Steps Toward Unity
Local students honor Dr. King.
Don Cohen
Special to the Jewish News
A
lmost a thousand spirited com-
munity members and students
from more than eight schools
ignored an ice storm and gathered at
West Bloomfield High School to honor
Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Organized by United We Walk, the
local celebration is in its 13th year.
Student co-chairs were Michelle Boyd,
Chanel Geter and Becca Portney. Adult
co-chairs were West Bloomfield residents
Sherry Masterson and Raman Singh and
Rev. David Robertson of Orchard Lake
Community Church.
On Sunday night at the school as part
of a candlelight vigil, Rwandan journal-
ist Thomas Kamilindi spoke about the
Rwandan genocide in 1994 in which an
estimated 800,000 people were killed in
three months. During the program, two
people were added to the school's Martin
Luther King Day Wall of Fame: Coretta
Scott King, Dr. King's widow who died last
January, and Paul Rusesabagina, made
famous in the film Hotel Rwanda.
Prior to a 1.5 mile-walk from the school
down Orchard Lake Road to Walnut Lake
Road and back, Monday's program fea-
tured Speak for Yourself, a one-act play
presented by Mosaic Acting Company,
based on student interaction from the
Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity
in Metropolitan Detroit project run by
University of Michigan Professor of Social
Work Barry Checkoway.
Checkoway and Roger Fisher of U-M's
Program on Intergroup Relations are
organizing local Youth Policy Summit
dialogues. High school and U-M students
serve as facilitators and support comes
from West Bloomfield Schools, B'nai
B'rith Great Lakes Region's Enlighten
America project and the Cranbrook Peace
Foundation.
Birmingham Groves High School
juniors Michael Brown of West Bloomfield
and Jennifer Lada of Bloomfield Hills
participated the day's event. Brown had
participated in last summer's New Detroit
Youth Race Summit and wanted more.
"We need to go back to our school to
discuss these issues and get more students
involved," Lada said. "We also need the
support of teachers and administrators to
make a difference!'
Students from Hillel Day School of Metropolitan Detroit in Farmington Hills partici-
pated in a walk at Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities in West Bloomfield.
Both were concerned that last Friday's
optional Dr. King program at Groves in
Beverly Hills was not well attended.
"In our school, racism has become
accepted to some degree; and there are
lots of people that felt [the program] was
pointless," Brown said. "Here we got to
hear how other schools work, and we need
to get everyone involved!'
Rachel Kapen of West Bloomfield appre-
ciated that United We Walk was celebrat-
ing its bar mitzvah year.
"The walk embodies the man's dream
as so beautifully and unforgettably articu-
lated in his Have a Dream' speech:' she
said, wishing, in the tradition of Moses,
that it will live to 120. I
To join the Youth Policy Summit, call Steve
Wasko, a West Bloomfield Schools assistant
superintendent, at (248) 865-6450.
Heschel's Legacy
U.S. Jews mark 100th anniversary
of birth of social justice rabbi.
Ben Harris
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
New York
T
hey are forever joined in an iconic
image of the rabbi and the preach-
er marching arm in arm for civil
rights, but Abraham Joshua Heschel and
Martin Luther King Jr. are this year linked in
commemoration as well.
As Americans marked Dr. King's memory
Jan. 15, the Jewish community is gearing
up to honor the legacy of one of the 20th
century's great Jewish thinkers on the 100th
anniversary of his birth.
In March, Brandeis University will host a
two-day symposium on Rabbi Heschel, who
was born Jan. 11, 1907, and over the next 65
years became one of America's most promi-
nent rabbis, renowned for his political activ-
ism and his innovative writings on theology
and the Jewish prophets.
Other events are scheduled at the
Manhattan school that bears Rabbi
Heschel's name, at a spiritual retreat center
in Connecticut and in cities as far afield as
London, Berlin, Milan and Krakow.
Dr. King's birthday has become a national
holiday and an occasion to reflect on
America's interracial relations; but at the
Jewish Theological Seminary, the institution
where Rabbi Heschel taught for the last 27
years of his life, no public memorials are
planned.
Rabbi Heschel's relationship with JTS
is said to have been fraught with tension.
But the seminary's incoming chancellor,
Professor Arnold Eisen, says a two-hour
meeting he had with Rabbi Heschel in his
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr.
book-laden office around 1970 was person-
ally transformative.
"It overwhelmed me',' said Eisen, adding
that he considers Rabbi Heschel the most
important Jewish thinker of the 20th cen-
tury.
Eisen's predecessors, however, didn't
always hold Rabbi Heschel in such high
esteem, seeing him as something of an out-
sider — a mystic and a political activist in
an institution renowned for neither.
Some claim that Rabbi Heschel's legacy
is being appropriated to advance a political
agenda, or that the seminary's critics are
"misreading the data"
Others point to Rabbi Heschel's outspo-
Heschel's Legacy on page 16
January 18 * 2007
15