JNeditorials

Editorials and Letters to the Editor are posted and archived on JN Online:
www.d.etroitjewishnews.com

Meeting The Challenge

year ago, Jewish Community Center lead-
ers faced a public backlash while closing
the Oak Park JCC day care center. Today,
they face a crossroads as they unveil plans
to close the West Bloomfield JCC tennis courts.
How they handle closing the courts not only will
show what they learned about upfront communica-
tion from last year's predicament, but also will set
the stage for the all-important membership appeal
phase of their $30 million fund-raising drive.
That appeal won't match what the big donors
gave, but it will be a truer measure of the depth of
community support. Ordinary members who give
$50, $100 or $500 on top of their dues will be say-
ing an awful lot.
Possible plans for the outdoor tennis courts
include a temporary classroom building for either
the new Jewish high school or the JCC's childhood
development center, or conversion to indoor courts
by bubbling over the top. As for the indoor tennis
courts in the Rosenberg Recreation Complex, the
JCC plans to convert them to in-line hockey rinks.
Tennis has been a long-time offering and the players
who use the courts are loyal, but usage doesn't justify
the number of courts, JCC leaders say.
Availability of other facilities in the area for tennis
buffs will help soften the blow of the court closings.

A

Related story: page 6

IN FOCUS

That availability also helps validate the JCC's decision
to address court downtime.
This week, the JCC sent a letter explaining the
court closings to all health club and general mem-
bers. Unfortunately, there's no hotline number for
players' follow-up questions or to control rumors,
although it is not too late to rectify that.
Still, the pro-active letter is a more upfront
approach than tennis players suddenly finding the
courts gone.
It's also a step up from how the JCC handled last
year's closing of the day care program at the Jimmy
Prentis Morris Building. Change almost always
brings dissent, but it's less apt to happen when
there's also context and discussion. So we hope
there's more of both as word of the court closings
spreads.
Significantly, the JCC board has decided to con-
sider reopening and enclosing the outdoor courts in
the next few years rather than forever banishing the
sport — provided there's enough interest down the
road to resurrect a viable tennis program.
We appreciate that decision and urge that it not be
forgotten. For it to make a lasting difference in the
lives of Jewish Detroit once the excitement surround-
ing the $30 million two-campus upgrade fades, the
JCC must maintain a candid dialogue, not only with
its 10,000 members, but also with the general corn-
munity that supports its endowed programs, new
construction and building operations. ❑

Responsible For The Holocaust

0

fficially, Yom HaShoah isn't even 50 years
old, and because it is secular — estab-
lished by the Israeli parliament rather
than by Torah — it doesn't have quite the
same spiritual weight of Passover or Yom Kippur or
Rosh HaShana.
That gives us a certain liberty to decide for our-
selves how we want to think about the unthinkable,
the whirlwind of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six
million European Jews.
Our preeminent modern Jewish author, Elie
Wiesel, said, "Let it be an act of remembrance, for
that is what the victims wanted: to be remembered,
at least to be remembered." And, of course, we try
to do that, in ceremonies in Israel and around the
world and here in Detroit.
But remembering the Shoah just as a story of vic-
tims is not going to be enough because we cannot
make a moral sense of it. Victims ought to be
avenged, but vengeance is God's right, not ours. The
generation that suffered grows old; its members
alone have the right to decide what to forgive. Our
children know they should care, but the best that
most can muster is a distant caring, like our feeling
for the soldiers dead in the Civil War. It is a histori-
cal fact — not an emotional reality.
We can record the memories of the survivors.

Cover story: page 14

And that will help future generations understand
what it was to see your home smashed, your parents
marched at bayonet point into a gas chamber, what
it was to starve, to slave in factories that supplied a
war against the very troops you hoped might liber-
ate you, to wish against your belief that it would
have been better not to have been the chosen ones.
But something else must happen to be sure that
we will mark Yom HaShoah a hundred or a thousand
years from now. We need to find in this monumental
tragedy the lesson that inspires the future to be better.
What we need to remember when we remember
Yom HaShoah is that we all have a duty to stand up,
to speak and to act against barbarism, to commit
ourselves to protecting the powerless in the world.
That should not be such a hard lesson for Jews,
who have known since their beginning what it was
like to be enslaved and powerless. It is a little harder
to know that in this country, where the worst forms
of discrimination were reserved for blacks and where
we now prosper materially as we have never before
in our history. But we can use the 27th of Nisan
(May 2) as the spur that reminds us of our responsi-
bility to be sure that we do not allow another
pounding on the door, for us or for any others that
a majority might decide to hate.
Will we need Yom HaShoah a hundred years from
now? Yes, so that we will never need anything like it
again. ❑

Spring Fun

The Jewish Community Center in Oak
Park was abuzz with youthful activity
Monday — spring break from school for
many young people. Above: Zevi Reinitz,
16, of Oak Park and his 18-year-old
brother Ariel play a little one-on-one
basket-
ball.
Right:
Ben Avra-
hami, 10,
of Oak
Park
spends
time in
the sun
on his in-
line
skates.

