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City residents should vote yes for Prop. S

Following a recommendation from the Ferguson Report, Jews United for Justice (JUJ) established an Opportunity to Thrive Task Force. The task force chose reduction of predatory lending as its first target. As part of its advocacy work, the task force is supporting the passage of Proposition S on the March 7 ballot in St. Louis City.

Prop. S is our chance to rein in preda-tory lending, an industry that sucks mil-lions of dollars a year from our most vulnerable neighborhoods. Missouri has more payday lenders than McDonalds, Starbucks and Wal-Mart stores combined. We have the highest rate cap in the country allowing the equivalent of a 1,950 percent annual interest rate charged in two-week incre-ments of 75 percent.

If passed, this ordinance would require payday lenders in the St. Louis City to pay a permit fee ($2,500 to 5,000) to operate in the city. This money would be used by the city to implement local regulations and the fee could not be passed down to con-sumers. Payday lenders would be required to change the terms of their agreements so that the interest rate and other terms of the loan are more transparent to borrowers. They would also be required to provide a list of nonprofit alternatives for short-term lending.

This proposition is based on a simi-

lar one in Kansas City that passed and has been working well so far.

Prop. S is our chance as a city to step up. For more information, visit jujstl.org.

David Lander, PresidentJews United for Justice

Responses to cemetery desecration

The desecration of Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, which has received national attention, has personal mean-ing for me. I am not Jewish, but my wife’s parents are buried there, as are many of her relatives whose services I have attended.

The rise in such incidents since November, 2016 should concern not only Jewish Americans, but all Americans. They powerfully evidence that Donald Trump’s hateful and divisive rhetoric has empowered those who espouse such views, which his belated and inadequate response only reinforces.

February 19 was the 75th anniversary of the executive order condemning to forced detention more than 100,000 Americans whose only offense was their Japanese ancestry. The national and local Jewish community has historically resisted such appeals to fear, ignorance and prejudice. All Americans must resist them, against whomever directed.

Alan B. HoffmanKirkwood

To our dear friends in Jewish commu-nity: I am contacting you on behalf of

our community and congregation that serves mostly Bosnian Muslims. I would like to express our community’s support, as we were shocked to learn of the vandalism at the Jewish cemetery

Our whole community feels the pain you are grieving, and would like you to know that we are here to help or assist in any way we can. These are challenging times for all of us, and easiest way we can get thru them is by staying together. In recent months, both Jewish and Muslim communities have been target-ed, our buildings, organizations, ceme-teries have been vandalized, our mem-bers have been singled out. Yet, this is the time when we have to stay strong.

We Bosnian Muslims feel an obliga-tion to show you our neighborly sup-port, in the same way as it has been done between us many times before when, especially in World War II: We had to be and to work together to stay alive. As everyone else, we hope that they will catch the people responsible for this act, and that they will be perse-cuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Alija Dzekic, Board PresidentSt. Louis Islamic Center

I recently joined thousands of fellow St. Louisans to clean up the recently vandalized Chesed Shel Emeth ceme-tery, where my grandparents and many other relatives are buried. I was shocked and upset to see Vice President Mike Pence there, giving a

BY ANDREW REHFELD

Last week an estimated 2,500 indi-viduals gathered to show the world that St. Louis would not tolerate sense-less acts of violence, particularly those aimed at minorities. The desecration of Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery was a signal event for our community and the response was heartwarming.

The Jewish Federation of St. Louis is working actively with the leadership of the cemetery to support them in man-aging the unprecedented international attention that followed the event. We will be conducting security reviews with them and our other community cemeteries and making sure the dollars that were raised from multiple sources get to work as soon as possible.

Sadly, among this demonstration of unity and support there is now a terri-ble rumor circulating that the Jewish Community of St Louis is shunning contributions by the Muslim commu-nity. It is false and despicable.

Let me explain. In the wake of the cemetery vandal-

ism last week a number of fundraising efforts began, including at least two very specifically from the Islamic com-munity outside of St. Louis.

Our community is grateful for any support for a safe and secure Jewish St Louis. I have very publicly expressed my thanks in a general way for these efforts, noting the contributions by our Muslim brothers and sisters at my pub-lic remarks during the interfaith vigil in St. Louis. And I have reinforced this in every interview I have given to the media.

But it is true that the Federation did not publicly name any specific effort being undertaken on our community’s

behalf beyond the general note of thanks.

Why — at this point — did we only thank these efforts in the broadest terms without specifically mentioning the names of the other charities?

Sadly, one common phenomenon of crisis fundraising is that it is a market-place of deceit. False charities open up that have no oversight to take advan-tage of people’s desire to give and then scam them in one way or another. The Jewish Federation should not promote any specific effort until they have established a clear relationship and partnership, and can vouch for the funds being raised in their name.

Now that the intensity of the crisis has passed the Federation is in the pro-cess of responding to other groups to help them get their donor’s funds to work. I have been in contact already with prominent efforts in the Islamic community outside of St Louis. Our conversations always begin with the strongest words of thanks and grati-tude and a presumption that these efforts are honest and above board.

And this process works both ways. We are now working through a process to help these charities manage the trans-fer of funds in a manner that maintains their confidence in us, to make sure that they know that their dollars go to real projects in St Louis as well.

This is what responsible philan-

thropic management looks like on both sides.

We will continue to work together in a spirit of collaborative partnership with any group. And we will be delighted to announce and celebrate those gifts and efforts—very publicly by name—when this process is completed.

What we do not need is to turn a moment of tremendous unity into divi-sion because of an uncharitable response from those who insist on viewing others with suspicion and always presuming the worst in peo-ple’s motivations.

Let me state once again how grateful our community is to all support—from the thousands who came to clean and pay respect, to the multiple funding efforts from other Muslims, Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and many many others. We will continue to build strong partnerships with all who seek to find common ground and in a man-ner that is responsible and respectful of all. That is what last week was about. And that is what we must con-tinue to do.

Last week the St. Louis region came together in a remarkable show of unity, to stand against anti-Semitism, bigotry, and racism. We “named it” and called it unacceptable. And we “condemned it” and committed to not tolerating it. Now we must “do something about it.”

As a first step, let me suggest treat-ing each other with charity, avoiding the constant speculation about motives, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt. That is a good way to create a foundation on which the collective purpose to which we all joined last week might be continued for a very long time ahead.

Build on unifying response to cemetery ordealCOMMENTARIES

See MINK, page 20

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

BY ERIC MINK

I think it was the violence that got to me, the sudden consciousness that a rampage of deliberate violence had taken place sometime in the past three days on the ground where I now walked. It had left its mark in plain sight.

I actually staggered − just a little, just for a second — when I saw the first group of fallen tombstones. I had to steady myself against a monument close to me, one that had not been attacked, that was not among the 154 pushed, pulled, kicked, rocked, shouldered or dragged to the ground, that was not one of the 16 damaged so badly they require repair or replacement.

When staff workers arrived Monday morning (Feb. 20) at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, a place where people pray that the dead may rest in peace, they found the aftermath of violence. It had not been there when they left at 4 p.m. the Friday before.

The cemetery stayed closed Monday so officers with the University City Police Department’s Bureau of Investigation could survey the crime scene and gather evidence. A helicopter for KTVI-TV (Channel 2) flew over in the afternoon and broadcast images from above, but the pic-tures, startling as they were, lacked depth, perspective and impact. None of those qualities was lacking at ground level Tuesday morning.

I met my sister at Chesed Shel Emeth an hour or so after it opened. It was the first of my four visits that week. Like most of the other people we encountered, our primary mission was to see if violence had been done to the burial sites of relatives. Our mom and dad, two of four grandparents, two of eight great-grandparents and many aunts, uncles and cousins are buried there. The cemetery is barely a mile from our childhood home and only half that distance from where we went to high school.

The headstone that had been in the most jeopardy was that of our great-grand-mother Sarah Serkin (1865-1931). Although it was not disturbed, it was immediately adjacent to at least 10 toppled stones and close to many more. It could only have escaped damage by chance. The stones on the graves of our other family members, most located far from the main attack area, were spared as well.

But the other formidable granite slabs strewn on the ground and the knowledge that a violent attack had put them there tempered our personal relief. It was impossible to not feel connected with the families whose relatives’ stones had been so crudely assaulted.

With our familial mission fulfilled, I left my sister, who had been joined by one of her sons, and went to a place I’d been before near the cemetery’s eastern bound-ary. It’s an expanse of lawn with widely scattered grave makers close to the ground and fragile looking headstones, many of which were maybe 2 inches thick, 15 or so inches wide and I’d guess no more than 30 inches tall.

They are the graves of children. The ones I saw were for infants, toddlers and preteens who died at ages ranging from 3

The emotional toll of fallen headstones

Eric Mink is a freelance writer and editor and teaches film studies at Webster University. He is a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Daily News in New York. Contact him at ericmink1@gmail.com.

Andrew Rehfeld is President and CEO of Jewish Federation of St. Louis.

See LETTERS, page 23

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months to 13 years.Some of the words carved into these

stones speak of “Our little boy,” “Beloved sister” and “Our brother.” The stone of one girl, dead at age 3, reads, “Loved and sadly missed by your family.” “Darling daughter” died in the spring of 1914, eight days shy of completing her third month on Earth. The family of a 13-month-old boy who succumbed in the fall of 1926 to who knows what tragedy had the head-stone marked with a tender message — “To our own brave buddy” — and con-cluded with the promise, “Until we meet again, brave son.”

More than a few of the children’s stones were broken, but their exposed edges were well weathered, and the frac-tures might have resulted from natural causes. In a couple of instances, though, the breaks looked more recent. As recent as the weekend of Feb. 18? I don’t know. But a person doing violence in a ceme-tery and wearing decent boots would have had no trouble shattering one of these tombstones.

Troubled by that mental image, I left the field of children’s graves and started looking for my sister and nephew among a crowd that had grown considerably larger since we arrived.

From 30 or 40 feet away, I noticed a

woman walking in my direction. We happened to make eye contact and kept walking until we were standing together. I hadn’t been aware of deep sadness in my face, but she apparently detected it even at a distance, just as I had sensed something similar in hers.

Without a word, she opened her arms, and we embraced. Several seconds later, we stepped back and asked about the headstones of our respective loved ones. I told her mine were OK; she said she hadn’t found the ones she was looking for yet. And then we parted, strangers then and

still who had paused to comfort each other.What happened in that moment did not

seem to me to be a “random act of kind-ness.” Our presence at Chesed Shel Emeth and our wounded emotional states were not at all random but the direct result of violence inflicted on the ceme-tery in the days prior. We simply extended kindness and compassion to each other, people who seemed to need it for reasons that we understood without explanation.

The subsequent outpouring of human decency from the people, institutions and diverse religious denominations of

St. Louis and the respectful visits by Vice President Mike Pence and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens were heartening. But they could not completely erase the impact of the violence that took place at Chesed Shel Emeth. Nor could humanity’s nobler impulses prevent similar violence a week later at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia; an earlier attack at the Catholic Holy Redeemer Cemetery close to Mount Carmel; two arson-caused fires at Islamic mosques in different Florida cities in the past six months; or 89 bomb threats made in five waves against 72 Jewish institutions and Jewish Community Centers, including both facilities in St. Louis County, over the past two months.

I don’t know if the violence done under cover of darkness at Chesed Shel Emeth meets the legal definition of “hate crime.” But whatever the motives of those who did these things, I know that love, under-standing, compassion or even mere toler-ance of Jews and Judaism were not among them.

Nor do I know if the people who assault-ed the cemetery are aligned with extrem-ist white supremacist groups who felt legitimized and empowered by the elec-tion of Donald Trump. I do know that Trump himself has had multiple opportu-nities to explicitly condemn the anti-American ideology of these groups and reject the support of their followers.

He has refused to do either.

Eric Mink photo of the headstone on the grave of his great-grandmother, Sarah Serkin.

ERIC MINKCONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

BY RABBI HYIM SHAFNER

In the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, Moses has just ascend-ed Mount Sinai after the saying of the aseret hadibrot, Ten Commandments, and G-d now commands Moses to tell the Jewish People to collect funds for the building of the Mishkan (tabernacle), a moving Temple the Jewish people trav-eled with in the desert.

This Torah portion and several subse-quent to it continue to describe the details of the Mishkan’s construction. Why do the commandments for building a taber-nacle follow so soon on the heels of the revelation at Mount Sinai? Indeed, why do the Jewish people, a nation that our rabbis say saw G-d face-to-face at the Red Sea and at Mount Sinai, require a Tabernacle at all for relating to the Divine?

Furthermore isn’t it a dangerous prop-

osition for a people so soon redeemed from a land of idolaters to have a con-crete place and gold vessels for worship-ing an infinite G-d?

Rash”i, the great medieval French Torah commentator, was perplexed by the same questions. He answers that the Torah here is in the wrong chronological order. In reality, Rash”i says, the Tabernacle was given to the Jews only after they had wor-shiped the golden calf and G-d realized their need for a more concrete form of worship. Maimonides, in his book “The Guide to the Perplexed,” says similarly that prayer and personal interaction are a high-er form of connection with G-d than Temple sacrifices and communal service but that the Jews, a nation 50 days from slavery, could not relate to things so abstract.

The Midrash though, sees the Mishkan in a more positive light. The Midrash says

that Moses was quite perplexed when G-d gave the commandments for the building of the Tabernacle and said, “Will You who even the whole universe can not contain, constrict Yourself in the Mishkan?”

The Midrash, Yalkut Shimoni, offers the following parable as G-d’s answer to Moses. There was a king who had a young daughter. When she was a little girl, she would run to the king in the marketplace, and he would pick her up. He was always available to play with her and talk to her. When she grew up, the king said, “It is not fitting for us to talk in the marketplace; I will make a special personal room for us to talk in.”

So it is with Israel, G-d says. When she was young, I interacted with her every-where face-to-face; at the Sea, in the Exodus and at Mount Sinai. But now that she has grown up, received the Torah and become a complete nation, it is not

polite (or profound enough) for me to talk to her in public like a child, rather let her make for me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among them.

Do we have a Mishkan due to our lack of ability to interact intimately and maturely with G-d or because we have an even greater ability to do so? Though growing up often changes the parent-child relationship into one that at first may seem less intimate, the potential exists, if we can mature enough, to have a relationship that is ever so much more deep and complex.

This Shabbat, may we each personally become spiritually mature enough to have an even more intimate, deep and complex relationship with our G-d.

Having a grown-up relationship with G-dD’VAR TORAH: PARASHAT TERUMAH

Rabbi Hyim Shafner serves Bais Abraham Congregation in University City.

ing of anti-establishment conservatives that includes within its ranks unabashed anti-Semites, the RJC went dark.

The group issued few statements men-tioning Trump. None of its events at the Republican National Convention in July were open to the media — in contrast to the group’s high profile in past years. Its drive to get out the vote barely men-tioned Trump for the most part and focused on vulnerable GOP senators in states with large Jewish communities. And even the RJC’s inauguration party last month was closed to the media.

Now the group is trying hard to get behind the president. Trump’s pivot from his “neutrality” on Israel in 2015 to an eager embrace earlier this month of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and his policies on the Palestinians and Iran — have helped the

RJC belatedly come around.Asked by journalists Friday about

Trump’s most recent Jewish controver-sies — including the White House’s omission of reference to the Jews in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that was widely criti-cized by Jewish groups, including the RJC — the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks, talked about Israel.

“There’s a professional complaining class in the Jewish community that will criticize and attack Donald Trump no matter what he says,” Brooks said. “People who genuinely have an open mind, indi-viduals and organizations, see he is fol-lowing through on commitments he made on campaign, he is repositioning in a pos-itive way the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Brooks also pointed to the vice presi-dent.

“He’s a terrific partner to President Trump, you have a terrific team with the both of them,” the RJC leader said.

In his speech, Pence also vouched for

Trump’s pro-Israel bona fides.“If the world knows nothing else, it will

know this: America stands with Israel,” he said.

“We told the ayatollahs of Iran they should check the calendar, there’s a new president in the Oval Office. President Trump will never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, this is my solemn prom-ise to you.”

Pence also described his recent visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where a Holocaust survivor gave him a tour. The crowd was clearly moved.

In one ballroom of the Venetian, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has defended the Trump White House from allegations it is covering up Russian inter-ference in the elections, pleaded with RJC members to have the president’s back, according to people who were present.

Boris Epshteyn, a top White House aide who is emblematic of an emerging

vocal minority among Republican Jews who have adopted the alt-right’s confron-tational style, made a similar pitch in another ballroom.

Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who owns the Venetian and contributed tens of millions to the effort to elect Trump, had a private meeting with Pence prior to his speech.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens described how he rallied a diverse community ear-lier in the week to help clean up Chesed Shel Emeth cemetery, an effort joined at the last minute by Pence. The vice presi-dent called out inspiration over a bull-horn. Pence also stood on the back of a pickup truck and wielded a rake (see related coverage on Page One).

Greitens, having depicted a sweaty, intense Pence getting down and dirty for the Jews, finally got around to Trump.

“The president had called me earlier that day,” Greitens said. “He said tell the people of Missouri that we stand with them in the fight against anti-Semitism.”

RJCCONTINUED FROM PAGE 6