided the worst aspects of the move to free-market economics that beset Russia and Ukraine---the closing of factories and collective farms and mass unemployment and the plunging of 80 percent of the population into poverty, drunkedness and despair, by cushioning the blow, keeping alive a form of collective agriculture, keeping prices reasonable, etc, etc. Of course, he managed to do that thanks to dirt cheap energy supplies from his longtime ally Putin, but once Lukashenka made clear he did not want the much-anticipated merger with Russia unless he himself would become the supreme leader instead of merely a governor, Russia has begun charging Belarus much higher energy prices, so who knows how much longer Luka can keep it up. But at this point the population looks pretty content, well-fed and grateful to have avoided the shock therapy their neighbors endured.

Tanya and I were driven by a guide from the Jewish community to Ross', Izabelin and Volkovisk, small towns near the Polish border which were frespectively the birthplace and the first two rabbincal postings of the illustrious Rabbi Spektor, who then moved to Kovno in 1864. On the way, we saw storks in the field, lots of goats, chicken and sheep and felt to be floating through Chagall-land. We were warmly recieved by thye mayors of all three places, who had no prevjious idea that their towns were associated with Rabbi Spektor, who during hios heyday was the most influential rabbi in the Russian Empire. There are no Jews left there--all those communities were slaughtered by the Nazis and the Jewish cemeteries almost completely overgrown to the point where only a few headstones can be seen...Melancholy and haunting.

We spent our last four days in a lovely hotel in Vilnous with a magical panorama of that exquisite city, once the Jerusalem of the Litvak Jews. The beauty of the city makes the story of the annihilation of its Jews from 1941-44, which was recounted to us in detail by our superb guide Regina Kopeleivch, all the more emotionally devastating. We did have the opportunity to meet and talk to a wonderful 85-year-old survivor who we had seen in posters, suddenly come to life, and also to witness a performance of Yiddish songs performed for a group of students from around the world (including German Christians) who come to Vilna every summer to study Yiddish.

In Kaunus, besides getting mugged, we visited the ruined home and ohel of Rabbi Spektor and his second son, Tzvi Hirsch Rabinovich (Unfortunately, all traces of his first son--my great-great grandfather, Chaim Rabinovich, have vanished). I did however have one more 'Eureka' geneological moment in Lithuania. Just after we arrived in Vilnius, Regina Kopelevich introduced to another western visitor, Eli Wohlgemuth of Montreal, who said he wanted to meet me because his great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yishai Wohlgemuth of Memel (then the eaternmost city in Germany, now the Lithuanian city of Kleipeda) was a close friend of my great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Spektor. That was amazing enough, but I was also blown away by his last name, Wohlgemuth, because my mother's mother Elli Ringel, was born Elli Wohlgemuth in East Prussia in 1900). Elli was a wonderfful lady,who escaped Hotler with my then teenage mother and came to America, but she had a snobbish disapproving attitude toward Russian Jews, who she considered uncouth and uncivilized, even though, or maybe because, East Prussia was right on the border with Russia.

In any case it seems almost certain that my Wolgemuths, who lived in Konigsburg, the capital of East Prussia until 1920, when they moved to Berlin to find Elli and her sister Hilda, suitable well-to-do Jewish husbands, were almost certainly related to Eli Wohlgemuth's family, which was based in Memel just a short way up the Baltic Coast. So in one stroke, Eli Wohlgemuth provided me with links to both my mother's family and my father's, which had always seemed so far apart, German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish, oil and water, in my mind. And the kicker was this, according to Eli, the East Prussia Wohlgemuth clan had all emigrated there from Belarus in the early 19th Century--so those who despised Ostjuden had themselves been Ostjuden a couple of generations before!!! Who would have think it??? I mean, come down off superiority shtick, German Jews, yekkes, and lighten up, already...

Nu, thats it for now...For further accounts of my roots trip, there will soon be an article in the Jewish Week and eventually a book still forming in my mind along the lines of "Encounters with a Tzaddik; Secular, liberal, decadent Walter Ruby has a hell of a dialectic across space and time with his ancestor, the illustrious Kovno Gaon and gets mugged by a dybuk in the Process"...coming in the not so distant future to a Barnes and Nobles and artsy-fartsy cinema near you...

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