Category: Jewish Exponent

News Coverage of Our Co-sponsorship of the July 11, 2021 NO FEAR Rally in Washington, D.C.

7/11/2021

On Capitol Hill, rally-goers agree that antisemitism is un-American. But when Israel is involved, it gets complicated.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Several thousand people spent a sweltering afternoon in front of the U.S. Capitol at a rally on Sunday that denounced antisemitism as un-American and made the case that Jewish identity and support for Israel are inextricable.

Those were the unifying messages of the “No Fear” rally on Sunday, which drew about 2,000 people, but there were differences among the speakers and in the crowd on how precisely Israel figures in the fight against antisemitism.

Some of the most searing messages came from people who have suffered antisemitic attacks in recent years. A recurring theme among these speakers was that they never expected to suffer such attacks in the United States. Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Shlomo Noginski, who sustained stab wounds in a July 1 attack in Boston, appeared with his arm still in a sling, and in evident pain.

“I was born in the Soviet Union in the city of St. Petersburg,” Noginski said in Hebrew, having explained that he was still too pained to speak fluently in English. “I remember how even as a young child, I experienced terrible antisemitism. Never in my darkest dreams did I imagine that I would feel the same way here in the United States, the land of freedom and endless possibilities.”

The crowd shouted “hero!” as Noginski spoke. He had held the attacker at bay outside a Chabad facility where about a hundred children were in summer camp.

Another speaker hailed as a hero was Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who described saying the viduy, the Jewish prayer before death, as a gunman shot 11 worshipers dead in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October of 2018. Myers was the first to alert the police of the attack.

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are all endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Myers said, quoting the Declaration of Independence. “To be an antisemite means you do not accept that pact of being an American.”

The rally drew a broad array of sponsor organizations, covering the religious spectrum and many right-wing and central pro-Israel mainstream Jewish organizations.

Notably absent were representatives of more left-wing groups that were asked to join but opted out of attending because some of the sponsoring groups adhere to a definition of antisemitism that encompasses harsh criticism of Israel, including the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. Groups like J Street and Americans for Peace Now oppose BDS, but object to defining it as antisemitic.

Melissa Landa, who leads the Alliance for Israel, a relatively new group that has as a central tenet that BDS is antisemitic, set the tone at the outset of the event. She had launched plans for the rally after antisemitism spiked during the Israel-Gaza conflict in May.

She spoke of the “shared promise for our children, that they will be free to live as proud Jews, and exercise their religious liberties granted by the United States Constitution, free to wear their yarmulkes and Magen Davids and free to speak their love of Israel without being attacked in the streets of New York or Los Angeles.”

Landa, like other speakers, named lawmakers on the left or the right that have in recent months incurred accusations of antisemitism. Mentions of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat whose criticism of Israel has been seen by Jewish groups as crossing into antisemitism, notably garnered much louder boos than those of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who has drawn fire for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and for likening coronavirus restrictions to Nazi laws.

Noa Tishby, an Israeli actor, appeared with conservative pundit Meghan McCain and Alma Hernandez, a Democratic state lawmaker in Arizona. Each suggested that anti-Zionism was equivalent to antisemitism.

“So much of the antisemitism of today simply attributes all the evil tropes, lies and libels that have been used for centuries to justify the worst horrors against Jewish people to the Jewish state,” said Tishby, who is well known in Israel and recently published a book titled “Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.” “As you will hear today, this hatred is being used to attack our Jewish communities. It is being used to impose a heavy cost on anyone who identifies as Jewish or even God forbid, Zionist.”

McCain has become an outspoken defender of Israel on the talk show “The View” — which she announced earlier this month that she is leaving — and elsewhere.

“I’m Meghan McCain and I’m a Zionist because, apparently, this is now something that is controversial to say,” she said at the rally.

Elisha Wiesel, the son of the late Holocaust diarist and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, had joined the planning of the rally to bring in mainstream and liberal-leaning groups after Landa hit a wall in bringing them in.
Major mainstream groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith International, as well as the Orthodox Union and Reform and Conservative movements, signed on as sponsors, but few of their representatives spoke.

Wiesel said he feared division but was soothed by the unity he saw.

“The sages teach that it was our own hatred for each other that caused the destruction of the first and second temples,” he said. “And in the weeks leading up to this rally, it was this fear that dominated my field of vision, the fear that our community was divided beyond repair. That fear is our enemy’s dream. But looking out at all of you today if it comes clear that instead of dividing us, the enemies of the Jewish people, whether from the right or the left at home or abroad, they have instead united us.”

Wiesel appeared to nod to the concerns that some liberal groups had — that criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians would be conflated with antisemitism at the rally.

“We can disagree even passionately, without being divided. We can even disagree on Israel,” he said. “ We must not tolerate calls for an end to the Jewish state of Israel, through a one-state solution that once again leaves the Jews defenseless. We must also not tolerate denigration or hatred towards the aspiration for dignity and self-determination of our Palestinian cousins. If we hate, we will not win.”

Just minutes after his own speech, Wiesel jumped in to intervene and help out a fellow speaker — Erika Moritsugu, a deputy assistant to President Biden, who was representing the White House, and was booed. A cluster of supporters of former President Donald Trump shouted during her speech, particularly when she mentioned that President Joe Biden decided to run after the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. Trump equivocated in condemning the marchers, which has become a sore point among his followers.

“Stolen election!” one man shouted. “You pay money to terrorists!” said another. One held up a placard saying “Screw Kristen Clarke.” Clarke, who leads the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, came under fire during her confirmation hearings for having hosted an antisemitic speaker when at an event when she was a student at Harvard decades ago.

Moritsugu appeared flustered and others in the crowd shushed the booers. After she finished speaking, Wiesel stepped in and said, to applause, “I’d like everybody to thank President Biden for the way that the White House stood with Israel during the Gaza war.”

Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, the director of the Presbyterian Office of Public Witness — the public advocacy wing of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church — invoked the black Jewish alliance of the civil rights era, to cheers.

“I am here today to express my support for the Jewish community in the face of antisemitism, in the face of the shooting deaths and attempted murders in synagogues, stores and homes,” he said. “Now is a time of solidarity. Now there’s a time of unity.”

A couple from Kensington, Maryland, Bruce and Malka Kutnick, were unnerved by the presence of the far Jewish right at the rally. Malka Kutnick said she had been reassured by Wiesel’s claim before the rally that both people who don’t care about Israel’s existence and Kahanists — followers of the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane — would not be welcome. She held a placard that read “No to occupation, No to antisemitism.”

“I was just accosted by someone in a Kahane shirt,” she said. “He said I should stand with the Netorei Karta.” A small cluster of that fringe group, which is both haredi Orthodox and anti-Zionist, gathered on a green across the street.

Marie Berlin-Fischler, a 28-year-old Washington, D.C. preschool teacher, stood with a poster reading, “My fellow progressives, you missed a spot: Stop antisemitism.”

She said she felt untethered from the progressive movement, which she otherwise supports.

“The issue is that in this country as of late, I don’t feel as though anyone like me can exist in a progressive space anymore without checking my intersectionality at the door,” she said. “When I am asked to be part of myself as I show up to these spaces, the gap is closing. There’s nowhere for people who want to be American, the way I do.”

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Community Briefs: COVID Relief Kits Donated

12/31/2020

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The Jewish Exponent covered our donation of COVID-19 relief kits to communities struggling with the effects of the pandemic in the Philadelphia area.

Read in the Jewish Exponent

COVID-19 Relief Kits Donated

B’nai B’rith Community Coordinator Samuel Domsky of Huntingdon Valley presented Rabbi Sandy Berliner, chaplain and service coordinator for Federation Housing locations in the Philadelphia area, with 150 COVID-19 relief kits provided by B’nai B’rith.

Residents and staff of the Arthur and Estelle Sidewater House in Philadelphia and Florence E. Green House in Trevose received kits containing a cloth facemask and travel-sized hand sanitizer, both imprinted with the B’nai B’rith logo.

These kits will help ensure residents and staff stay safe during the pandemic.

The donation is one of many made as part of B’nai B’rith’s project to provide 3,000 COVID-19 relief kits around the U.S. Individual B’nai B’rith community coordinators will donate kits on behalf of B’nai B’rith to local agencies dedicated to serving the community.

The B’nai B’rith COVID-19 relief campaign has supported projects around the world since it began in March.

The B’nai B’rith Disaster Relief Fund has responded to manmade and natural disasters worldwide since 1865.

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Recap: B'nai B'rith's Project H.O.P.E. Delivers Possibility Of Passover

4/17/2015

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UPDATED: 04/22/15, 4:45 p.m.

For five decades, B'nai B'rith International has used Project H.O.P.E. (Help Our People Everywhere) to make Passover seders possible for the elderly and disabled, as well as those that do not have the means to buy kosher-for-Passover meals.

This year, the program served more than 2,600 meals in a number of communities across the United States, garnering attention from the local press and the appreciation of those served.

Read a recap of the localized impact, listed below:

Connecticut Jewish Ledger:

As it has for the past 39 years, the B’nai B’rith Horeb Lodge in New Haven helped make Passover a happy holiday for families in need throughout the area through PROJECT HOPE – a kosher-for-Passover food drive organized by Lodge chair Harold Miller.

“I started by contacting various offices of the Jewish Family Service (JFS) and Tower One in New Haven. I am in touch with JFS in New Haven, Bridgeport, Danbury, Waterbury/Southbury, Greenwich, and New London,” Miller explained to the Ledger. “I asked all of them how many packages needed for the current year and then I arranged to provide for it.” After the packages were assembled at the JCC of Greater New Haven in Woodbridge, representatives from JFS and Tower One stopped by to pick them for distribution to their clients.

It’s hard work, says Miller, but well worth the effort.

“We distributed almost 400 packages this year,” he says.

Connecticut Jewish Ledger

Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia):

“I wish to thank Project H.O.P.E. — You have certainly made it possible for me and my beloved son to have a joyous Pesach through your generosity of the kosher food. As a Holocaust survivor, I am especially appreciative. If there were more people like you, the world would be a much happier place.”

“During World War lI, I lived in the [concentration] camps in terrible conditions but always with hope. I thank Project H.O.P.E. for sending me Passover food … I am glad that good people care, that I should never be hungry again.”

These are just two of the numerous thank-you notes received by Project H.O.P.E., an organization dedicated to providing Passover-friendly foods to those in need in the Philadelphia region, since its inception in 1997.

Samuel Domsky, chairman and founder of Project H.O.P.E. (Helping Our People Everywhere) was especially proud of this year’s Passover distribution effort, which took place on Sunday. It is the chai, or 18th year, of his group providing much-needed Passover food to those who otherwise would not have the ritual foods for their seder.

“Some people assume Jews aren't in need. That’s not the case,” he said, as his family and hundreds of others gathered at Temple Sinai in Dresher to pack and deliver food to families across the region. “Families, the elderly, single parents — all need food to celebrate Passover.”

The Jewish Exponent

Five Towns Herald (New York):

The Key Food supermarket in Woodmere, which has served the community for more than 50 years, according to Manager Jose Diaz, is closing, and the site — in a small shopping center between Franklin and Irving places — is expected to become home to a Gourmet Glatt Emporium, an all-kosher food store.

[...]

Anna and Asher Matathias were in Key Food last week to pick up the store’s Passover contributions to B’nai B’rith’s Project HOPE, and saw what Asher described as “rapidly emptying shelves.”

Asked about the possibility of a new Gourmet Glatt, Matathias said, "Of course, my wife, and those closer to the Woodmere [Long Island Rail Road] station than the Cedarhurst stop, are delighted with such a prospect.

"Needless to state that such an advent reflects the expansion of the Jewish community — Hewlett is already feeling the phenomenon by the way of the growing congregation of the local Chabad."

Five Towns Herald

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Joan Pavalow had planned a trip to the supermarket this week - with Passover just a few days away, she needed groceries. But then she decided not to go.

She just didn't have the money, she said.

So on Sunday afternoon, when the Kepniss family - David and Marla and their four kids - showed up at her apartment with two bags full of kosher-for-Passover food, Pavalow reacted with gratitude - and relief.

"This is a life-saver to me," she said. "I don't have the money to go to Shop Rite - and this is wonderful."

Pavalow was one of hundreds of people in the Philadelphia region who had food delivered to their doors Sunday in anticipation of Passover, which begins at sundown on Friday.

The program, run by the Jewish service organization B'nai B'rith and known as Project H.O.P.E., has been serving needy Jewish families in four states and the District of Columbia since the 1960s.

Philadelphia's Project HOPE program was begun 18 years ago by Dresher resident Samuel Domsky, who for several years ran the entire operation out of his garage with donated food. Now, he raises $30,000 a year to buy Passover staples such as matzo, eggs, and gefilte fish, and has gone from serving 75 families a year to 600.

"There's a general lack of knowledge of the extent of poverty in the Jewish community," Domsky said. "We helped raise awareness that there are many out there - seniors, Holocaust survivors, people just hanging on."

According to statistics from the Philadelphia Corporation for the Aging, 7 percent of Jewish people in the five-county Philadelphia region between 18 and 39 - and 6 percent of those age 75 and older - were living at the poverty level in 2012.

On Sunday, about 400 volunteers - the Kepniss family among them - gathered at Temple Sinai in Dresher to pack grocery bags full of food, load them into cars, and drive them to homes and apartments across the city.

The Kepniss family, of Philadelphia, was sent with more than a dozen bags to the Robert Saligman House, a Jewish retirement home on Roosevelt Boulevard. David and Marla Kepniss and their children - Talia, 13; Emmett, 11; Max, 8; and Joel, 6 - spent about an hour making deliveries in the narrow hallways.

For their trouble, they received hugs, smiles, and the occasional piece of candy for the children.

[...]

At her apartment door, Pavalow told stories about her father-in-law, a cantor at a synagogue who always made sure the prayers were read perfectly at their Passover seders.

[...]

"It's the contact with such a broad range of people," said Peter Adlowitz, of Philadelphia's P'nai Or congregation. "The giving, to me, doesn't feel like it's one way.

"Letting the kids witness the impact this has on families - these are real people, local people - is very meaningful as a parent," he said.

As the family gathered in the apartment building lobby after a full morning, Max said he felt "tired and good at the same time."

"It makes me feel grateful," said his sister Talia, "for what I have."

Philadelphia Inquirer

Reprinted In U.S. News & Interest

Reprinted in Israel Foreign Affairs

Reprinted in WorldNews (WN) Network

The Mitzvah Bowl (Pennsylvania):

Project H.O.P.E. works with the community family service agencies and local Jewish social services and with B’nai B’rith members and synagogue volunteers. Jewish organizations provide the lists of people who need packages and the facilities for collecting, storing, and packing the food. B’nai B’rith volunteers assemble and deliver the packages. Begun in New York, the program has spread to Boston, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Last year in Philadelphia, 540 families received Passover food.

As a once a year Mitzvah Project, the Sunday before Passover, deliver Kosher for Passover food to our most needy, elderly and isolated Jews in the Philadelphia Region. The Project involves planning, fundraising, and volunteers to ensure success annually.

The Mitzvah Bowl

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News Coverage of Our Co-sponsorship of the July 11, 2021 NO FEAR Rally in Washington, D.C.

On Capitol Hill, rally-goers agree that antisemitism is un-American. But when Israel is involved, it gets complicated.

Community Briefs: COVID Relief Kits Donated

Recap: B'nai B'rith's Project H.O.P.E. Delivers Possibility Of Passover

Connecticut Jewish Ledger:

Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia):

Five Towns Herald (New York):

Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Mitzvah Bowl (Pennsylvania):

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News Coverage of Our Co-sponsorship of the July 11, 2021 NO FEAR Rally in Washington, D.C.

On Capitol Hill, rally-goers agree that antisemitism is un-American. But when Israel is involved, it gets complicated.

Community Briefs: COVID Relief Kits Donated

Recap: B'nai B'rith's Project H.O.P.E. Delivers Possibility Of Passover

﻿Connecticut Jewish Ledger:﻿

Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia):

Five Towns Herald (New York):

Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Mitzvah Bowl (Pennsylvania):

In the News

Archives

Categories

Connect With Us

About B'nai B'rith

Support Our Work

Subscribe

Connecticut Jewish Ledger: