Uncategorized
This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need
(New York Jewish Week) — At a warehouse in Borough Park, thousands of apples were waiting to be taken off two 18-wheelers, as dozens of volunteers were hard at work putting groceries into bags.
The scene was one part of a massive $1.5 million operation undertaken every year by Masbia, an Orthodox organization that helps provide kosher food for low-income people, to distribute food for Passover to 10,000 families.
But this week, the Passover initiative differed from those of previous years. That’s because most of the people in the warehouse were migrants, the majority of whom were bused to New York from Texas during the past year. Because they are undocumented, they lack work permits, and for many of them, working in Masbia’s warehouse is their first job in the city.
Masbia was one of many organizations to welcome migrants who came from Texas when they arrived at the Port Authority last year, providing them with new shoes to replace pairs that may have broken down during long treks through jungles and other dangerous areas. The group’s executive director, Alex Rappaport, sees employing a group of migrants as another way to help them find their footing in the city.
“Sometimes, you need to turn over every stone to find a way to help people,” Rappaport told the New York Jewish Week.
Passover is the busiest time for Masbia, with hundreds of pallets of food coming in daily to the organization’s three warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. At Masbia’s Borough Park location, boxes of potatoes and onions lined the sidewalk and stretched down the block. Inside the garage were piles of other Passover goods, stacked two stories high. Volunteers were busy picking produce off the shelves and putting it into bags for delivery drivers who were waiting near the entrance. The operation starts in December, and food distribution begins two weeks before Passover, which starts next Wednesday night.
“These people should have been given work permits,” Rappaport said. “They’re here, ready, willing and able to do beautiful work.”
Masbia CEO Alex Rappaport in front of a truck full of apples in Borough Park, Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Rappaport combined the work with a touch of advocacy: Some of the volunteers working alongside the migrants were Jewish high school students, and Rappaport overheard one of them say that “illegal immigrants” were working there. He gathered high schoolers together and began to hold court.
“These people who are working are asylum seekers,” Rappaport told the teens. “They are fully designated as an asylum seeker, meaning to say, they are fully legal, because they have a day in court.”
Rappaport went on to discuss how if a person jaywalks, they are technically breaking the law, but are not referred to as “an illegal.”
“There’s never a person that turns into ‘an illegal,’” Rappaport said. “The term is just a very bad term. A person might not have documents, but these are people coming from the border who are looking for a new future. It’s an opportunity. They asked for asylum.”
The opportunity Masbia is providing comes via a partnership with La Colmena, a nonprofit that helps find jobs for day laborers, domestic workers and low-wage immigrant workers in from Staten Island.
Kimberly Vega, the workforce manager of La Colmena, told the New York Jewish Week that the group saw “an influx of asylum seekers” that began in August and is still ongoing. Vega has a list of 190 workers looking for jobs. Masbia provided work for 15.
“We’re facing this crisis at the moment,” Vega said. “We have the amount of workers, but we don’t have the jobs. They face all these challenges because they don’t have a permit or any documentation, so we’re very thankful for this opportunity that came up through Masbia.”
Vega added that many of the workers are staying in homeless shelters provided by the city in Staten Island. Many of the workers drop their kids off at school in the morning, then come to Brooklyn to work throughout the day. “They got shipped on a bus, arrived here and were transported to a shelter,” Vega said.
According to NPR, it’s estimated that up to 50,000 migrants were moved to New York over the past year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, called Abbott’s actions “inhumane.”
In a New York Post op-ed published last August, Abbott wrote that Adams was hypocritical for calling New York a sanctuary city, then complained about the new arrivals.
On Twitter, Adams’ press secretary Fabian Levy wrote that the mayor is “welcoming asylum seekers with open arms.”
Vega said the migrants working at the Masbia warehouse were being paid based on a law that has been used to help undocumented workers earn income. According to the State Department of Labor, nonprofits may give volunteers stipends or reimbursements. Therefore, Vega said, even though a migrant worker is only a volunteer, they can still be paid by a nonprofit organization. Masbia and La Colmena would not disclose how much the workers were being paid.
Asylum seekers working at a Masbia warehouse in Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Gledys, 30, a migrant working at the warehouse, told the New York Jewish Week that she came to New York from Venezuela after being bussed here from Texas last October.
Gledys, who did not give her full name for fear of her family being harmed, said through a translator that when she was living in Venezuela, “There’s a certain political view that everyone has to have.”
“If you even think differently, you can’t even speak amongst your community, because then they will turn on you,” Gledys said. “My husband was a police officer there, and because of that reason, we had to leave.”
When she arrived in New York, Gledys said she was “hit with the reality that it’s hard to find a job because you need certain permits.”
“I’m working really hard [at Masbia] and hoping this will open my doors,” Gledys said. “They’ll be able to see that I’m a hard worker and [I will] gain experience for more opportunities to open up.”
She added that she was thankful that her children were able to begin attending public school only a few days after she arrived. The city also helped provide daycare for her.
“No other country has done that,” Gledys said. “It’s more than enough. I’m not suffering, and I’m grateful. I’m definitely very hopeful because now I can see a different future for my children, a different future for myself.”
Another worker named Moises, 39, who likewise did not provide his full name due to fear for his family’s safety, said he came to New York from Venezuela via Texas in January after entering immigration custody.
“During those days, we were still cuffed and I was separated from my family,” Moises said. His wife and children eventually made it to New York, and they were reunited.
He said that in Venezuela, inflation was so rampant that he was only making $7 to $10 a week.
“People are really struggling,” Moises said. “There are also a lot of political issues as well. If the community tries to step up and do a protest, you have the military stepping in and shooting directly at civilians. We’re really running away, because we were so scared.”
He said he was worried about how he was going to feed his family, but was also thankful for the help they received when they first arrived, including finding a place to stay in a shelter, and now the job at Masbia.
“I want to feel independent,” Moises said. “With a job like this, I can be more independent. I understand it’s a temporary job, but hopefully in the next couple of months, I can find something that is no longer temporary.”
Rappaport feels that there’s a connection between the migrants’ stories and the holiday they’re helping prepare for because the Jewish people were also strangers in Egypt. “The Bible says, ‘You should love the stranger, the newcomer,’” Rappaport said. “There is that idea of people making a long journey to a promised land. These people went through the jungle.”
He added, “It’s beautiful to connect the Jewish story of Exodus to this story of the challenge of the asylum seekers.
“People take their whole family and go for thousands of miles through very dangerous terrain,” Rapport said. “They must be running from something. It’s not utopia yet, but we’re celebrating some freedom. And they’re still in the middle of their story.”
—
The post This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s
“I’ve always been a stranger,” Ido Fluk told me when I met him in a near-empty conference room in a sleek, Nordic-designed hotel in Berlin this past February. It was the afternoon after the Berlin Film Festival’s world premiere of the Israeli director’s German-language film, Köln 75, a kinetic behind-the-scenes look at Keith Jarrett’s famous live album, The Köln Concert. Jarrett improvised the hour-long set at the Cologne Opera House on Jan. 24, 1975, on a substandard piano — a beat-up baby grand rehearsal piano instead of the 10-foot-long Bösendorfer Imperial he’d been promised.
The film has grossed over a million dollars at the German box office — no mean feat for a domestic production — and was nominated for four Lola awards (Germany’s version of the Oscars) including Best Picture.
Fluk, 40ish, with tousled hair and a thick mustache, stubble and round, dark-framed glasses, had a peripatetic upbringing. Born in Tel Aviv, he was raised both there and in Paris, where his family relocated for five years during his childhood. Just shy of 20, he moved to New York City to study at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He returned to Israel to shoot his first feature film, Never Too Late (2011) about a young Israeli man who comes home after eight years in South America and takes a road trip in his 1985 Volvo through the country he left behind. It holds the unusual distinction of being the first crowd-funded Israeli film and won the main prize at the Fribourg Film Festival. Fluk shot his next film, The Ticket (2016), about a blind man who regains his vision, in Kingston, New York. Köln 75 was filmed largely on location in Cologne.
“I’ve always been, like, moving around. So for me, it’s very natural to go to a new country to make a film,” said Fluk. “I also think it’s the story of cinema a little bit these days where art house cinema in the States is kind of a dying breed. You see more and more filmmakers from the U.S. traveling to Europe.”
“And, you know,” he added, “it’s also kind of the story of Keith Jarrett in the 70s, which is that jazz musicians were losing their audiences in the States, and they started coming to Europe, because in Europe they still found an eager audience for their work. So I could identify with that, in a way.”
Fluk was wearing a black T-shirt for the British punk rock band Idles that showed a man in a balaclava posing with a birthday cake. The image was captioned, “JOY STILL AN ACT OF RESISTANCE.” Fluk has a musical background. When he moved to New York, he played bass for “all these punk bands that never made it.” One band that sort of did was Elephant Parade, a lo-fi indie outfit that he formed with his now-partner, Estelle Baruch. They played legendary venues and festivals like CBGB and South by Southwest and even opened for Beirut.
“I’m not a good musician by any means,” he said, “but it helps you understand just how difficult what Jarrett is doing. It’s such a feat, what this man was doing in the 70s, which means driving in this tiny car, and every night showing up at a new city and playing a new thing that nobody’s ever heard before. He doesn’t think about it. He just starts playing.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, the respect that Fluk has for Jarrett (a reclusive artist, now 80, who had nothing to do with the film), the director did not set out to make a conventional biopic. Instead, the narrative and emotional center of the film, which Fluk also wrote, is Vera Brandes, the 18-year-old self-made concert promoter who, 50 years ago, signed Jarrett for the gig, sold out the venue, and convinced the reluctant pianist to perform on a subpar keyboard for the 1400-strong crowd that packed into the Cologne Opera House for the 11:30 pm concert. (The late hour was due to a performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu earlier that evening, a wonderfully strange detail that makes it into the film).
“There are a lot of movies about music that tell you the same story. It’s about the artist. It’s about his rise. There’s some complication, then there’s a comeback, there’s a big show at the end. And here was a story about the woman behind the scenes. It wasn’t a story about the artist so much as about the promoter and the invisible people behind the artist. I thought that was really interesting and fresh,” Fluk said. At the start of the shoot, Fluk invited Brandes, now 69, to visit the set, an event that he recalled as inspiring for him and the film’s team.
“She’s like a punk rock goddess from the 70s who, like, changed the world and never got a proper thank you. This was an opportunity to shine a light on her, because however good Keith Jarrett is, no Vera Brandes, no ‘Cologne Concert.’ If Keith Jarrett had the perfect piano on stage that night, the album wouldn’t sound the way it sounds, and it wouldn’t be as special as it is,” he said.
Mala Emde, a 29-year-old German actress, plays Brandes as a spirited and determined young woman striking out on her own, using her charm, enthusiasm and tenacity to navigate (and often bluff her way through) an exciting adult world that she cannot wait to enter. Emde carries the film on her capable shoulders. Jarrett, performed with brittle world-weariness by the American actor John Magaro, is another standout.
Köln 75 was in pre-production for four years and Fluk used that time to learn German. “By the time we were shooting, I already understood German. Now I can read, I can understand – I don’t like speaking it because I sound like an idiot — but it was enough for me to hear actors improvise, which was really important for me in this film, because it’s a film about improvisation and it needed to feel free,” he said. He added that Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, about the birth of rave culture in late 1970s Manchester, was a key inspiration in terms of tone and energy, calling it “the spirit animal of this film.”
Fluk didn’t reveal too much about his upcoming projects, which include an HBO series based on the bestselling non-fiction book Empty Mansions and a legal thriller about the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which Fluk described as “a really beautiful script and really important story about American Jews and the way they were perceived in America.”
With so many stateside projects lined up, can we expect Fluk to film again in Europe or Israel in the future?
“If the story I want to tell is located there? Absolutely,” he said. “I am very agnostic about territory. I have a film, and the film says where it needs to be shot, then we go there and shoot it.”
Köln 75 begins its theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York on Oct. 17. (It opens a week later in Los Angeles).
The post How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce
(JTA) — Israel has identified the remains of three more hostages following a second release by Hamas on Tuesday, bringing the number of deceased hostages in Gaza to 21.
But even as the conditions of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement were still being met, both President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that further fighting could be in the future if Hamas does not move forward with disarming — as footage from Gaza shows it is far from doing.
The three hostages whose remains were returned were Uriel Baruch, Eitan Levy and Tamir Nimrodi. Nimrodi’s death had not previously been confirmed, though Israeli authorities said there was “grave concern” about his condition. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said he had been abducted alive but was subsequently killed in an Israeli airstrike.
A fourth set of remains sent to Israel was not that of a hostage and likely came from a Gazan, officials said DNA analysis showed.
More remains could be released on Wednesday as Hamas faces calls to hold up its end of the deal struck last week, which required the return of all 48 Israeli hostages. All 20 living hostages and four deceased hostages were released on Monday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who pressed for the deal, called attention to Hamas’ delay in returning the deceased hostages in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. But he also said that the second phase of the ceasefire, in which a lasting peace and plan for Gaza’s future governance is supposed to be negotiated following the release of all hostages, was already underway.
“ALL TWENTY HOSTAGES ARE BACK AND FEELING AS GOOD AS CAN BE EXPECTED. A big burden has been lifted, but the job IS NOT DONE,” Trump wrote. “THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!”
Meanwhile, footage showed Hamas operatives emerging from hiding in Gaza and reasserting themselves in the enclave, including by executing those seen as having opposed Hamas during the war with Israel.
Trump’s peace proposal called for Hamas to disarm and not play a role in governing Gaza, but the group has not agreed to those terms. Trump said before traveling to Israel on Monday that Hamas had been given temporary approval to act as a police force in Gaza.
“Well, they are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he told reporters.
On Tuesday, he said the show of force “didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you,” because the group had targeted rivals “that were very bad.”
But both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that a long-term failure to demilitarize by Hamas could risk a return to fighting.
“They’re going to disarm, and because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. He was then pressed on how he knew the group would do something it has said it would not do.
“I don’t have to explain that to you, but if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. They know I’m not playing games,” Trump said. “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”
Netanyahu told CBS News that he understood Trump’s comments to be a version of the threats Trump made on social media that coincided with a ceasefire deal moving forward: Disarm or “all hell breaks loose,” Netanyahu said.
The Israeli prime minister said he hoped it would not come to that. “We agreed to give peace a chance,” Netanyahu said, adding, “I hope we can do this peacefully. We’re certainly ready to do so.”
The post 3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce
Israel has identified the remains of three more hostages following a second release by Hamas on Tuesday, bringing the number of deceased hostages in Gaza to 21.
But even as the conditions of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement were still being met, both President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that further fighting could be in the future if Hamas does not move forward with disarming — as footage from Gaza shows it is far from doing.
The three hostages whose remains were returned were Uriel Baruch, Eitan Levy and Tamir Nimrodi. Nimrodi’s death had not previously been confirmed, though Israeli authorities said there was “grave concern” about his condition. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said he had been abducted alive but was subsequently killed in an Israeli airstrike.
A fourth set of remains sent to Israel was not that of a hostage and likely came from a Gazan, officials said DNA analysis showed.
More remains could be released on Wednesday as Hamas faces calls to hold up its end of the deal struck last week, which required the return of all 48 Israeli hostages. All 20 living hostages and four deceased hostages were released on Monday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who pressed for the deal, called attention to Hamas’ delay in returning the deceased hostages in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. But he also said that the second phase of the ceasefire, in which a lasting peace and plan for Gaza’s future governance is supposed to be negotiated following the release of all hostages, was already underway.
“ALL TWENTY HOSTAGES ARE BACK AND FEELING AS GOOD AS CAN BE EXPECTED. A big burden has been lifted, but the job IS NOT DONE,” Trump wrote. “THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!”
Meanwhile, footage showed Hamas operatives emerging from hiding in Gaza and reasserting themselves in the enclave, including by executing those seen as having opposed Hamas during the war with Israel.
Trump’s peace proposal called for Hamas to disarm and not play a role in governing Gaza, but the group has not agreed to those terms. Trump said before traveling to Israel on Monday that Hamas had been given temporary approval to act as a police force in Gaza.
“Well, they are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he told reporters.
On Tuesday, he said the show of force “didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you,” because the group had targeted rivals “that were very bad.”
But both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that a long-term failure to demilitarize by Hamas could risk a return to fighting.
“They’re going to disarm, and because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. He was then pressed on how he knew the group would do something it has said it would not do.
“I don’t have to explain that to you, but if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. They know I’m not playing games,” Trump said. “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”
Netanyahu told CBS News that he understood Trump’s comments to be a version of the threats Trump made on social media that coincided with a ceasefire deal moving forward: Disarm or “all hell breaks loose,” Netanyahu said.
The Israeli prime minister said he hoped it would not come to that. “We agreed to give peace a chance,” Netanyahu said, adding, “I hope we can do this peacefully. We’re certainly ready to do so.”
—
The post 3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.