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n the sweepstakes for our state's precious dollars,
Detroit Jewry has come up big, thanks to a state
lawmaker who helps control tax dollar outflow
and to unprecedented financial help from the
Arab community. People with special needs or whose
welfare is at risk will benefit from $750,000 in new
funding over two years to the Jewish community.
It's a stunning windfall for our communal agencies,
which have felt service, program and staffing cuts in
response to the weak economy. The lesson is that a
confluence of well-placed power and persistence can
pay off.
The coming together of Arabs and Jews over
money, coupled with the prodding of Rep. Marc
Shulman, R-West Bloomfield, who chairs
the House Appropriations Committee, ulti-
mately may mean an endowed legacy for
Jews and other minority ethnic groups in
Michigan.
On Aug. 11, Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed into
law House Bill 4392, the fiscal year 2004 Department
of Community Health appropriation of $9.5 billion.
That amount includes $3.2 million for the multicul-
tural funding line; the Jewish community will receive
$500,000.
Given the state's fiscal crisis, the multicultural fund-
ing line must stand the rigors of time. But no ethnic
group on the line has been shut out of funding over
the past 10 years.
Shulman shepherded adding the Jewish community
to the line in partnership with community activists
Dennis Bernard and Evan Weiner. When they found
other ethnic groups were getting state support for
health-related support services, they convinced the
House speaker, Rick Johnson, R-LeRoy, and the
Senate appropriations chair, Shirley Johnson, R-Royal
I
Oak, that Jewish needs were just as
urgent and that we had a quality infra-
structure to meet them. We were just
short on cash.
The result, two years in the making,
includes a $500,000 state grant to the
Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit. JFMD allocation planners
have yet to meet, but it is expected
that JVS, Jewish Family Service, JARC
and Kadima will share the bounty.
These four Jewish agencies, built to
help the frail, impaired or otherwise
vulnerable. are popular and respected.
All four deserve to bear the
fruits of such a historic
grant.
This is the first time the
state is giving money directly to the
Jewish community. So the burden falls
to Federation to assure wise spending
for the greater good.
In retrospect, it's too bad that
Federation didn't vigorously pursue
direct state funding five years ago
when it was stronger financially.
Greater foresight and lobbying prowess
then would have meant less cut from
Federation allocations to partner agen-
cies now
Last year, Federation received $250,000 for partner
agencies JVS and Jewish Family Service through a
roundabout, unannounced, interim deal with the
Detroit-Wayne County Community Health Agency.
The deal redirected part of the Arab community's $1
million-plus in multicultural funding.
While that show of ethnic cooperation, triggered by
Shulman's political brokering, helped keep the multi-
EDIT ORIAL
Related story: page 16
Helping The World Remember
ext week, Yad Vashem will mark its 50th
year as the intellectual and emotional
repository for Jewish remembrance of the
Shoah. This Jerusalem-based Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority has
been the defining reminder of Nazi Germany's
almost incomprehensible effort to wipe Jews off the
face of the earth.
But time, distance and technology are
pulling us in different ways, assuring that
the world's understanding of the slaughter
of 6 million innocent people is surely
going to be altered, not necessarily for the better.
Time, immutably, is erasing the possibility and
power of firsthand accounts. It has been more than
70 years since Hitler created the first concentration
camp at Dachau, and fewer than 350,000 survivors
remain. 'While film director Steven Spielberg's
Survivors of the Shoah has documented 50,000 of
their accounts, those recitations cannot have the
same impact as standing face-to-face with someone
N
who endured Birkenau or Treblinka.
Consciousness of the Holocaust is dimming in
much of the world, sometimes through the efforts
of deliberate deniers as in the Arab world and
through the persistent anti-Semitism of many
Europeans who are ashamed of their own failures to
try to stop the slaughter when it was under way.
Genocide becomes equated with Stalin's
deliberate starvation of more than five
million Ukrainians or, more recently, the
killing fields of Cambodia or massacres in
the Balkans and Rwanda.
The singularity of the Shoah — targeting the
whole of European Jewry — may remain better rec-
ognized in America, where the news media and the
movie industry have exposed the bitter story to
most of the adult population.
But Holocaust study is losing out in schools that
are under pressure to teach children how to pass
standardized reading, writing and math tests — not
a place where a question about the Warsaw Ghetto
EDITORIAL
cultural funding line in the state budget, such peculiar
rerouting of public money is awkward, to say the least,
for both the Arab and Jewish communities. Direct
funding via each community's central agency is wiser.
What Shulman pulled off this year with help from
Bernard and Weiner — and with Federation's partici-
pation — may well be a national model for giving
diverse cultures in a state a piece of the public revenue
pie. ❑
is likely to show up. The danger is that the
Holocaust will be made as dry and irrelevant as the
order of reign of the kings of England in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
On the hopeful side, the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington and our
Holocaust Memorial Center in Oakland County do
valuable work in keeping the memory bright; the
Simon Wiesenthal Tolerance Center in Los Angeles
and its coming sibling in Jerusalem infuse the Shoah
with new meaning. New technologies — the
Internet-based Cybrary of the Holocaust
(wvvw.remembenorg), for example — may bring
new awareness.
Locally, the DMC-Sinai Hospital Program for
Holocaust Survivors and Families has created a trav-
eling photo exhibit that spotlights local survivors
and Dr. Sidney Bolkosky's audio-visual project has
recorded and stored hundreds of their testimonies At
the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus.
We salute Yad Vashem on its first half century,
proud of what it has accomplished and aware that
in the next 50 years we will never forget. But we
may remember in very different ways. ❑
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