Johnstown, Cambria County, and the Flight 93 Memorial for 9/11

This past weekend there was a free Brad Paisley concert on the hill at WVU's law school Friday night and a football game Saturday afternoon. It seemed a good time to get out of Morgantown.

My next county to visit was Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Although Johnstown is the largest city, the county seat is at Ebensburg, twenty-three miles northeast of there and one hundred twenty-one miles from Morgantown. It's one of the larger counties I'm visiting, and far enough away to merit an overnight stay. I took a toll-free way to get to Johnstown, winding through southern Pennsylvania's countryside. It took two and a half hours to go eighty-five miles. I didn't stop on the way.

I stayed with a cheaper branch of my customary motel chain, located, for once, near the center of the city. Johnstown has a central square with a fountain and a gazebo, just a few blocks from the hotel. There was also a small farmers' market at the square. The weather was warm and overcast, much the same as in Morgantown. I found a little café on the square, and had a salad for lunch.

According to the U.S. Census, Cambria County is estimated to have 136, 411 people in 2015, down from a peak of 213,459 in 1940. In 2000, the population was ninety-five percent Caucasian. Part of the decline was from heavy industry leaving the area, and part from disastrous floods in 1889, 1936 and 1977. The 1889 flood, the most famous, killed thousands of people when an earthen dam, built to create an artificial lake upstream, failed and sent water crashing into the town. Most of the city had to be completely rebuilt after that flood. The walls along the river were built after the 1936 flood, and were supposed to prevent further flooding. Still, the town flooded again in 1977.

I saw many Catholic churches in the county. There were Trump signs on lawns; not one Hillary sign. and  also signs saying "Push The Pushers Out" with a number to call to report drug transactions. Apparently, this is a big problem. There were blue ribbons on many trees. It is part of a "Teal Campaign" for ovarian cancer.

I had marked out ten of the thirty places on the National Register to visit. As usual, I didn't stick to that, because there were many of them a short walk away in central Johnstown. Here are the places I saw in Johnstown Friday afternoon:

The fountain in Central Square

The former Nathan's Department Store

A food truck at the farmers' market at Central Square

Grand Army of the Republic Hall, built for Union Civil War Veterans

Across the Conemaugh River,

The 1891 Carnegie Library, now the Johnstown Flood Museum

Community building, originally used by Cambria Iron Company

Cambria Iron  Company former offices

Cambria Iron Company factory, now abandoned

Johnstown City Hall

one of the rare streets where the houses appear to be pre-1889

View from the top of the Johnstown Incline Railroad

Johnstown Incline Railroad

The bridge leading to Johnstown's Incline Railroad

I attended synagogue Friday night at Beth Shalom, the only remaining congregation in the area. There was an exhibit in the lobby about the Jewish history of the town, and it is like small-town Jewish stories everywhere. At one time, many of the merchants were Jews, and there were three active synagogues, two of which built new buildings around 1950 in the suburbs west of town, above the incline railroad. With a declining Jewish population, the synagogues merged into one in the 1970s, keeping the newest building and letting the others go.

I headed out to that suburb at six, looking for a restaurant I found on line, and Westmont Historic District, directly atop the Incline. I couldn't find the restaurant and settled for a sandwich at a chain sub shop before heading to services. There were thirteen of us in attendance, counting the rabbi. We used a Reform siddur. Most of the people were elderly. I spoke to a few of them.

Westmont Historic District

Beth Shalom, Southmont

Saturday was to be a short day, heading out to the places in the county away from Johnstown, then leaving for home about one. I left my hotel at 8:15 on a beautiful sunny morning.  I started at the Johnstown Flood Memorial, east of the city. There was a lake, surrounded by resort home, created from the damming of the Little Conemaugh River. After a heavy rain on May 31, 1889, the dam broke and the flooding downstream destroyed most of Johnstown. The valley below the house in the picture was the lake.

This is from the visitor's center at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, run by The National Park Service.

This was the clubhouse that once sat on South Fork Lake. It is being restored

 I headed north through small towns along State Road 53.

Historic District in the borough of Portage

Portage

 

 Another National Park Service site is Allegheny Portage National Historic Site. The eastern border of Cambria County is at the peak of the Appalachians. There were steam-powered engines that pulled trains and boats over the mountains on rail lines. At the visitor center, I met a couple from Georgia. We commiserated about the election, and she told me about a senior visitors' pass for only ten dollars that gets one into National Park Service sites for free. The ranger, a young man whose last name is Rager, didn't think I was 62, bless his heart. We talked some about parks. He likes Shenandoah, which Joe and I visited. I said I liked it, but I was spoiled by Yosemite, the most beautiful place I have ever been. He said he wanted to go there, but San Francisco was high on his list because he wants to go to Amoeba Records. Small world. I asked him what artists he likes, and I, to my embarrassment, didn't recognize any of the names.

At Appalachian Portage National Historic site. This is an engine house.

 Ebensburg, the county seat, is much smaller than Johnstown, and appears to be more prosperous.

Cambria County Jail, Ebensburg

A.W. Buck House, now Cambria County Historical Society, Ebensburg, 1889 and 1903

Cambria County Courthouse, Ebensburg

Beach at Prince Gallitzin State Park

Prince Gallitzin Park, according to Wikipedia, "is named for Demetrius Gallitzin, a Russian nobleman turned Catholic priest who was instrumental in the settlement of Cambria County." The park is at the northern end of the county.

By 1 P.M. Saturday, I was just finishing up in Ebensburg. I still wanted to see the mall east of Johnstown, and the campus of University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown. And there was a car show at a church near the college campus and a "town center" development, all on the way home.

I went to the mall, called "The Galleria." It's like Morgantown's mall, only many of the stores have closed. I had a dish of chicken teriyaki served by a Vietnamese women who called me "darling" and "sweetie." I took a few minutes to check out the college campus, and, yes, the car show. The car owners, as at other shows, are all crazy men my age.

On the campus of The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

1961 Plymouth painted in honor of those killed on Flight 93 on 9/11

1968 Plymouth Fury

1965 Plymouth convertible

1959 Ford Skyliner Hardtop-Convertible

I had read in the paper in Johnstown about ceremonies at the site where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11 near Shanksville, in Somerset County, just south of Cambria County. It was almost on the way home. The paper said there would be a candle ceremony Saturday. That, as it turns out, was private, and after dark. Still there were many people there that day to remember and commemorate.

The field where the plane crashed was a surface coal mine, "reclaimed," meaning covered with dirt. Nothing was growing there. The monument, by architecture firm Paul Murdoch Architects, sits at the top of a low hill. The landscape design, a field of wildflowers on the old mining site and forty groves of forty trees (still incomplete) is by Nelson Byrd Woltz. There is parking at the bottom of the hill, then a walkway leading to a white wall, with marble slabs commemorating each of the forty people on the plane. There is a low wall left of the walkway, with only a boulder marking where the plane crashed, creating a fifteen foot deep crater, now covered. The visitor center is up the hill, on a winding path from the memorial.

The visitor center across the field of wildflowers

The memorial wall

Mark Bingham was the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped organize the passengers to fight the terrorists

A closer look at the visitor center

The walkway to the visitor's center

I didn't stay long at the top. It was hot out, and I wanted to get home. I looked at some of the exhibits. Much of it was old television news shows with the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the newscasters obvious horror. It was hard enough to watch fifteen years ago; I didn't really want to see it again. 9/11 is not something I dwell on, and had I not been so close, I might never have gone to that memorial. I left there at 5 P.M. and was home, eighty-two miles away by 7. Traffic in Morgantown was still backed up from the football game.

Mallard Fillmore and Why My "Red Is Up."

It's hard enough to read Morgantown's Dominion-Post these days, now that they have added Michelle Malkin as a columnist, in addition to Cal Thomas, both flame-throwing fascists, calling themselves "conservatives." They also run Bruce Tinsley's "Mallard Fillmore" on their editorial page every day. It just "gets my red up" as my new hero, Trae Crowder, likes to say. Last week, I had enough of Tinsley and wrote a letter to the paper. They haven't published it yet, and I was going to wait until Sunday to see if they found room. They usually do publish my letters, eventually.

There was a letter today from Pastor Terry Hagedorn, of Calvary Baptist Church in Reedsville, West Virginia. Reedsville is located fifteen miles southeast of Morgantown, in Preston County. It had a population of 593 as of 2010, and is 98.5% white according to the census. Pastor Hagedorn's letter is about the football player who won't stand for the Star-Spangled Banner.. He claims racism is in the past. He would know, living in a virtually all-white community in a rural area.

I'm so angry about what goes on politically, especially here in West Virginia, but nationally as well. I protested last week at Mylan Pharmaceuticals' factory a few blocks from our house,After lobbying to have Epi-Pens in all the schools, they raised the price from under $100 for a pack of two to $600. The CEO raised her own pay from five million to sixteen million. I also marched with WVU's Black Students' Union and NAACP  to protest targeting of African-American males by some policemen.

Yesterday, both the Morgantown and Charleston newspapers ran a two-page ad from the CEO of Dominion Gas about why workers were locked out in a labor dispute. The dispute is because the company, highly profitable, wants to eliminate retirement and pension benefits for new hires.

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce invited the Democratic and Republican candidates for Governor to their annual conference. The Chamber has previously lauded the Republicans in our state for cutting business taxes, eliminating prevailing wage, and implementing "right-to-work" which means no one has to pay union dues, even though the union is still obligated to represent all workers. This is the kind of thing Republicans like, but our Democratic candidate, Jim Justice, attended this conference and said he is with the Chamber of Commerce. And our Democratic candidate for Attorney General, Doug Reynolds, voted for a "religious freedom" bill in the Legislature this year, which would have allowed discrimination against LGBT people. He also voted for a twenty-week abortion ban, which passed, and wants to continue to defy Federal guidelines allowing transgender people to use the restroom that fits their identity. He introduced a bill in the Legislature to demand that West Virginia colleges and universities allow concealed weapons on campus. Justice and Reynolds are the Democrats. The Republicans are worse.

Back to Mallard Fillmore. In last Thursday's cartoon, August 31, Tinsley shows Hillary Clinton saying "...And if you think being gay is a crime... or that women are chattel... or that Jews are vermin... Donald Trump is such a bigot... (new balloon) ... that he doesn't want you to come to his country.!" There is a pic of Trump.

Here's my response:

"Bruce Tinsley, in his cartoon "Mallard Fillmore," is often offensive. His cartoon published Wednesday, August 31, hits a new low. As a Jew, a gay man, and the son and brother of women, I feel compelled to speak about this. Although Tinsley does not explicitly say it is Muslims Trump plans to keep out of the United States, the meaning is obvious from the context and from Trump's own statements.

The Republican Party has never been any kind of friend to gay people. At the National Religious Liberties Conference in Des Moines last November,Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal, all contenders for the Republican nomination for President, appeared with Kevin Swanson, a pastor who has called for the death penalty for gay people. just not yet, but when America embraces the "one true religion." It's not Muslims I'm afraid of. Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, claim they will overturn same-gender marriage.. They have opposed every kind of law proposed to give LGBT people equal rights in employment and housing.

Locally, Republican legislators have supported "Religious freedom" bills that allow discrimination against LGBT people for allegedly religious reasons. It is not the Islamic community that has asked for these laws. The Dominion-Post often publishes hate-filled letters aimed at LGBT people, sometimes signed "Pastor."

Jewish journalists who have covered the Trump campaign have been bombarded with anti-Jewish memes and threatened with death by Trump supporters. Trump's comments to and about women have been ugly and stupid.

I have attended interfaith meetings which have included Islamic, Christian and Jewish leaders. One of these, called to support resettling Syrian refugees in the United States, attracted several hundred people, of many religious faiths, right here in Morgantown. After the shootings at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Islamic Association of West Virginia issued a statement in support of the gay community,

Maybe your newspaper hasn't noticed, but there is a large Islamic community here in Morgantown, and to allow someone to smear that entire community is despicable. As the only local daily paper in town, you should know better. "


I ran for office to change the political culture of West Virginia. Between Donald Trump's wide-support here, the greed-based oil, gas and pharmaceutical industries located here, and the Chamber of Commerce that they support, and a Democratic Party that lost control of the state by not standing for anything substantive, and whose leadership continues to block progressives from power, I'm not sure their is hope for this state.


It may be hopeless, but I support Charlotte Pritt and Michael Sharley of The Mountain Party for Governor and Attorney General respectively in the upcoming election. And I will continue to protest greed-based corporations in favor of workers and the environment. And yes, I support Colin Kaepernick's right to protest by not standing for "The Star-Spangled Banner."

My Sister, Calvert County and The Millennials.

This should be three posts, but it will be one.

My fiftieth monthly county is Calvert County, Maryland, south of Annapolis between  Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent River estuary. The county is adjacent to Prince Georges County, where my sister Robin has lived since attending the University of Maryland a few decades ago. My plan was to combine trips, as I try to see my sister over the summer.

Robin and I get along well generally. She is careful and meticulous, I am sloppy and more reckless. Since she has lived in her house, I've lived in three different cities and eight different homes. She is the only one who really understands what our parents were like and who remembers our grandparents. We both nap in the afternoon, take medication before we can eat breakfast, and watch our weight.

I try to visit the Garrison Forest Veteran's Cemetery in Owings Mills, where our parents are buried, every year before Rosh Hashana (this year in early October). Robin and I  visited in the morning, then had lunch at Suburban House, an old-fashioned Jewish deli in Pikesville, near where we grew up, and a place we hung out in our younger years. The restaurant moved to a new shopping center a few years ago. We asked the waitress where she went to high school. She attended Milford Mill a few years after my sister. The manager (City College '68) came over to chat us up. He wants things to stop changing, and lamented that the 1960s in Jewish Baltimore are gone. There was a tight-knit community that no longer exists. Robin and I both fled for our lives when we had the chance. We thought we saw our parents' friends at the restaurant, but we soon realized the people we saw were our age.

I visited two millennial couples in the Washington area, my nephew Evan and his fiancée Kellie in Arlington, and my friend Neal, who I met here in Morgantown, and his new wife Natasha, in Silver Spring. I've read about how millennials are likely to be urban dwellers, use transit instead of driving, and worry about making a living. Evan and Kellie have a small apartment in a newer building with a fitness center and pool. They share a car, live a block from Arlington's courthouse, take the subway to work and use Uber when they need  an extra car.

Neal and Natasha live in an older building, which means their apartment is slightly larger than Evan and Kellie's, but parking is outside the building and there are no amenities. They are near the center of Silver Spring, a location with shops and restaurants and the American Film Institute.  The proximity to AFI alone makes me envious. Still, I would be uncomfortable in a cramped apartment like theirs.

Both couples are paying off student loans, and find money tight. I feel their frustration. I lived in central Baltimore in my 20s, had a small student loan from grad school, paid about 20% of my earnings for rent and didn't own a car. I didn't make a lot of money, but I was able to live comfortably on what I had. Young people today can't do that.

I brought a light jacket with me, because I remember that evenings are usually cool in Maryland the last week of August. Apparently, that is no longer true. Temperatures remained well above average the entire time I was there. Perhaps this is the "new normal."

Sunday was my day to visit Calvert County. Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington becomes State Road 4 in Maryland. It is joined by State Road 2 heading south from Baltimore and Annapolis. SR 2-4 is the main road in Calvert County.

I have a college friend who grew up in Calvert when it was a sleepy agricultural area. There are towns that were destroyed by the British in the War of 1812, and for a long time, Calvert County did not seem to recover, as Baltimore and Washington became major cities. Recently, the northern part of the county has become an expensive suburb, with faux colonial mansions on acres and half-acres. To the credit of the county, they have limited commercial development to "town centres" near Prince Frederick, the county seat, Huntingtown near the center of the county, Solomons, at the south end of the county, and a few other locations. The stores were the usual grocery stores, pharmacy chains, and mattress shops.

I picked ten of the twenty places listed on the National Register to visit. Some were houses from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I used to drive up long driveways to catch a glimpse of an old country house, but I'm over that now. I saw some of the houses from a distance and didn't photograph them. I found some old houses near the ones on the National Register. There were also old churches, generally Episcopal. Maryland was founded by Catholics, and was called The Free State, because any Christian was allowed to settle there.

There isn't a lot to Prince Frederick. More interesting were Solomons and Solomons Island, at the southern end of the county and on the waterfront at the Patuxent River estuary just before it flows into Chesapeake Bay. It's a resort area with restaurants and a Tiki bar. It was crowded on a warm sunny Sunday the weekend before Labor Day. The plant life is different in the southern end of the county- more crepe myrtle than the poplars and oaks to the north. There were even palm trees in Solomons Island, much to my surprise. I asked the two young women at The University of Maryland Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the tip of Solomons Island about the palm trees, and they said they are taken out in winter and replaced in the spring. No, palm trees cannot survive the winter, even in this relatively warm part of Maryland. The laboratory is investigating changes to Chesapeake Bay: stream runoff from mountaintop removal in West Virginia, pollution from agricultural runoff, and how to restore crab and oyster beds. They told me the water is not necessarily higher than in previous times, but it is warmer, and that affects the bay's ecology.

Isaac Solomon was a businessman from Baltimore who opened a cannery for oysters in the mid-19th century. I've looked for something that says he was Jewish, but I couldn't find any written account. I assume he was Jewish.

I hadn't been everywhere i wanted to be when I got to Solomons Island, separated by a barely noticeable creek from the mainland.  I decided to take the rest of the day off, walk around and have a chocolate ice cream cone, in the way many men would have a beer. It was about 70 miles back to my sister's house from Solomons Island, with heavy traffic despite it being a late Sunday afternoon. I imagine rush hour is not pretty.

I came back to Morgantown Monday in time for Joe's birthday Tuesday, and had to explain my dark tan to my dermatologist, who has warned me about being out in the sun, Wednesday afternoon.

Here are the pictures:

All Saints' Church, Sunderland, founded in the 1600s. The present building is from 1774

Lower Marlboro ( along the Patuxent River (formerly Marlborough). Called "Lower" because Upper Marlboro is the county seat of Prince Georges County, to the north and west.

"Harbormaster's House" Lower Marlboro

Linden, Prince Frederick,  1868 with later additions, now Calvert County  Historical Society

Calvert County Court House, Prince Frederick. Probably early 20th century.  The statue is a 1920s monument to World War I soldiers.

Christ Church, Port Republic. 18th century, but remodeled in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Cove Point Lighthouse, near Lusby. The beach in Cove Point is private.

Natural gas loading facility, Chesapeake Bay near Lusby. From Cove Point. Dominion wants a pipeline, people are fighting it.

Calvert Cliffs. Many fossils have been found there. From Cove Point

Solomon House, Solomons Island, 18th, 19th and 20th century.Visitor center for University of Maryland's Environmental Research Center

Tiki Bar, Solomon's Island. The palm trees are taken out in winter

                                                    

Tourists with a perfect 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible, Solomons Island

Boating on the Patuxent River near Solomons

Looking out from Solomons Island to Chesapeake Bay

Los Angeles- August 2016

We are on a plane from Los Angeles to Washington, likely about to miss our connection to Pittsburgh tonight. We’ve seen lots of friends, eaten most of our meals at restaurants, gone hiking twice in Griffith Park, been to an evening of Israeli dancing, and worshipped at two nights of services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I met in 2005 and were married in 2008, now in a new building.

The people at the places I used to go are pretty much the same people who were there six years ago when we left, and mostly, they are doing the same things. Some people we wanted to see were on vacation, others, those who wanted their lives to be different, left town for better opportunities in the hinterlands between the Rockies and the Appalachians, much as Joe and I did. Other friends died in the years we’ve been gone, and I feel some guilt about not attending their funerals, not mourning them properly.

It took me a few days to get used to checking the traffic report, not the weather report, before going out. Every day we were there was warm and sunny, the temperature changing by what part of town we were in: cooler by the ocean, warmer in the valleys.

Maybe it is because we stayed near Beverly Hills that I noticed how many tourists were out and how few of them spoke English. Griffith Park, too, the province of gay men out looking for sex in the eighties, was now full of French, German, Chinese and Japanese tourists snapping pictures of the Hollywood sign. Years ago, the back roads in the park were closed to traffic, and there was a disastrous fire sometime between 2007 and 2009, years blending together in my mind. The only help to my memory is which of the eight apartments I lived  in when something happened during my twenty-five years in Los Angeles.

We had breakfast yesterday morning at Brooklyn Bagels, on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, then went shopping on that street for gifts for our catsitter in Morgantown and for Reva, my dance partner, who lent us a bedroom and bathroom for all but the first night of our stay. Beverly Hills is what I call “Mythological Los Angeles.” The people are all thin and beautiful, everyone drives a Porsche, Lamborghini or an exotic BMW you haven’t seen before. The women wear gorgeous clothes, jewelry and shoes, and the men are muscular with clear, unlined faces and perfect hair. Celebrities line the streets daring you to look at them, or smiling at you in the hope you will recognize them. We saw 82-year-old Larry King at Brooklyn Bagels and scores of glamorous people and cars.

All of our friends who own homes say they could not afford to buy their homes now. And those with jobs spoke of companies trimming their health-care benefits. These are problems across the country, but particularly in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Homeowners are secure. For renters, it’s more difficult, even though there is rent control in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

The more “real “ Los Angeles is the Spanish-speaking and African-American town, where people work in restaurants or at the airport, and kids go to public school. The people who teach in those schools also struggle to maintain some semblance of a middle-class life.

Our friends are outrageous by the standards of Middle America. One, from an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto, works hard, then goes out dancing every night of the week. Our gay friends from Great Outdoors, the hiking group, reminded us of how stiff and careful we’ve become in public.

Despite all these complaints, I am comfortable in Los Angeles. It seems  home-like to me. Being Jewish is certainly not an issue, slightly darker than Northern European is the norm, gay is not a big deal. And of course, our friends.  We have made friends in Morgantown, but they don’t go back decades.

I loved being out with my people, soaking up unhealthy amounts of sunshine, mingling with Orthodox Jews, spiritual and mostly more open gay people. We ate twice at The Farmers’ Market, a collection of restaurants outdoors in the Fairfax District. I used to eat lunch there every Tuesday when I lived nearby. Years later,t he same Armenian women work at Moishe’s, a stand with Lebanese- Armenian food, despite the Yiddish name. We also ate at the Brazilian barbecue, a place so good that I dream about the fried plantains. Speaking of dreams, I often spend my sleeping hours somewhere along Wilshire Boulevard, between downtown and the ocean, looking for my apartment and not remembering where it is. We drove much of Wilshire Boulevard last night, from Koreatown to Beverly Hills.

Maybe that is what Los Angeles is to me now, a dream. Hollywood and Beverly Hills are that to lots of people, but I’ve been there and done that. I don’t imagine us going back there to live, nor are we likely to live in that other dream city, San Francisco. I hope we can get back to California again. Until that time, we have remade our lives, like so many other refugees, in a new place, in our case, Morgantown.

Great Outdoors, gay mens' hiking group, Griffith Park

To ask for an interpreter, you point at your language

Brazilian barbecue at the Farmers' Market with Larry Nathenson

At Israeli dancing with our host and my dance partner, Reva Sober

The new Broad Museum of Art, downtown Los Angeles

With Rabbi Dalia Samansky, a classmate of Joe, and her husband Jason, Woodland Hills

Gregory Miller, at home in Alhambra with St. Francis (Greg is Jewish)

Factor's Deli. Pico Boulevard, with husbands Stephen Klein and Thomas Moore

Michelle Huneven and Jim Potter, in their kitchen in Altadena, which they are about to rebuild

At Ta'eem (Tasty) a Kosher Israeli restaurant on Melrose Avenue

In Griffith PArk, past the Observatory to downtown Los Angeles

Left to right: Tracy Moore, me, Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Rabbi Joe Hample at Lisa and Tracy's Wilshire Center home

Touristy picture at dusk with Joe from Griffith Observatory parking lot to the Hollywood sign

Kabob and Chinese Food A kosher restaurant with signs in English, Hebrew and Farsi (Persian), Pico Blvd.

Update: We made it to the flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and arrived home, after an 80 mile drive from the airport, at 1:20 A.M. EDT.

Tisha B'Av 5776 The Refugee Problem

I am in Los Angeles as I write this, at the home of my former Israeli dance partner,  Reva Sober. Joe and I have been visiting friends in San Francisco and Los Angeles since July 31. Last night began the fast day of Tisha B'Av, a day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, and many other tragedies for the Jewish people, like the expulsion from Spain in August 1492, or the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during The Holocaust. Joe fasts; I don't.

We attended services last night at Beth Chayim Chadashim, a mile down Pico Boulevard from where we are staying, and the place where we met just eleven years ago. We were asked during the service to write about something that made us sad - perhaps a news article we had read, or something personal. A few people read these out loud. My friend Ilene Cohen said she was worried about refugees, people who can't stay where they are, but may not have a place to go. We were supposed to add something personal to that, and Ilene did. I had also written about refugees as something that made me sad. Not just sad, but frightened.

My ancestors left Czarist Russia between 1886 and 1906. My father's parents, second cousins, came from Belchatow, now in Poland. My mother's family lived in present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. There were pogroms at the times they came, where Jews were beaten and robbed, at least, often with the cooperation of the local police. Jews who stayed in Europe, including family members, were murdered by the Germans in the decade before I was born. I don't know of any relatives in Europe.

I lived here in Los Angeles between 1984 and 2010. Refugees from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua came into Los Angeles in droves. People came from The Philipines, Jews from Russia and Iran, Armenians, Chinese and Vietnamese. I knew illegal aliens, but they were middle- class Jewish people from Israel, South Africa and Argentina. There were backlashes against the poorer, darker refugees, and the border was shut, until employers complained that they couldn't find workers. What they meant, of course, was that they couldn't find workers to work for low wages..

I felt like I was seeing New York, where my ancestors arrived a hundred years earlier. People would complain about "short, dark people with eight children" crowding Los Angeles, and I wondered if people in New York a century earlier had talked about my great-grandmother, also short and dark and with eight children. I would see people lined up at Virgil Junior High to take English at night and remember that my mother's father's parents met in an English night school class.  I still hear people say "Why don't these people learn English?" and I remember that my mother told me that her grandmother lived here sixty years and never learned English. Bubbie Glekel was married at sixteen, had two boys, and at twenty-four took them (ages three and six) to the boat to America to meet her husband, who came here first. That great-grandmother died when I was five, and I have only dim memories of her.

I've been hearing for the last year about a backlash in America against refugees coming here, particularly from Syria. Congress won't pass a reform of immigration laws, and people can be sent back to dangerous places in Mexico and Central America, separating them from their families.
Imagine living in a country where ISIS, Al-Queda and your own corrupt government are fighting, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to exert control, as well as the United States and Russia. The cruelty of what goes on there is horrifying, and we in the United States have no power but to accept refugees from the war-torn Middle East.

Of course, we are not the only country that needs to be more compassionate. I am always loathe to criticize Israel, but there are African refugees locked up there, and foreigners, if they lose their jobs, can be deported. And I read this week about asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia, who are locked away in camps in Pacific Island nations.

This is our seventh day in Los Angeles on this trip. We are in a neighborhood where many Orthodox Jews live, American-born but also from Israel and Iran. We have eaten twice at my favorite venue in Los Angeles, The Farmers' Marrket in the Fairfax District. One hears Spanish and French, Chinese and Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian and Farsi there.

I know that Los Angeles is not necessarily an ideal society. In my years working in public schools here, there were often clashes between ethnic groups, and income inequality is possibly worse here than anywhere in the United States. Still, I believe this town is less racist, more accepting of differences, than other places I have lived in or visited.

We have a spacious country. We can help people who are desperate, and still work to bring about more just and stable societies, including our own.

My prayer for Tisha B'Av is that refugees throughout the world will find a place where they can live peacefully and prosper, as my ancestors were able to do in the United States. May it come to pass, speedily and in our time.

For my grandparents, Issachar Wenglinsky and Feigie Sadowsky (Sam and Anna Wendell) and Y'hoshua Poliakoff and Chaika Glekel (Samuel Joseph and Irma Polk). 10 Av 5776- 14 August 2016