17 minute read
Voices
from April 1, 2022
by Jewish Press
The Jewish Press
(Founded in 1920)
Margie Gutnik
President
Annette van de Kamp-Wright
Editor
Richard Busse
Creative Director
Susan Bernard
Advertising Executive
Lori Kooper-Schwarz
Assistant Editor
Gabby Blair Sam Kricsfeld
Staff Writers
Mary Bachteler
Accounting
Jewish Press Board
Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Danni Christensen; David Finkelstein; Bracha Goldsweig; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; Joseph Pinson; Andy Shefsky and Amy Tipp. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the Federation are: Community Relations Committee, Jewish Community Center, Center for Jewish Life, Jewish Social Services, and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.
Editorial
The Jewish Press is an agency of the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Deadline for copy, ads and photos is: Thursday, 9 a.m., eight days prior to publication. E-mail editorial material and photos to: avandekamp@jewishomaha.org; send ads (in TIF or PDF format) to: rbusse@jewishomaha.org.
Letters to the Editor Guidelines
The Jewish Press welcomes Letters to the Editor. They may be sent via regular mail to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154; via fax: 1.402.334.5422 or via e-mail to the Editor at: avandekamp@jewishomaha.org. Letters should be no longer than 250 words and must be single-spaced typed, not hand-written. Published letters should be confined to opinions and comments on articles or events. News items should not be submitted and printed as a “Letter to the Editor.” The Editor may edit letters for content and space restrictions. Letters may be published without giving an opposing view. Information shall be verified before printing. All letters must be signed by the writer. The Jewish Press will not publish letters that appear to be part of an organized campaign, nor letters copied from the Internet. No letters should be published from candidates running for office, but others may write on their behalf. Letters of thanks should be confined to commending an institution for a program, project or event, rather than personally thanking paid staff, unless the writer chooses to turn the “Letter to the Editor” into a paid personal ad or a news article about the event, project or program which the professional staff supervised. For information, contact Annette van de KampWright, Jewish Press Editor, 402.334.6450.
Postal
The Jewish Press (USPS 275620) is published weekly (except for the first week of January and July) on Friday for $40 per calendar year U.S.; $80 foreign, by the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Phone: 402.334.6448; FAX: 402.334.5422. Periodical postage paid at Omaha, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154-2198 or email to: jpress@jewishomaha.org.
It’s time to RSVP
ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT
Jewish Press Editor
Two years ago, we invited you all to come to our Centennial Gala. Now, we are ready to welcome you for real — On May 1, from 4 to 7 p.m., we will host the Centennial Press Gala by our beautiful Goldstein Aquatic Center’s outdoor pool. Musical entertainment will be courtesy of singer Kyle Knapp, who is performing a portion of his (mostly) mellow and familiar tunes, and we will serve kosher appetizers and cocktails. We will use some of the original decorations, even though we’ll be outside this time and not in the Community Engagement Center. The change of venue is deliberate; although the world is looking a lot better, we still prefer to be outdoors, mostly because it is hard to predict whether the numbers in Omaha will stay low or increase again. The Board and staff of the Jewish Press hope you all come. We’d like you to RSVP by April 20, so we know how many people to expect, but don’t let that stop you if, at the last minute, you decide to come after all. If you bought tickets last time, you can simply send an email to avandekamp@jewish omaha.org and let us know how many guests you will bring; if you didn’t sign up in 2020, you can sign up here: tinyurl.com/JewishPressGala The speeches will be short (we promise), and we will focus on the simple act of catching up and spending time together—something we all still lack, even as the world is slowly opening back up. As a community, we’re running a deficit when it comes to social contact; you can feel it anytime there’s an opportunity to meet others—we’ve missed this. We have missed each other, seeing the faces, hearing news from the grapevine, not just hearing from each other how life is, but seeing it for ourselves. The agencies of the Jewish Federation of Omaha will focus much of our energy this year on engagement, on bringing us together, and we’ll collaborate as much as possible with staff, volunteers and other organizations in Omaha and beyond to do so. For the Jewish Press, our May 1 gala is another step in creating spaces and opportunities for our community to participate in a variety of programs. To be honest, as an agency, the Jewish Press occupies a unique position: we talk to you every week and bring you the paper in print and online, but unless we are intentional about it, our relationship can be a one-way street. It’s why in past years we organized exhibits in the gallery (heads up, we have another one coming in 2023) and why we are so excited for May 1. It’s why we’re working with Jennie Gates Beckman on the local author series (see front page) and why we have various other initiatives in the works. It’s not enough to just tell the story—although that is very important. At the same time, we have to remind ourselves that we are part of that story. We help write it, we get to show up and insert ourselves in it, we get to be there with you and grow the relationships. On May 1, please join us. Let’s come together, let’s eat, drink, and celebrate this paper and the visionaries who started it long before us. We can toast to all the stories that have been told, to the ones we as a community are currently writing, and to all the ones still to come. We cannot celebrate without you. The biggest reason we get to celebrate in the first place is all of you, reading this paper, week after week. We can’t wait to see you!
My heart breaks for Ukraine and the Ethiopian Jews
HAFTAM YIZHAK-HEATHWOOD
JTA The past few days I couldn’t stop crying about the situation in Ukraine. Watching the news, reading articles and hearing reports took me to dark moments in my past. My heart broke to see people being victims again in a war that they did not choose to be part of. I don’t remember the experience of escaping civil war and famine in Ethiopia as a child. However, I heard and learned about it over the course of my childhood through my father, my family and my community. With very limited information, I began to piece together the true history of my people. I only had a few years of happy home memories before everything changed forever. This was after my family and I escaped, in 1990, from a war-torn Ethiopia where Jews were targeted, and settled in Israel, in the town of Beit She’an. My fondest memories are of gathering around the dinner table, talking about our days and laughing at my father’s jokes. I was too young to realize the realities of being a refugee and the racism around me. I was in a naive reality, before the horrors of the world were to enter my life. My father got sick. I was around 10 years old when I heard him cry for the first time. I didn’t understand why, but the more I listened carefully, the more I started to hear him. He repeated one name so often that I had to ask someone in my family who it might be. It was his nephew, who was killed in front of my father by agents of the Derg junta as my father watched. The world around me shattered. I learned that the world is a cruel place, and that there are people who are meant to suffer unfathomable things when they don’t deserve it because of disconnected leaders with selfish agendas. I was overwhelmed and overjoyed, then, to see how the world came together in condemning and isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he is doing to Ukraine. The way Israel and the world acted so quickly to help Ukrainians to escape, and to help others to fight the war alongside them, was nothing short of extraordinary. When people started to advocate for Ukraine, I joined. I changed my profile picture on social media to the Ukrainian flag. A few days later, however, someone from my Ethiopian community asked why I didn’t post the Ethiopian flag, when the government there has recently and regularly targeted civilians in a 16month-old war against rebellious forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. I was ashamed. I had done what many white people do: I had brushed off what happened to my people, to Africa, to the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Why does the survival of one country matter more than another’s? Why does one group of people have more value than another? When I realized my mistake, I felt rage and the urge to do something about it. I started to do research, make phone calls, ask questions. I reached out to everyone I knew in order to find out more about what is happening in Ethiopia and what we are doing about it. There is clear evidence of a racial imbalance in how we respond to tragedies, not just in Israel, but throughout the world. Many countries have opened their doors to the Ukrainian people, but not to refugees from Ethiopia, or other countries with populations of color. Despite a pledge to speed up its evacuations of some of the relatives of Ethiopian Israelis who remain in the country in the midst of an escalating civil war, the Israeli government seems to be making it more difficult for Ethiopian Jews to make it into Israel. Case in point: The Israeli High Court has frozen the planned entrance of 7,000-12,000 Ethiopians into the country for more than a month. Meanwhile, the same government is preparing to receive several thousand Jewish Ukrainians, and to take in 5,000 non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees. Preventing these Ethiopians from entering Israel keeps them in harm’s way while their case gets reviewed by the High Court, and it’s all because of those in Israel who question the Jewishness of those individuals. Ukrainians of any faith are rushed in, while Ethiopians of Jewish heritage are kept out. The Ukrainian conflict is a perfect example of the world’s hypocrisy. It shows how little Black and brown skin matters. The voices of other refugees
aren’t shared on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. War in Ethiopia and other countries is not as appealing to the international media. But it’s up to each one of us to be their voice. We’re seeing big companies, sports teams, celebrities and governments boycotting Russia and blocking Putin in every way they can. But my wish is that the world
Israeli officials, including Aliyah and Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata, center, greet refugees from Ukraine as they ar-
rive at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, March 6, 2022. Credit: Mucahit Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images will also treat Black and dark-skinned people the way they treat those who are white. A world, for example, that won’t stand for border guards in a war-torn Ukraine preventing brown students from fleeing the country while allowing white Ukrainians to get out. What is happening in Ukraine is appalling, and we should all absolutely unite to fight oppression and murder any time it happens, but we can’t only do this when it is appealing to our racial or economic biases. Ethiopia is worthy of our time; all suffering around the world is worthy of our time. If we cared about human life more than we care about oil and military spheres of influence and our own racial biases, there would be less suffering in this world. Let’s be a megaphone for the voices that have been drowned out.
Haftam Yizhak-Heathwood is studying childhood education at City College and serves on the Board of Directors and is co-chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Justice Committee of the Jewish Women's Foundation of New York. She’s also been involved with JCC Manhattan and Be'chol Lashon and is currently a fellow for the Jews of Color Initiative.
ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
JTA Late last year, months before a Russian missile landed near the Babyn Yar memorial outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, the site’s foundation announced plans for a new museum to honor the 33,771 Jews slaughtered there by the Nazis in September 1941. Natan Sharansky, chair of the memorial’s supervisory board, described Babyn Yar as a “symbol of attempts to destroy the memory of the Holocaust,” and that the new institution would be called the Museum of the History of Oblivion. “The History of Oblivion” would make an appropriate alternative title for Song Searcher, a new documentary about Moyshe Beregovsky, the Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist who traveled his native Ukraine in the 1930s and ’40s collecting Yiddish folk music and klezmer songs. Before World War II, Beregovsky shlepped primitive recording equipment on his visits to then still vital shtetls throughout the region. During and after the war, he found and interviewed residents and survivors of ghettos in Chernivtsi and Vinnytsia. The voices that he captured are heard on 1,017 scratchy wax cylinders that for a long time many feared were lost. The film details how they and other material were recovered and made their way to the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine (where they have been digitized). “Nobody else did any projects like this, of collecting that much music and writing that much about it,” Mark Slobin, an American ethnomusicologist, says in the film. Slobin’s collections of Beregovsky’s work were key to the klezmer revival of the past 40 years.” “Nobody did a project like that in Poland when the culture was alive. Nobody did it in these other places where the Jews lived. So it stands as a monument not just to where he worked in Ukraine, but for the whole population of Eastern European Jewish culture.” Various klezmer musicians are seen in the film, playing the songs that Beregovsky collected. Many of the songs reflect the misery of the Jewish experience under the Soviets, the Nazis and the Soviets again. Even a so-called “humorous” song – sung here by Psoy Korolenko, a puckish Yiddish singer from Russia – is a revenge fantasy about confronting Hitler after the war. The film never loses sight, however, of the incalculable human toll of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Survivors who were children during the war tell of the horrors of the forced marches, the suffering in the ghettos and the grim fate of the Jews in Transnistria, who were spared the concentration camps but were starved and shot to death by German and Romanian occupiers. There are also rare color photographs of the slaughter at Babyn Yar, one of many moments when the pictures and stories of trapped civilians and desperate refugees blur with this morning’s headlines out of Ukraine. But the history, like today’s headlines, is head-swirling as you try to keep track of the shifting occupations and the various degrees of villainy. The Soviets are celebrated as the lib-
erators of Auschwitz, but almost immediately turn on the Jews. Their targets included Beregovsky, who by this time had founded or led a slew of important and perfectly legal academic institutions in Russia and Ukraine: a Cabinet for Research on Jewish Literature, Language, and Folklore; the Archives for Jewish Folk Music; the Cabinet for Music Ethnography and Audio Recording at the Kiev Conservatory. He had even received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Conservatory, with a dissertation on Jewish instrumental folk music. By 1949, such Jewish ethnic activities were considered “cosmopolitan” by the Soviets, and Beregovsky was shipped off to Siberia, where he joined other slave laborers in building a railroad. Already a grandfather, he found some solace in leading the prison camp’s choir, and the film includes snippets of letters he wrote home to his wife Sara in Kyiv, asking her to send – what else – sheet music. Beregovsky was able to return to Kyiv after the death of Stalin, where, before cancer would kill him in 1961, he was able to arrange his private archive. What was preserved? What was lost? And what might still be lost as the current war grinds on? Much of the film was shot in Ukraine in 2019 and 2020, with the camera lingering on Kyiv’s pastel-colored academic buildings, the lazy Dnipro River and the waving wheat in the country’s bread basket. You recall this is a “pre-war” Ukraine, and then realize you are thinking back about three and half weeks. Jews have a complicated history with Ukraine. (How complicated? The filmmakers acknowledge the “generous support” of Roman Abramovich, the Russian Jewish oligarch who is being hit with a slew of international sanctions thanks to his close ties with Vladimir Putin.) Perhaps one and a half million Jews were killed there. They were the victims of the Nazis, but also of the Germans’ local collaborators. Once home to the second largest Jewish population in Europe, and still a place where over 40,000 Jews live, the country can also be seen as a vast Jewish graveyard. And yet its Jewish culture was as central to the country’s identity and self-understanding as it was to the Jews’, as scholars in the film explain. As I write this, Ukrainian culture as a whole is literally under fire. A museum was razed in Ivankiv. Kharkiv’s Central Square is a war zone. Lviv is bracing for the worst by packing sandbags around public sculptures and hiding museum collections. “The heritage war for identity means that the target is not only territory or some military or civil objects,” Ihor Poshyvalio, the director of the Maidan Museum in Kyiv, told PBS NewsHour Thursday. “The target is our historical memory, our cultural traditions, our national and individual identity, our memory and identity as a nation.” The historical memory of the Jews was only saved from oblivion by the survivors, and by a dogged little man who was rewarded for his troubles with a prison term. Song Searcher ends on a note that is neither hopeful nor despairing – or maybe it is both: Igor Polesitsky, a violist and klezmer from Florence, sits near the graves of his slain Jewish relatives in Kalinindorf, once a Jewish agricultural colony in southern Ukraine. “Look around here, there’s nothing Jewish remaining,” he says, after playing a requiem preserved by Beregovsky. “The one thing that truly remains is what was saved by Moyshe Beregovsky. So his archive is what brings us here, and we become a link with the spirit of people who are no longer with us.”
Moyshe Beregovsky is seen with various documents and sheet music collected in his vast archive of Yiddish folk and klezmer
songs. Credit: Jewish Music Forum
CONGRATULATE YOUR GRADUATE
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Love, Mom, Dad, brothers and sisters Size A | $36
Mazel Tov, Aaron!The annual Graduation Issue will publish this year on May 27, 2022. Senior photos will run in that issue and we know you’ll want to highlight the achievements of your high school graduate! Congratulatory ads are available in two sizes. Limit of 25 words.
CONGRATULATE YOUR GRADUATE ORDER FORM
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