[cid:AC_logo-150ppi_b0554e81-2d50-477d-8264-0219cbd8ac34.png]<http://www.alachuacounty.us/Pages/AlachuaCounty.aspx> Raemi Eagle-Glenn
County Commissioner
Board of County Commissioners
12 SE 1st ST • Gainesville • FL • 32601
352-264-6900 (office)
[cid:Home2_44a3d51e-b983-4237-8082-72394e0032c7.png]<http://www.alachuacounty.us/Pages/AlachuaCounty.aspx> [cid:fb_logo_150ppi_9dd00851-99d8-4342-8932-10cac01030c6.png] <https://www.facebook.com/AlachuaCounty/> [cid:twitter_150ppi_9c3d56ae-20c9-4509-b852-4aaed5522edd.png] <https://twitter.com/alachuacounty> [cid:insta_150ppi_5be81f1b-b06b-49ca-b309-54edd0545f55.png] <https://www.instagram.com/alachuacounty/> [cid:youtube_150ppi_0da7ed3a-56a8-459c-b04c-ed8dfa1a388a.png] <https://www.youtube.com/user/alachuacounty> [cid:county_news_150ppi_14250fe5-78c3-4aa5-b059-283cc85fd4ea.png] <http://www.alachuacounty.us/depts/communications/pages/updatenewsletter.aspx>
PLEASE NOTE: Florida has a very broad public records law (F.S.119).
All e-mails to and from County Officials and County Staff are kept as public records. Your e-mail
communications, including your e-mail address, may be disclosed to the public and media at any time.
________________________________
From: Gabriel Hillel <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2022 1:11:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; Kent Fuchs <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; Paula Reeves <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; news wuft <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: SELENA CARTER <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; anya ventura <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; Roberto Cruz <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Day 111 Florida freedom Summer of 2024: Halloween: is truly scary this year
CAUTION: This email originated from outside your organization. Exercise caution when opening attachments or clicking links, especially from unknown senders.
Day 111 Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: Halloween is truly scary this year
On Halloween 61 years ago, children usually accompanied by their parents knocked on our door, giggling, laughing in the high rise hall outside the two and a half-room apartment where I, my wife, and our two infants were living happily in Riverdale, the Bronx, NY. The Henry Hudson River and the Palisades on the opposition shore were in plain view.
We had loaded up with Almond Joy, Mounds Bars, and Hershey chocolates, I knew I would enjoy for several days. We always overstocked.Once again, I opened the door with a handful of candy.
A boy with Hitler mustache and a Swastika armband held out his basket for treats expectantly. I think I dropped the candy into his basket and closed the door. I am sure I said nothing. I have no memory of Halloween until years after I arrived in Gainesville, FL.
As an adult in Gainesville, on Halloween between 2007-2014, few children came trick or treating at comparatively inaccessible two-story condo where I and my life partner lived. However, the day came to have special meaning ffor us in those years.
We tracked the data annually about the miraculous journey flown by millions of Monarch butterflies from North America to a 60-mile square area in the Mexican Sierras where they invariably landed to overwinter in among the pine trees.
We would update our website, annually, The butterfly arrivals occurred on Halloween, or one or two days later when Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead. With folks from the McGuire Center for the Study of Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and the co-founder of the first Butterfly City in the nation, we often talked about a sister city relationship with Angangueo, MX, a small town where the butterflies clustered.
My partner died on Oct. 19, 2015. Once again Halloween became forgotten, just another day in the year, until this year.
The television movie channels I tend to watch were filled with horror film. I tend to avoid them, often because I find them too silly to like. But several nights ago, I took the chance to watch a film which terrified me the first time I saw “Don’t Look Now” in 1973.
A married couple grieving the recent death of their young daughter are in Venice when they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom is psychic and brings a warning from beyond.
My wife, daughter, and I were in Venice several months earlier. I enjoyed the watery city during daylight hours, but I felt discomfited after dark. That discomfit returned as I watched the film, as the couple find themselves together or separately on the dark streets, and murky canals of the city.
The couple is played by two of my favorite actors, Donald Sutherland, and Julie Christie, so I felt an immediate connection as I watched the tale play out on the television set. This time I was fascinated by the color motifs, his primarily in blue, but the bright blood red color present throughout, especially a red raincoat worn by their daughter. Human warmth seemed to evaporate. I closed the television before the credits. I fed my three outdoor feral cats quickly, closed and bolted the door. The film was as uncomfortable now as it had been in 1973.
I already was ill at ease. My monthly phone session with my VA anger management counselor ended uneasily, when he responded to my question about his recent trip to Germany. My friends and family had been communicating about the rise of the extreme right on the continent. Had he noticed anything to suggest such a return. There was no sign of it at all, and he was sure such news was greatly exaggerated.
The question was prompted by a six hour Ken Burns documentary about “the Holocaust and the United States,” which aired on PBS earlier this month. I was reminded of my own safe childhood when children my age on the screen were shown on the way to railroad box cars, to concentration camps, to gas chambers, to pits in which they were thrown naked before they and the adults around them were shot repeatedly.
The program reminded secular Jews like me about the acceptance of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, and the dangerous tilt to the right in this nation, around the election of 1940. The adulation has appeared again, in crowds which continue to gather to hear Donald J. Trump denounce the 2020 election as a fraud.
My reaction to Germany has been instinctive and visceral. Since I was in college, among Protestants for the first time. As a sophomore walking down a campus hill in Madison, Wisconsin, I shivered involuntarily when I heard two voices behind speaking in what I perceived to be German. I turned and looked at two smiling blond and blue eyed older students who were chattering away oblivious of their surroundings as they walked past me. Last week, I saw Cabaret again. In that summer of 1973, I saw the musical about the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, in Rome in English, with subtitles for the Italian audience. There was only silence and the crowded theater emptied.
The horror is captured by a handsome young Nazi blond boy man singing to a German audience at a festival, “Tomorrow Belongs, Tomorrow Belongs to Us.” Only an old man who bore some resemblance to my late father is unhappy with the rendition.
My immigrant parents instilled a comparable distrust of Poland, after the nation became independent after World War I, when my father left to enter this country illegally. Mt mother arrived separately several years later at Ellis Island. I have been there, and of course to the Statue of Liberty.
My father claimed to have unlearned Polish. He was an eloquent story teller and his tales invariably concerned rife anti-Semitism which he experienced frequently before he left in his late teens.
Last week, a Sister City delegation from Rzesznow Poland came to Gainesville, FL. When a prior delegation had visited, I urged the city officials to disassociate our city from that community, based on research I had done. I was ignored.
Last week, Mayor Lauren Poe, and Commissioners Reina Saco and Harvey Ward, a mayoral candidate, presented the delegation with a $20,000 check.
[image.png]
[<p>Delegates from Poland accept $20,860 presented to them by Mayor Lauren Poe and Commissioners Reina Saco and Harvey Ward, Oct. 26, 2022.</p>]
Delegates from Poland accept $20,860 presented to them by Mayor Lauren Poe and Commissioners Reina Saco and Harvey Ward, Oct. 26, 2022.
Photo by Aidan Bush<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.alligator.org/staff/aidan-bush__;!!KOmxaIYkRmNA0A!QUww6FzyEYCSLRHMMnXvfXwc9m58fvZ4f7lKLxaVCPs5wKSjHH6ZSbruDk5jeYjWvAzi3qTH7SG92uWsRH5uOQbHidA$> | The Independent Florida Alligator
At the outbreak of World War II, more than 13,000 Jews were living in Rzeszow. After 1939, the population grew, augmented by Jews forcibly resettled out of Polish territories annexed to the German Reich. In December 1941, the Germans created a ghetto<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ghettos__;!!KOmxaIYkRmNA0A!QUww6FzyEYCSLRHMMnXvfXwc9m58fvZ4f7lKLxaVCPs5wKSjHH6ZSbruDk5jeYjWvAzi3qTH7SG92uWsRH5uyOKvBdg$>, crowding more than 23,000 persons within its confines. The first significant deportation from Rzeszow occurred between 7 and 13 July 1942, when the Germans sent the elderly and the sick—a total of about 2,000 Jews—to the Bór forest near Głogów Małopolski, where they were shot to death; another 14,000 were sent to Bełżec. Subsequent deportations were carried out on 8 August and 15 November of that year. In November 1942, the Rzeszów ghetto was turned into a “secondary” ghetto for Jews from the already liquidated ghettos of Krosno, Jasło, and Sanok. It was then divided into two parts: Ost (East) for those able to work, and West for all others. In September 1943, the inhabitants of the former were deported to a camp in Szebiny, where most were murdered; the West ghetto was liquidated that November, its inhabitants ending up in Auschwitz.
The few dozen Jews who had been left in Rzeszów to clean up the ghetto were deported in February 1944.On 9 September 1944, about 300 Jewish survivors formed a new community, whose numbers diminished after antisemitic attitudes erupted into violence on 12 June 1945. In 1947, the remaining Jews of Rzeszów erected a memorial to victims of the Holocaust<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Holocaust__;!!KOmxaIYkRmNA0A!QUww6FzyEYCSLRHMMnXvfXwc9m58fvZ4f7lKLxaVCPs5wKSjHH6ZSbruDk5jeYjWvAzi3qTH7SG92uWsRH5uEIrb_uU$> in the new Jewish cemetery. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/rzeszow<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/rzeszow__;!!KOmxaIYkRmNA0A!QUww6FzyEYCSLRHMMnXvfXwc9m58fvZ4f7lKLxaVCPs5wKSjHH6ZSbruDk5jeYjWvAzi3qTH7SG92uWsRH5uc91khpQ$>
At the beginning of August 1944, Rzeszów was liberated by the Soviet army, and around 600 Jews slowly gathered there, the majority of whom were not original inhabitants of the city. However, the city’s Polish inhabitants were very hostile toward them, and a pogrom almost took place on June 1945, leading to the desertion of the city by many of the Jews. By 1957 there were no remaining Jews in Rzeszów.
(Roee Goldshmidt)
But the weekend promised excitement, a turn away from politics. The University of Florida Gators’ football team was playing he number one ranked Georgia Bulldogs in their annual game in Jacksonville on Saturday, at 3:30 p.m.
Briefly in the second half, Florida had bounced back and cut the lead to a touchdown and two point conversion. They had the momentum, but soon lost before a sell-out crowd. Gainesville Sun’s featured sports writer updated his account of the game up until 10:30 a.m., Sunday.
But he and the Sun apparently missed the big news at the game and in Jacksonville. The news of an occurrence during the game went viral. But apparently it was not on the writer’s beat. Still, the issue reported by Saturday night in print and broadcasting news had been simmering since mid-week about the anti-Semitic remarks of rap singer Kanye West, now known as “Ye”. Kanye already had become a darling of the Republican party, of Trump, of Fox News.
But the triggering event on Saturday had gone viral because of flashing and stationary signs around Jacksonville and in the stadium in particular: “Kayne was right about the Jews (see attached.)” flashed at the stadium. Comparable signs appeared in large letters around the City.
The event received no mention, none at all, in the Gainesville Sun or its briefing for Monday, Oct. 31, 2022.
Now in Gainesville, we’re all getting ready for the expected large protest on campus around Emerson Hall, starting at 9:30 a.m., tomorrow, when the UF Board of Trustees will meet with U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), before a vote is taken to confirm his selection as the 13th white male president of the University of Florida.
Both the Faculty Senate with a 67-15 vote of ‘no-confidence” in the process used to select Sasse, and the mass student protest when the conservative Republican appeared on campus suggest that he will not be supported publicly. Sasse turns out to be the person only Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and the University of Florida Board of Trustees and the Florida Board of Governors could love, or other white Republicans, like former Gov Jeb Bush (R-FL), Sasse brings Trump views to this Democratic city without Trump.
Senator Sasse’s evangelical Christian views now are well-known, and they have triggered a firestorm of controversy, because of his political and religious agendas--anti-women, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Obamacare, anti-Chinese, pro right-wing judges, pro Exxon-Mobil and pro-Commissioner Harvey Ward.
Yet it would seem that Jews as a group are willing to give Sasse a pass, because of his constant and frequent support of Israel, even of its controversial former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Israel is not the issue. The hostility nurtured in Christianity for centuries is the issue. That the evident pro-Christian, if not anti-Semitism, of Ben Sasse has not been explored.
Surely Sasse’s view of the Kanye West (Ye) controversy is of interest. Vanity Fair already has published an article on the public silence of Republicans in the face of West’s ongoing diatribe about Jews like me. See attached.
In sum, I have not had a Halloween like this one in decades. The coming Mid-term election on November 8, 2022, fills me with dread. A few remarks condemning Kanye West’s point of view by Sasse, University of Florida president Kent Fuchs, and the UF Board of Trustees, would help. The corporate UF already has denounced the Jacksonville event.
Of course, it goes without saying that future would be brighter for all of us in Gainesville, if the designation of Sasse as president of the University of Florida would be withdrawn. Unless that were to occur, Harvey Ward’s number one goal to bring peace of mind to the community seems funny, even if none of us is laughing.
Gabriel Hillel for Florida Freedom Summer of 2024
########################################################################
Access the RAEMI-EAGLE-GLENN Home Page and Archives:
http://listserv.alachuacounty.us/scripts/wa.exe?A0=RAEMI-EAGLE-GLENN
Unsubscribe from the RAEMI-EAGLE-GLENN List:
http://listserv.alachuacounty.us/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=RAEMI-EAGLE-GLENN
########################################################################