June 26, 2019--Aunt Tanna

I've been thinking this week about my Aunt Tanna, my mother's second oldest sister who became our extended family's matriarch after my grandmother died.

This meant that all ritual occasions such as Passover and Rosh Hashanah dinners were under her auspices and occurred around her always-ladened dining room table. 

In my life I do not recall any warmer times.

Aunt Tanna was also the even-more-extended family's guardian angel. 

My earliest childhood memories were of distant cousins, who had survived Nazi concentration camps, who she somehow, at the end of the war, managed to bring to the safety of America. That "safety of America" was the security and love she provided to those who had literally been through Hell.

When they were liberated those emaciated skeletons were placed in DP camps, often tent camps, displaced persons camps, which were much less than ideal facilities, where they needed to wait, often for more than a year, before there was a place of refuge to which to send them. 

Much of Europe was in ruins and there were few places to locate freed prisoners. The United States, which sustained no direct damage, was only reluctantly welcoming. 

In America there was a long tradition of official antisemitism and our State Department, which was charged with managing the quotas that severely restricted the number of those who could be admitted to the country as refugees, was notoriously known to be unfriendly to anything Jewish. 

For example, before World War II erupted the Secretary of State ordered that ships packed with asylum seekers not be permitted to disembark them. The ships and their passengers were turned back and as a consequence many thousands were then sent to concentration camps where they were slaughtered by the Nazis. 

Aunt Tanna somehow found ways to locate scattered family members and one-by-one, occasionally in small family groups when more than one cousin miraculously survived, she managed to bring them to her apartment in Brooklyn where she arranged places for them to sleep, frequently for months, frequently three to a bed, while she searched for more permanent places for them to live and jobs so they could support themselves.

They spoke no English and I no Yiddish, the lingua franca, and so we communicated mainly though shrugs and gestures. As might be imagined I was especially drawn to the occasional young cousin survivors, who my father said, looked like "little old men." What they had been through, I came to understand, had literally left its mark on them.

And of course I could not take my eyes off the blue numbers they all had tattooed on their forearms.

I have been thinking about this recently because Portland Maine continues to be in the news as it struggles to welcome a few hundred Congolese refugees who have been granted asylum in America. There was another article in the New York Times Monday about how welcoming Portland is attempting to be. And how Portland and the State of Maine continue to be the only places in the U.S. where public money in combination with privately raised funds are being used to help defray the cost of their relocation and transition.

This, as I have written, has unleashed a storm of protest from some Mainers who feel that while citizens are struggling we should not be using taxpayer money to defray the costs associated with admitting refugees. That it is better to require that family members "sponsor" anyone seeking to live in America. The Aunt Tanna approach.

This seems to me to be worth considering.

September 9, 2013--Good Yontif in Farsi

While much of the attention focused on the Middle East last week was about the United States' struggle with how to respond to Syria's use of chemical weapons on its own citizens, there was another important story that were virtually ignored.

The press covered every minute of President Obama attempt while in St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit to convince at least a few leaders of the world's most powerful nations to support limited military strikes against the Assad regime's capacity to deploy these weapons of mass destruction.  He secured little overt endorsement and may have to settle for going it along, assuming Congress grants him the authority to do so.

Dealing with Congress was the concurrent part of the Syria story. Equally covered by the media wall-to-wall were the deals the Obama administration was working on to garner enough bipartisan support for this authorization. At least half of what was discussed was how big a blow it would be to Obama's prestige and to undercutting the power of the presidency if the Congress failed to do so.

The other half was devoted to how this would play out in the rest of the Middle East, particularly how Iran would react if the U.S. were seen as weakened by bipartisan anti-war sentiment.

If Obama couldn't enforce the red line he drew regarding Syria's use of poison gas, how likely would he be to enforce an even more crucial one--not allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons? And, always of course, how would Israel react? What would Israel do if the United States was suddenly perceived to be impotent?

These are all important subjects well worth detailed coverage and discussion. But almost lost in the shuffle of Syria-related stories was what might be happening in Iran now that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no longer president and his successor, the "moderate" Hassan Rouhani appointed an even more moderate, American-educated Javad Zarif as Foreign Minister.

Both, if you can believe it, on the eve of the highest of Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, sent out Tweets, wishing Jews a Happy New Year.

Semi-buried on page A9 of the New York Times, President Rouhani's Tweet was quoted--

As the sun is about to set here in Tehran I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah. 

And while they were wishing Jews a Good Yontif, unlike Ahmadinejad, who made a habit of it, they dismissed the idea that the Holocaust never happened.

In response to a Tweet from Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Christine, who is married to a Jew, in a message to Foreign Minister Zarif in which she said that the new year would be even sweeter if he would stop denying the reality of the Holocaust, he responded--

Iran never denied it. The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone. Happy New Year. 

That "man" who is now "gone," of course, is the aforementioned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He was not just "perceived" to be a Holocaust denier--he in fact emphatically and repeatedly was. But the Tweets from Iran's recently-elected leadership (though the ultimate ruler remains Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) are encouraging.

Perhaps something good will emerge from the new regime in Tehran. Maybe a deal that would see Iran back off from its nuclear weapons program and, in response, we would agree to end the sanctions that are wrecking Iran's economy--the real source of the apparent sea change in attitudes and, let's hope, behavior.

This to me is the major story of last week.