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Rose Feiss Boulevard honors a ‘small but mighty’ maven of the South Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) — In the industrial Port Morris neighborhood in the Bronx, a 10-block stretch of Walnut Avenue bears the name Rose Feiss Boulevard, honoring the Jewish immigrant woman who lived, worked and touched the lives of many in the borough.
Rose Feiss was born in Minsk, Russia in 1901. She immigrated to the United States with her family as a young girl: first to Morgantown, West Virginia, where her father was a rabbi and shochet (kosher butcher) and then to Moodus, Connecticut. Eventually, Feiss and her family moved to the Bronx — a more circuitous route than most Jewish immigrants — where she met her husband, David, at a social club in 1922. She gave birth to their son Murray in 1926.
When Murray went overseas to fight in World War II, Feiss launched a cottage business in the South Bronx manufacturing lampshades. Feiss started StyleCraft as a way for wives and mothers to earn money and stay busy during a stressful time; during the war, the business employed around a dozen women.
Rose Feiss married her husband David in 1922. She became a naturalized US citizen in 1939. (Courtesy Jane Hersh)
“It seems like a very random act, other than the fact that my grandfather [David] owned a wire factory in the South Bronx — so he made the frames and she would bind the shades,” Feiss’ granddaughter, June Hersh, told the New York Jewish Week “She was just very industrious.”
Eventually, Hersh said her grandparents acquired a “little factory” in the South Bronx for her grandmother’s lampshade business and her grandfather’s wiring company, Associated Wire. “She was always very business-minded, forward-thinking and independent,” said Hersh, a food writer who published her fifth book, “Iconic New York Jewish Food,” earlier this year. “It’s those qualities that led her to become a force in the South Bronx. She would even make pots of food at home and travel with them on the subway so that she could feed the women who were working at the factory.”
When Murray Feiss, who is Hersh’s father, returned from his service in the Navy, he attended business school at NYU with the aim to help his parents unite their wiring and lampshade concerns and grow a formal business. In 1955, the family launched Murray Feiss Lighting in the South Bronx — it eventually became one of the largest lighting companies in the world.
And though the business bore her son’s name, Rose, whom Hersh describes as “small and mighty,” was always in the room when business decisions were made. As the story goes in her family, Rose came to work well into her 80s, where she would do her rounds on the factory floor and then retire to the couch in Murray’s office — but only to rest her body, not her mind.
As the business flourished, members of the growing family took on roles at the company — Hersh, along with her mother Dorothy, sister Andrea and their husbands Ron and Robert, all worked there. “My husband, who was co-president of the company, will never forget being in my dad’s office for a major meeting with a bank,” Hersh said. “My father and my brother-in-law and husband were making a deal with the bank and, all of a sudden, they hear my grandmother in the background — who they thought was asleep on the couch — yell, ‘Murray, you’re an idiot!’ because she didn’t like the terms of the deal.”
“That was very much like my grandmother — she was really a force,” Hersh added. “She really set the tone for the ways the women in our family interact and comport ourselves, because she was fierce — but not in a not in a harsh way, in a very determined way. She had very strong convictions.”
Hersh added that her grandmother’s strong sense of Jewish values is what allowed her to lead the company with empathy and conviction. “She was very, very proud of her Jewish heritage and her Jewish roots and she imbued us all with a sense of tzedakah,” she said. “She lived her life as a businesswoman with that philosophy.”
After her death in 1984 at age 83, Murray Feiss sold the lampshade portion of the company — which was Rose’s passion — but continued the lighting side of the business. Still, the family wanted to honor their matriarch’s rich life and legacy in the Bronx. Hersh said her brother-in-law, Robert Greene, wrote to Wendell Foster, the City Council member for the South Bronx, and Stanley Simon, the Bronx borough president, to ask if there was anything the city could do.
“She always had confidence in the people of the Bronx,” Hersh said. “Most of the people she worked with — and she always said they worked with her, not for her — were immigrants… She sent their kids to college, cosigned mortgages and dressed up as Santa Claus every Christmas for the Christmas party. She had such faith in this community.”
“This was part of her philosophy and the way she viewed her role in life: She did well and she wanted to help others do well in turn,” Hersh added.
A family photo of Rose’s descendants taken underneath the Rose Feiss Boulevard sign unveiling on June 24, 1987. (Courtesy June Hersh)
Feiss’s generosity was recognized by the city. The family — one son, two granddaughters, and four great-grandchildren — was invited to Gracie Mansion by then Mayor Ed Koch, where he signed his approval to co-name 10 blocks of Walnut Avenue, where the family’s factories were, Rose Feiss Boulevard.
Rose Feiss Boulevard was unveiled on June 24, 1987. At the ceremony, Feiss’ great-grandson, Adam, gave a speech on behalf of the great-grandchildren about Feiss’ legacy and the importance of doing the right thing, Hersh said.
“She was not the center of attention, by any means, but I think she would be immensely proud,” Hersh said of the co-naming. “My grandfather would also be exceptionally proud; he was supportive of a woman working long before most women left the home to work outside the house.”
After 50 years in business, Murray Feiss Lighting was sold in 2004 — though Rose Feiss’ legacy continues in the South Bronx today. Many of her descendants still live in the region; Hersh, who lives in Manhattan was driving in the Bronx recently and her GPS navigation told her to take a right on Rose Feiss Boulevard. “It was really cool,” she said, adding that she sent a screenshot to everyone in the family.
“Knowing my grandmother, she would be most proud that it’s a legacy for her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren and something that they can point to,” she added. “This poor girl from Minsk, with no language and no skills, came to this country and left an imprint.”
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The post Rose Feiss Boulevard honors a ‘small but mighty’ maven of the South Bronx appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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