6 February 28 • 2019
jn

A

ll winter, Detroit 
Jews for Justice 
leaders have 
been busily planning 
the DJJ’
s 4th Annual 
Purim Extravaganza. 
While doing so, people 
have asked, “What’
s jus-
tice-y about Purim?” 
Purim celebrates the story of how 
a Jewish woman named Esther saves 
the Jews of Persia from a genocidal 
plot proposed by the wicked vizier 
Haman (boo!) and approved by 
the bumbling King Achashverosh. 
The leader of the Jews at that time 
was a Shushanite resident named 
Mordechai. He had a cousin, Esther, 
who was orphaned as a young girl. 
Mordechai raised her and treated her 
as a daughter.
This story, which is fundamentally 
a story of the triumph of oppressed 
people over the machinations of a 
hateful and/or apathetic state appara-
tus, has been told and retold through 
the centuries in ways that invoke and 
parody the struggles of the day. 
This year, DJJ is doing its annual 
Purim shpiel (play). There is a sense 
of collective catharsis, cohesion and 
power that comes from putting down 
the opposition and dramatizing the 

ascent of the “good 
guys.” Through our 
revelry, we cultivate 
resilience and enact the 
triumph that we so long 
for. 
But the Purim story 
does not end with 
the simple foiling of 
Haman’
s genocidal plot. Rather than 
Mordechai being hanged on the gal-
lows, it is Haman and his sons who 
hang. “V’
nahafokh hu.” We flip it on 
them and redirect the threat of anni-
hilation from us onto them. 
For a suffering people living 
subsumed under the shadow of an 
empire, such a revenge fantasy is 
understandable. But is this the best 
we can do? Rather than sanitizing 
this narrative or relishing its violent 
conclusion, why not take the fantasy 
of Purim as an invitation to envision 
an ever more holistic, totalizing and 
sustainable liberation for our people 
and beyond? 
The mitzvot (commandments) of 
Purim teach us to enact — at least for 
a day! — a radical alternative to the 
systems that guide our daily living. 
We are taught to practice expansive 
joy; to engage in gift-giving and 
mutual aid within our communities; 

to give tzedakah, direct reparations 
for economic injustice. 
We wear costumes and dress in 
ways that reveal who we could be 
— and in some ways really are! And 
there is, of course, the teaching from 
the rabbis that tells us that we should 
drink to the point being unable to 
differentiate between the phrases 
Arur Haman (“Cursed be Haman”) 
and Baruch Mordechai (“Blessed be 
Mordechai”) — not to erase the dis-
tinctions between harmfulness and 
caring, but to remind us that even 
our most treasured truisms deserve to 
be interrogated and unpacked.
Purim is a day when we are taught 
to remember that another world is 
possible: a day to reflect on the world 
as it has been and to manifest the way 
we want things to be in the future. ■

RSVP for the DJJ Purim Extravaganza at 
detroitjewsforjustice.org/purim2019.
 
Roslyn Abt Schindler is associate professor 
emerita at Wayne State University, an active 
member of Congregation T’
chiyah and a 
Detroit Jews for Justice leader since its 
inception. Jake Ehrlich is a graduate of the 
Jewish Communal Leadership Program at 
the University of Michigan School of Social 
Work. His is an active leader in DJJ and 
Congregation Tchiyah’
s community engage-
ment associate.

commentary
Purim Off
 ers Alternative Vision for Future

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Roz Schindler & Jake Ehrlich

symbolic; it also means: double “chai.
” To 
all of them, whether celebrated or not, 
Kol HaKavod. You are the pride and joy 
of our Jewish community.

— Rachel Kapen

West Bloomfield

A Remembrance 
of Abraham Weberman
On Jan. 25, 2019, Holocaust survivor 
Abraham Weberman passed away. 
Weberman was the president of the 
Shaarit Haplaytah, the survivor organiza-
tion of Metropolitan Detroit. He was one 
of the pioneering Holocaust survivors 
of the Shaarit Haplaytah whose dream 
it was to build a Holocaust Memorial 
Center. The Shaarit Haplaytah helped 
survivors get to know one another as 
they built a community for the new 
survivors coming to Detroit after the 
war. They held dinner dances, had card 
games, raised money to buy ambulances 
for the new State of Israel and raised 
money to build a memorial to remember 
the Holocaust. This later would become 
the Holocaust Memorial Center. 
Weberman was a survivor of the 
infamous Lodz Ghetto. After the war, 
he went to a displaced persons camp in 
Frankfurt where he met his first wife, 
Lotka. In 1947, he came to Israel, then 
known as Palestine. He fought in the 
Hagganah and later served in the Israel 
Defense Forces. He moved to Detroit 
to join his brother Leon who was living 
here. Abraham Weberman’
s biography 
can be read at portraitsofhonor.org. 
Weberman was a good man who had 
a heart of gold. He will be sorely missed 
by our community.

— Dr. Charles Silow

West Bloomfield 

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