Vampires and Israeli soldiers inspire former N.J. author’s latest

In the late 1800s, seeking funds to build Alabama’s Tuskegee University — then Tuskegee Normal School — the author and educator Booker T. Washington went up north to solicit help from known philanthropists. Among them was Chicago resident Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co.

“A lot of northern philanthropists were looking to help out with education in the South,” said Tracy Hayes, field officer and project manager for the Rosenwald Schools Initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In the end, she said, Rosenwald’s contribution would help not just Tuskegee, but the cause of public education throughout the south — and the nation as a whole. Through his efforts, some 5,000 schools were opened for African American children, some of which still function today.

It was an emotional, bittersweet Teaneck Holocaust commemoration this year. Perhaps it was because long-time residents Arlene Duker, who lost her daughter to Arab terrorists many years ago, and Rabbi Johnny Krug, a son of survivors and dean of student life and welfare at Frisch High School, read the family names of those who were lost in the Shoah. Among them were Backenroth, Flanzbaum, Malca, Jacobowitz, Adler, Bacall, Goldberg, Greenwald, Morris, Kraar, Taffet, Lewkowitz, Weissler, Rosenberg, Hampel, Stern, and many other familiar names — all neighbors, all second generation, all families with decades-deep roots in Teaneck, tied together by the tragedies of the Shoah and the triumph of survival.

Teaneckers have played an important role in shaping Holocaust education since 1979, so it was appropriate for Deborah Lipstadt, the keynote speaker, to talk about the Adolf Eichmann trial and the politics surrounding it. Earlier in the evening, she told The Jewish Standard that the trial 50 years ago gave the world a universal view of the Shoah, because for the first time, survivors gave testimony.

Frisch students, 650 of them, listened raptly as one of their teachers, Rabbi Jonathan Spier, grandson of Walter Spier, a survivor of the Shoah, described the moment in 2006, in Mauthaussen, that changed his life. He was on a “roots” trip with his grandfather, Walter Spier, a survivor from Marburg, Germany; his parents; and siblings. That day set him on a path to find the man who saved his grandfather’s life, because Walter wanted to say thank you.

It was a 67-year old quest that began in earnest when Jonathan went on the Internet on the anniversary of Kristallnacht 2011 to search for Capt. Mike Levy, the American captain who was Commandant of the Displaced Persons Camp in Mauthaussen. The captain made Walter his special project—providing him with clothing, preventing him from eating too much when food finally arrived, and by putting him on a train to his hometown to search for his brother—just one step ahead of the Communists. When Walter and Jonathan talked about their search at Congregation Ahavat Achim, Bergen County resident Randy Herschaft, a longtime Associated Press investigative researcher, heard about their quest and offered to help with data searches.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned and apologized in the wake of a scandal in which he lied about sexually explicit exchanges on social media outlets.

“I am here today to apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment that I have caused,” Weiner (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference Thursday at a home for the elderly in Brooklyn where in the past he has announced his intention to run for office.

WASHINGTON – From accolades like “compelling” to accusations like “Auschwitz borders” to radio silence, to label the Jewish response to President Obama’s speech on Middle East policy as diverse understates matters.

The very breadth of the Middle East policy speech — 5,600 words and covering the entire Middle East and decades of history — helps explain the wildly divergent responses from Jewish groups and opinion shapers, even among some who are otherwise often on the same page.

One could as easily pick out points for Israel — slamming the Palestinian Authority’s pact with Hamas as well as its bid for unilateral statehood — as one could the demerits — for many, the most explicit endorsement of the pre-1967 lines as the basis for future borders by any American president.

WASHINGTON – President Obama said the future state of Palestine should be based on the pre-1967 border with mutually agreed land swaps with Israel.

In his address Thursday afternoon on U.S. policy in the Middle East, Obama told an audience at the State Department that the borders of a “sovereign, nonmilitarized” Palestinian state “should be based on 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Negotiations should focus first on territory and security, and then the difficult issues of the status of Jerusalem and what to do about the rights of Palestinian refugees can be broached, Obama said.