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The Jewish Press

(Founded in 1920)

Margie Gutnik

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Annette van de Kamp-Wright

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Richard Busse

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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: wwwjewishomaha.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.

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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.

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Why we care

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor Here’s a story that hit the news last week: “A translator for a Nazi death squad died at home in Ontario at the age of 97, ending a decades-long effort to deport him from Canada for his role in the murders of tens of thousands of Jews. Helmut Oberlander, who was born in Ukraine in 1924, had long said that he was forced on pain of death at age 17 to become an interpreter for Einsatzkommando 10a, a Nazi unit. The death squad killed nearly 100,000 people, most of them Jews. Oberlander had not been accused of directly taking part in killing anyone. “In 1954, he emigrated to Canada and hid his activities during the war, eventually raising a family. His Nazi past appears to have been discovered as early as the 1960s. In the mid-1990s, the government began the process of revoking his citizenship, which succeeded after repeated appeals. He was in the midst of deportation hearings when he died on Wednesday.” (JTA.com) Trying to figure out why I find stories like these so troubling is not easy. Part of it is the photo that accompanied the news brief: it shows a young man with piercing blue eyes (I assume, it’s a black-and-white so maybe they’re green, whatever) staring into the camera. The young Helmut Oberlander looked like he came straight from central casting. Exactly who you imagine when you’re little and you first learn Nazis exist. Part of it is the news stories in Canadian papers that show pictures of him “outside his condo in Florida.” Wait, what? A Nazi who makes a good life in Canada and then retires to a condo in Florida, it’s almost cartoonish. I can’t even.

A photo of Helmut Oberlander when he was a

translator for a Nazi death squad. Screenshot There is, of course, plenty to be frustrated about when old enemies ‘get away with it’ and don’t ever really pay for their crimes. At the same time, how would they? Even if they are caught, even if they go to prison at the ripe old age of, say, 88, does it really make a difference? Perhaps that’s why I’m troubled. Nothing that happens to these people will ever even begin to make anything right. So we do we care? They are almost all gone anyway. I know; that sounds harsh, but let’s face it: there aren’t that many actual Nazis left—just as we are watching our number of Holocaust survivors dwindle with the passage of time, so to do the perpetrators disappear because nobody can live forever. Again, why do we care? Here’s why. The Holocaust, to the majority of people alive today, is history. Very few of us are left who experienced this first-hand; because of that, there is a real danger it will become just a story in a book. Something to make movies about, something to write about and discuss, sure, something to learn from, even. But a story nonetheless. With each passing decade, it becomes less real, more abstract. And when that happens, we lose the sense of urgency, the understanding that as human beings, we have the capacity to let things go horribly wrong. I think it is that enormity, that calamity, those sheer numbers of dead and that unbelievable cruelty we continue to wrestle with—and when that becomes more fictitious in our collective minds, we absolutely run the risk of letting it happen again. Remembering the Holocaust and all its accompanying atrocities is important because of that sense of urgency. It should not become less ‘hereand-now’ simply because time has passed. It should remain as prominent in our collective consciousness as if it happened yesterday. And if putting an old Nazi on trial and in jail helps us remember that, then good. If said Nazi dies a peaceful death before there can be any reckoning, it’s a shame. Not because we are vengeful, but because the crimes he committed, the atrocities he watched and did nothing to stop, are real. They are not to be treated as stories in a history book.

Shmita is Judaism’s sabbatical year. It can be a model for tackling climate change and inequality.

SEN. MEGHAN KALLMAN AND RABBI LEX ROFEBERG

JTA We are in an era of multiple interlocking crises. From record-breaking heat waves to wildfires to water shortages, from rising authoritarianism to a pandemic rampaging across the world, it is clear that, to survive, human beings will need to make urgent, major changes to how we live. Bold policy proposals already exist to address these problems, both nationally and in different states. Additionally, we — one of us a politician, the other a rabbi, and both progressives — want to suggest another possibility, gleaned from Jewish tradition: the ancient idea of shmita, the sabbatical year, which can guide our work in this urgent moment when everything we do matters. Both of us are millennials, and therefore have come of age under the worst inequality since the Gilded Age — exacerbated and symbolized by a student and healthcare debt crisis. The disastrous effects of climate crisis, extinctions, displacement and environmental degradation are threatening to turn life into a nightmare for most on the planet. These problems can be traced to a global obsession with unending growth. Our only chance to avoid that is to drastically reenvision our society and its priorities. Both of us are also, in particular, Jewish millennials. We have, in different ways and at different points in our lives, felt called to participate in Jewish communities of learning, prayer and communal gathering. Despite our involvement in those spaces however, neither one of us learned of shmita’s existence until adulthood. It is time for our Jewish spaces, around the world, to re-prioritize this sacred ritual, and apply its wisdom in concrete ways to our own times. The word “shmita” is observed every seven years. The shmita year began several days ago, on Rosh Hashanah. “Sabbatical” tends to refer to respite from work, typically in a university context. But the shmita year is slightly different. It is a collective sabbatical, a radical recalibration of society as a whole, in order to align it with principles of justice and equity for human beings and for the lands we inhabit. Shmita offers a framework for how we might enshrine seemingly individual choices as social values. The shmita year has two major components. The first is that it serves as a rest for land: Just as humans get to observe a sabbath once every seven days, the land that we inhabit gets a sabbath, too. In biblical times, it meant that the land should lay fallow for a

An oil derrick near farm fields in Oklahoma. Credit: Sarah Nichols/Flickr Commons year, and the gleanings left for the needy and even animals. Through shmita, our relationship to land can shift from one of control and domination to one of appreciation and interdependence. Clearly, such lessons are applicable to this moment as well. Shmita’s other major component is that debts are forgiven. This is done to address financial inequities that grow over time, and to enable everyone to have the opportunity to thrive. Debt forgiveness every seven years disrupts wealth-hoarding and provides relief to those struggling to meet their basic needs. Shmita approaches justice expansively. These ideas can be, and should be, used in practice — not just in our ancient texts, and not just aspirationally. For instance: we could forgive debts, and change the systems that cause such terrible indebtedness. Two-thirds of contemporary U.S. bankruptcies are over medical issues and medical debt; we must make healthcare free and universal to solve this problem over the long term. Collectively, U.S. college students owe nearly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt; President Biden could and should forgive up to $50,000 per borrower in federal student debt through executive action. Over the medium term, we must make public colleges and universities free, to avoid re-creating the same problem — something that our home state of Rhode Island is already on its way to doing. This year, its General Assembly permanently enacted RI Promise, the free tuition program at the Community College of Rhode Island. The idea of shmita can also guide us in acting to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Shmita proposes that for a year, humans must avoid treating land simply as a means to our ends; we must not think in terms of limitless expansion, but rather in terms of sustainability and rest. Leaving the land fallow rejects the notion that our planet, and its resources, exist only to serve us. Our state’s Act on Climate bill sets legally binding targets for emissions reductions; now we must act urgently to meet them. Measures like mandating net-zero emissions in energy generation, a critical move that passed only the Senate this session, are crucial first steps. We need to rebuild our food systems, and expand public transit and clean energy production. Neighborhoods are building community gardens while offering training for formerly incarcerated people, rethinking financial systems and experimenting with basic income. Communities and legislatures are mobilizing around these issues, but we need more action, faster, and at every level. The choices we make now will determine the survival of millions within the next few decades. We must seek out every strategy available to us as we take on the challenges that threaten the inhabitants of our country, other countries and our planet. That includes strategies anchored in ancient wisdom, like the shmita year. We need to act collectively, for everyone’s health. Because a society that takes care of itself and its most vulnerable is one that is, quite simply, the only moral option.

State. Sen. Kallman represents District 15 in the Rhode Island State Senate. Rabbi Lex Rofeberg is the Senior Jewish Educator for Judaism Unbound.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

JOE WOLFSON

JTA Between 2008 and 2011, one of the ways I survived in yeshiva was The Wire, HBO’s groundbreaking police drama. Tosafot and Rambam throughout the day, Brother Mouzone, Avon Barksdale and McNulty late at night. Our beit midrash had a main lower part and an upper part up some steps. These were the low rises and the high rises. The fish pond in the garden was the docks. When one of my rabbis asked me about my dating life, the scene of imprisoned Avon asking young Marlo how things on the street were going came to my mind. I responded as Marlo did: “It’s all in the game.” I can own my weirdness, but I wasn’t alone. A friend who had attended elite private schools and universities in the U.K. before moving to Israel to work in tech his life was about as far removed from the Baltimore ghettos as possible. He told me he loved The Wire so much because “I can just relate so well to the characters.” Ridiculous and outrageous as this may be, it’s a testament to the unique brilliance of “The Wire.” I can only assume that if Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews responded this way to The Wire, then other cultural subgroups were similarly riveted. To call it the greatest TV show of all time is too simplistic. It’s a strong competitor for the most powerful presentation and trenchant critique of inner-city America — as relevant now as when it first came out. Where The Sopranos is a microscopic focus over five seasons of a single individual, The Wire has a cast of hundreds. My havruta at Cambridge, an English literature student who first introduced me to the show, made the astute observation that The Wire can be usefully compared to a Dickens novel in which the central character is the city of London. The central character in The Wire is the city of Baltimore. Yet even amid all this brilliance, one character especially stood out. Omar Little, a frightening stick-up artist who nevertheless lived by a code of honor, stole nearly every scene in which he appeared. The actor who played Omar Little, Michael K. Williams, died last week on the eve of Rosh Hashanah at age 54. Years after the show aired, I had the privilege of getting to know Williams. In 2015, I began working as a rabbi at New York University’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life. Downtown Manhattan boasts more than its fair share of famous folk, and one day the man I could only think of as Omar literally bumped into me. Any desire to respect his privacy was overwhelmed by my excitement. Far from being annoyed at my intrusion, he was exceedingly gracious and even agreed to record a Shanah Tovah greeting for our community. We arranged to get coffee a couple of weeks later. Humble, gracious and curious is how I would describe that coffee. I asked a few questions about The Wire. I told him how many Jews were obsessed with the show and completely baffled him when I showed him the brilliant Omar Omer counter. He told me about his family, and his plan to spend Thanks-

giving with his mother, siblings and wider family. I told him about my mother-in-law who was fighting cancer. I told him about my work with students at NYU and he told me about his nephew who had recently left jail after 20 years and the HBO documentary “Raised in the System” they had made together focusing on the school-to-prison pipeline. He wanted to find audiences for the documentary’s message. I wanted to find a way for our community to think seriously about criminal justice. We decided to work together. Few of the tributes in recent days have focused on Michael’s work as an activist, but I am reasonably confident that if he could choose one of his works that people would watch in the aftermath of his passing, it would be “Raised In The System.” Shortly before Passover, in the spring of 2019, the Bronfman Center and the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus at NYU hosted Michael for a viewing of the documentary and a panel discussion. It’s impossible to watch the documentary and not feel broken-hearted over the lives of beautiful young people who get sucked up within the prison industrial complex. In its 45 minutes, the documentary takes a viewer from being an outsider to the issue to a passionate believer that incarceration rates are a national priority issue which must and can be fixed. Yet the stars of the evening were not Michael and the documentary, but the guests he brought with him to tell their stories. Dominic Dupont, Michael’s nephew and documentary partner, had been released recently following two decades behind bars for murder. He said he “treated prison like a university,” attained counseling qualifications and became an inspiration to other prisoners in helping turn around their lives. Derrick Hamilton, who spent 27 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, taught himself law while inside and overturned his conviction — and those of many of his wrongfully convicted fellow inmates. Dana Rachlin, a young Jewish woman and a frequent collaborator with Michael, came along with a dozen black teenagers whom she referred to as “her kids.” Dana had founded a charity that worked with kids at the schools in Brooklyn with the highest school-to-prison graduation rate. Her work sought to break this pipeline and had achieved remarkable success. Those people I have been privileged to know, such as Michael, for whom every day is a challenge, show us the truth that we would all do well to remember, that teshuvah is not something that is “achieved,” a destination arrived at. Rather teshuvah, like the recovery from addiction, is an ongoing process and struggle that is never over but requires constant work and regular re-examination. As Michael went through many struggles, he simultaneously used his story, fame and innate brilliance to help others. And he did this with humility and a smile. No matter how great Omar Little is, Michael K. Williams was infinitely greater. May his memory be a blessing.

Joe Wolfson is the rabbi of the Orthodox community at New York University and received the Jewish Week's 36 Under 36 honor in 2020 for his COVID relief work.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

This article was edited for length. Read the full story at www.omahajewishpress.com.

Rabbi Joe Wolfson, left, and Michael K. Williams brought the actor's prison documentary, Raised in the System, to NYU's

Bronfman Center in 2019. Credit: Wolfson

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