Sen. Menendez to Speak at Local Synagogue’s Veterans Day Service

Each year on the Friday closest to Veterans Day, partners with the Jewish War Veterans of Fort Lee, the Gallin-Mazur Post 741, to mark the occasion. This year, Veterans Day happens to fall on a Friday, and Rabbi Kenneth Stern’s efforts—dating back to August—to get U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez to speak at the Synagogue’s service paid off earlier this week when he received word that the senator would indeed be able to make it.

In honor of Menendez’s visit, Stern said, members of the Fort Lee Cairola-Barber VFW Post and other local officials will also attend the 7 p.m. service Friday.

Stern said it will “honor those who served our country with valor, loyalty and distinction.”

He added that combining Veterans Day with the Jewish Sabbath is unusual, but it’s something he learned meant a lot to some of the members of the congregation early on.

“We have quite a number of veterans here who are very active and very proud,” Stern said. “And my first year here, some of them approached me and said there should be some recognition for Veterans Day in the Synagogue. This is now the fourth year that we’re doing this.”

He also said Fort Lee, his fourth congregation, is unique in his experience, having also served communities in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where “there’s nothing like this.”

“Only in Fort Lee has there really been a Veterans Day observance that is of substance, that is really taken seriously by the community,” Stern said. “There’s a Veterans Day parade in New York, but fewer and fewer people come; it really doesn’t amount to much of anything. But here in Fort Lee things are very different, and I’m very impressed by it.”

Stern described Friday’s service as follows:

We’re opening with ‘God Bless America.’ For a ritual purpose, I’m doing Psalm 100, a Psalm of thanksgiving, followed by a mourner’s prayer. And then I’m going to introduce the senator and thank him for coming. He’ll speak [briefly]. The ranking member who’s present of the Jewish Veterans Post will say a few words. Jimmy Viola [Commander of the Fort Lee VFW] will also be sitting on our pulpit, and he will also be saying a few words, and we’ll conclude by singing just the first stanza of the anthems of the four armed services [Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines].

A reception will follow the service.

Annual Kristallnacht Commemoration, Nov. 12 and 13

Congregation Gesher Shalom is also commemorating Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” this weekend.

“Kristallnacht was an organized attack against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938,” Stern wrote. “Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and villages, as SA stormtroopers and civilians destroyed buildings, leaving the streets covered in pieces of smashed windows—the origin of the name—‘Night of Broken Glass.’”

According to Stern, 91 Jews were killed, and 30,000 Jewish men—“a quarter of all Jewish men in Germany,” he pointed out—were taken to concentration camps, where more than 1,000 ultimately died.

“Around 1,668 Synagogues were ransacked, and 267 set on fire,” Stern wrote.

Congregation Gesher Shalom’s commemoration will be held in two parts. During Shabbat morning services from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Stern will chant the Torah Service and the Haftarah “using the traditional melodies of the German immigrant congregation of his childhood.”

On Sunday at 10 a.m., the Synagogue will screen what Stern called a “powerful and touching” 10-minute film called “Jai,” from the Hebrew word “Chai,” meaning “life.”

“[It’s] a beautiful little film from South America with English subtitles about grandchildren staying over in their grandparents guest room,” Stern said. “The little girl asks her grandmother what’s the number on her arm. The grandmother tells this beautiful story about what the numbers mean: One God, seven days of Creation, and the numbers add up to 18. Eighteen is the Hebrew word for “Life,” Chai, and so this little girl goes into the bathroom and puts the same number on her own arm.”

After she finds out that her grandfather has a different number and her brother tells her what the numbers really mean, the little girl says that she’s going to keep her number, “because if neither grandma nor grandpa remember, somebody has to remember for them,” according to Stern.

“That is the message of the film,” he said. “It’s a powerful, beautiful little film.”

Following the screening on Sunday morning, Edgewater resident, congregation member and Kristallnacht survivor Dr. Lottie Pick will discuss “a sanitized version” of her experiences, Stern said.

“She will wind up speaking to us about what she remembers as, I think, a nine-year-old child during Kristallnacht,” he said.

Congregation Gesher Shalom is located at 1449 Anderson Ave. at the corner of Stillwell. For more information, call 201-947-1735.