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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.”
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The post This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Soccer helped my family survive the Nazis. Our community has lost sight of that story’s meaning
A new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum LA should be telling my great-grandfather’s story as part of its study of soccer, Jews and the Holocaust. But it won’t, because the museum failed to internalize the great moral lesson that my family learned from surviving the Holocaust: to never value the safety of one group over that of others.
The museum describes The Beautiful Game: The Untold Story, which opened this week, as an exploration of “the deep and often overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game.” It could have been curated specifically to tell my family’s story, because it was soccer that saved them from the Holocaust.
Pavel Mahrer, my great-grandfather, was a Jewish professional soccer player for Czechoslovakia. He played for teams in Teplitz and Prague, as well as at the 1924 Olympics. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved across the Atlantic to play for the Brooklyn Wanderers and for a Jewish team, New York Hakoah. His son Jerry was born during that time; eventually, the fact that Jerry held American citizenship would save much of the Mahrer family from the Holocaust.
During the Shoah, Pavel became the star player in the league at the Theresienstadt ghetto. He once wrote to his wife, as they were imprisoned separately, “tell our boys that I played soccer again and even played well and was successful.” Soccer brought him joy during those years of total despair. He avoided transport to Auschwitz — possibly because he was a famous athlete — and eventually reunited with his family in New York after the war.
The Holocaust Museum LA exhibit doesn’t tell that story, but it wanted to. My family pulled out of the exhibit because we didn’t want our story told by an institution that we think has faltered in holding true to the back half of its stated mission of inspiring “a more dignified and humane world.”
‘Never Again’ for whom?
We had already been in contact with the exhibit curators when the museum became entangled in a public relations crisis last fall over an Instagram carousel featuring a cover image of six interlocking arms of different colors with the text: “’Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.”
Further slides added: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to remember and act.”
Finally, I thought, a Jewish institution that will stand against genocide and violence, full stop. Not just genocide and violence against Jews.
Over the past few years, I’d watched the Jewish institutions I grew up respecting make excuses for or ignore Israel’s assault on Gaza. At best, they remained silent as Israel killed innocent civilians in the name of the Jewish people. At worst, they supported Israel’s actions unreservedly.
But here was one Jewish institution that was sending the right, albeit subtle, message.
My family agreed that this was a museum that was teaching the history and lessons of the Holocaust in a way we wanted to support. We had told the museum of our interest in loaning them Pavel’s 1924 Paris Olympics jersey and photos of his soccer career for the exhibit, and grew more excited for the collaboration.
But not everyone had the same reaction to the post that we did. Comments flooded the museum’s page claiming that the phrase “Never Again” was only for Jews, and criticizing the museum for generalizing the Holocaust — as if Jews have a monopoly on being victims of genocide. I figured the museum must have been prepared for some backlash, but had decided it was worth upsetting some to show that they cared for all.
I was wrong.
The museum deleted the post, then issued an apology, calling the post “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” To us, it read as if they were apologizing for giving the appearance of caring about Palestinian lives. The apology post drew outrage as well — although not in the comments section, which was disabled.
A humane world for everyone
The apology felt like cowardice to me and my family. So we asked to meet with Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. By the time we connected with her over Zoom in October, the apology post had been deleted as well. We wanted to understand what was behind their decision to post, remove, apologize and then act like none of it ever happened.
After the meeting, we understood that the museum hadn’t expected the response to the first post; some museum staff, horrifyingly, had received death threats. But we didn’t get a good answer as to how capitulating to hateful comments and violent threats aligned with the stated mission of the museum. We were promised an updated public statement that would specifically state the museum’s humanitarian goals; but if one was ever published, I didn’t see it.
We decided that we no longer felt comfortable lending the material that told Pavel’s story to the museum. I take pride in being the descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I’m especially proud that my family has always told our story in a way that emphasizes that the safety of all peoples is and has always been intertwined. I don’t think Pavel would be proud to see his story used to help suggest in any way that Jewish lives should be valued over others.
I didn’t expect the museum to change its mind because of a thirty minute Zoom call with my family, but its willingness to, in my eyes, bend on its principles left me disheartened. If we can’t take stories of Jewish suffering and strength — like that of my family — and apply their lessons to the suffering that is occurring to this day around the world, what is the point of telling them?
I’m a soccer player myself. Every time I score a goal or make a tackle I think of how I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for this beautiful game. I feel a kinship with other players, other soccer fans, because we share that love of the game. It brings us joy, it brings us hope.
I find my family’s story compelling not just because it is a story about Jews during the Holocaust, but because it is a story about survival — a story about luck, talent and both good and terrible timing. The drive to survive, and the need to ensure others’ survival, should be universal. If the message that our Jewish institutions send is that Jewish survival matters most, who is that message for? How can we expect the rest of the world to care about our safety if we don’t do anything to prove that we care about theirs?
Dani Mahrer is a former Jewish educator who now works in renewable energy in Los Angeles.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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