NEW YORK (JTA) — An Orthodox-run soup kitchen brought together a diverse group of local leaders to stock shelves for charity on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The event, run by Masbia, a soup kitchen network based in the largely Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, was meant as a display of solidarity following a rash of attacks on Jews in Brooklyn and other Hasidic areas near New York City.
Masbia also announced a drive to donate goods via Amazon to communities in Puerto Rico, which has been affected by recent earthquakes and is still recovering from Hurricane Maria. Masbia ran a similar drive for Puerto Rico in 2017, when the hurricane hit...
The photo at the article is worth seeing.
Besides local community members, also attending were representatives of the York Police Dept, several pastors, and local officials. Among them, New York City Councilman Kalman Yeger, State Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein and Aron Wieder, a legislator from Rockland County, where people were stabbed last month at a rabbi’s home on Hanukkah, and Denise Ridley, Jersey City city councilwoman for largely African-American Greenville area, where two shooters aiming to attack Jews and police killed four people at a kosher supermarket December 20.
“When you’re being attacked, we need other people, other neighbors, to stick up and to stop the hate,” Yosef Rapaport, father of Masbia’s founder, Alex Rapaport, said at the event. “If children are being separated from their parents at the border, put into camps — yes they are camps — I protest. You can’t be quiet when you have discrimination.”
For clarity, generally speaking, when an elderly Jewish person says “camps”, they mean the concentration camps and death camps of the Holocaust. In this week, 75 years after the “liberation of Auschwitz”, where families were torn apart and 1.1 million were systematically extirminated, that’s the comparison the white-bearded 19th-century-looking elder Rapaport was talking about.
Stronger together.