Flashback 2002: Taipei rabbi helps Jews connect far from home

     I went looking for this column Wednesday and was surprised to find it wasn't posted here. Can't have that. My sabbath in Taipei is etched on my mind for a variety of reasons — most of which are outlined in the column. But also afterward, one of those technical turning points in life. 

     At the time, our sister newspaper was the Jerusalem Post. After this ran in the Sun-Times, the Post wanted to reprint it, and asked me if I had a photo of Rabbi Einhorn.
     "No," I said. "But I have his card."
     So I shot an email to the rabbi, whose secretary forwarded me a photo, which I sent along to Jerusalem. I remember looking up from my computer, amazed, thinking, "What just happened here?" A request Jerusalem to Chicago to Taipei, a photo from Taipei to Chicago to Jerusalem. Imagine the time that would take, the mail delay, in the pre-Internet age. It would never happen.
     I am glad, still, to be old enough to find a whiff of wonder in that.

     Born in Vienna in 1918, Rabbi Einhorn died in 2021 at the age of 103. 

     TAIPEI, Taiwan — Dr. Ephraim F. Einhorn digs four business cards out of his pockets and hands them over, one after the other. They reflect his capacities as senior vice president of the World Trade Center, Warsaw; honorary representative of the Polish Chamber of Commerce for Asia and the Pacific region; president of the World Patent Trading Co. Ltd. and--most significantly at the moment--rabbi of the only synagogue in the Republic of China, which holds its services in Room 419 in the Ritz Landis Hotel on Min Chuan East Road.
     It is a cramped, narrow hotel room — two dozen or so banquet chairs, facing a modest table with candlesticks, a lectern set between two elegant lamps, a small ark. Books are piled everywhere. In the bathroom, cases of kosher wine are stacked in the bathtub.
     I must admit that running to Sabbath services would not normally be my first impulse on a Friday night in a foreign country. But my Taiwanese hosts, ever gracious, thought I might enjoy it and added it to my schedule, and I, for reasons of — in descending order of importance — politeness, curiosity and residual religious faith, did not decline. 

Rabbi Ephraim Einhorn

      

     As soon as I walk in the door, I am propelled up to meet the rabbi--look, a new person! Rabbi Einhorn produces his four business cards. He might have more; he seems to be fishing in his pockets for a fifth when he realizes that the newcomer had not yet seen his books.
     "What will interest you is that I maintain in the hotel one of the largest collections of historical Jewish books in Asia," he says, plucking up a large volume bound in soft brown leather.
     "Look at the year," he exalts, in a precise, refined tone that reminds me of a 1930s radio announcer. "1727." He reaches for another book. "Here, I will show you a fine example. This one, Vienna, 1810."
      More books, with elaborate title page engravings, old dates, references to obscure kings and princes. Rabbi Einhorn shows the books off with an unmistakable pride. Handing over the reprint of an academic paper, he says, "You'll see my name on every page. Interesting, eh?"
     Rabbi Einhorn has been conducting services in Taipei for 26 years, 15 in this very room. "Before that in the Presidential Hotel," he says. "Before that in the U.S. Military Chapel." That, of course, was before the United States de-recognized Taiwan in 1979. "Jimmy Carter isn't very popular around here," the rabbi says.
     The congregation, about 100 people total, is made up of embassy personnel, business executives posted in Taipei, plus their families and the occasional stray such as myself. There are children. Last Saturday, he says with pride, they had a bar mitzvah. We talk of the challenges of performing circumcisions in Asia--there is a mohel in Tokyo, he says, who swings through town to do the job when needed.
     This night, about a dozen people crowd the room. Mostly men, plus a few wives, children, and a baby. This is not just a religious service, but also a support group--Jews Far From Home Anonymous. We settle in, and Rabbi Einhorn goes around the room, asking us our names, our places of origin. Everyone is from somewhere else--Israel, South Africa, the United States. Every location draws a few lines of commentary from Rabbi Einhorn. A visitor from Padua, Italy, elicits memories of his days as a student at what sounds to me like "Instituto Superiora del Torah. "I had a relationship with the chief rabbi in Italy," he says.
      Never before in my life have I yearned for a tape recorder the way I yearn for one while Rabbi Einhorn is speaking. A tumbling cascade of erudition, bravado and pure verbiage that I despair to capture in my notebook. He mentions a certain noble lady--a marchesa--and conducts a brief exposition on the titles of nobility. A marchesa, he begins, is the wife of a marquis, but then he spirals upward, through dukes and duchesses, counts and viscounts, all the way up to the king and queen, a virtuoso performance, a jazz riff of obscure titles that I vainly try to capture with a mere pen.
      We then zip through the service, the familiar prayers. Rabbi Einhorn calls on various congregants for help. "Doctor, do you know how to light the candles?" he asks, then, in an aside to me, "Here, it is not the ladies who light the candles."
      Rabbi Einhorn offers commentary. "If you can bear it, there's so much to say, so much I want to tell you," he says, taking out a speech. "I worked on this for 48 hours."
      He reads a fervent, pro-Israel tract. "The whole world is wrong, and Israel is right," he concludes.
     The service ends in socializing. Regulars catch up and each in turn greets me. Several want to know if I'll be back. Even after I say I'm going home in a few days, they still want to know: Will I return? Will I bring my children to the services? "My kids are in the United States," I tell someone. "That's OK," he says. "Bring them anyway."
      When it comes time to go, I stand in the entranceway of the little room, for a long time, reluctant to leave, looking at the people milling around. So unbearably sad and sweet, a desperate need to connect, born of distance, longing and loss. I feel, at the same time, the service is something both already fading and permanently etched in my heart.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 2002

Earl Moses would have written a better headline

 

Earl Moses

     A reporter is supposed to cover the story. Not be the story. And one local newspaper typically doesn't report on the entry-level staff hires of another.
     But Earl Moses Jr. getting a job was news.
     "News Breaks Ice, Employs Negro Reporter," a headline proclaimed in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Black weekly, on Jan. 26, 1956.     
     The article begins, breathlessly:
"The Indianapolis News has employed a young Negro as a full-time member of its reportorial staff giving him the distinction of being the first Negro full fledged reporter to hold such a position on an Indianapolis daily newspaper." 

      The nimble and rigorous city editor that Moses became at the Chicago Sun-Times would have leaped to red pencil that sentence, purging unnecessary verbiage, fixing that passive voice and adding a time element, ending up with: "The Indianapolis News hired the first full time Negro reporter on an Indianapolis daily newspaper earlier this month." All the news in half the words.
     Moses, a respected Chicago newspaperman, died May 24 at his home in Torrance, California. He was 94.
     He was deeply proud of those who struggled before him, writing a brief family history in 2021.
     "In conjunction with Juneteenth," he began. "June 19, 1865, when word of the Confederate defeat finally reached Texas, this seems like a propitious time to revisit the origin of the Moses family roots."His great-grandfather on his mother's side was Henry Sheppard, born in 1838 on the Sheppard Plantation in Georgia — given his last name because he was plantation property. But when he was released from bondage after the Civil War, his great-grandfather chose a name worthy of a free man.
     "He decided to shed his slave name and pick a name that bespoke of honor, strength and dignity," Earl Moses wrote. "He chose Moses."
     Moses was born in Chicago. His, father, Earl Richard Moses Sr., was a college professor. His mother, Marjorie Banks, a teacher. 
     The family moved to Baltimore. Moses graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
     He joined the Army in 1953, serving as a radio operator and posted in Alaska. He went to Indiana University for law school at night, while working for the Indianapolis News.
     "His father insisted: 'You always have a backup plan,'" said Matthew Moses, his only child, who himself wanted to be a writer but became a librarian.
Moses joined the Sun-Times in 1962, rising from reporter to night city editor, then city editor, assistant managing editor, assistant to the personnel director and assistant to the editor before taking early retirement in 1988 after suffering a stroke.

     "My dad was a true newsman. The Sun-Times was his life," said Matthew Moses, who remembers his father interacting with colleagues. "Roger Flaherty, Leon Pitt, I remember their confidence. They saw through all the bs going on in the city. It was fun watching them hang out, hearing them swap stories. That made him a superhero in my eyes."

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The Louvre is closed.

     Workers at the Louvre went on strike Monday. Which caused me to send out supportive thoughts of solidarity to any teenagers being dragged through Europe by their parents, sullen and silent, figuring, "At least I'll be able to tell the gang back home that I saw that famous woman, Mona Whatever."
     I was that kid. Summer of 1977. My father spent a couple months at the Palais de Nations, taking his family along to cool their heels in Geneva.  Not what I would call a hopping town. I spent a lot of time in the American Library, reading "Dune." I pined for Cleveland or, more specifically, my girlfriend in Cleveland. That's what you do at 17.

     Though I did stretch my wings, taking the train to Zurich, and the boat two Chillon, twice, to visit Byron's Castle. I had a great fondness for Byron at the time. "I have not loved the world/Nor the world me/Have not flattered its rank breath/Nor bowed a patient knee,"    
     For the last two weeks of the trip we hit Paris and London. The highlight was to be the Louvre. But the Louvre .. was closed ...for renovations.

     I didn't believe my mother when she told me — can there be a more 17-year-old reaction than that? I thought she was lying to me, that she just didn't want to go to the Louvre. To spite me. In my defense, that sort of thing was certainly within her capacity. 
     I insisted on striding up to the museum doors and pulling. Locked. Turns out ... the Louvre ... was closed. For renovations. The week we were in Paris.

     I ended up ditching my family and wandering the book stalls along the Seine. In one, there was a pile of art reproductions on canvas, mounted on wood. A life-size copy of Petrus Christus's "Portait of a Young Lady" caught my eye and I bought it. 

     She's been staring from my bedroom wall for ... ngggg, doing the math ... 48 years now. I eventually put a big ass gilt frame around it. And when the actual picture, housed in Berlin, came to the Met, I made a point to go see it, sitting gazing at it for maybe half an hour. The original is much finer — art reproduction wasn't at its height in the mid-1970s.

      The funny thing is, the Louvre being closed turned out to be one of the more memorable aspects of the Paris trip. I didn't get back for 15 years, until I returned with my wife. The Louvre was open that time. Closed makes for a better story. I'm sure that will be cold comfort for all those tourists milling around in front of the locked Louvre doors in stunned incomprehension.

WBEZ, longtime Chicago voice for 'respect and joy,' needs help

     WBEZ and I go way back. In the mid-1980s, when I was freshly fired from the Wheaton Daily Journal and looking for any kind of work, Ken Davis gave a whistle and I started filing live reports on his Studio A program.

     I didn't get paid, of course — taking advantage of the ambitious young is a venerable media tradition. But it was reporting on the radio.
     I broadcast from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, watching attendants slide big numbers into place. From a live poultry store, watching a chicken, its throat cut, upside down in a metal funnel, blood running out the bottoms, talons scratching uselessly against the galvanized metal.
     Awkward situations made good radio. I broadcast naked from a sensory deprivation tank — quite the thing in the mid-1980s — on Lincoln Avenue.
     After floating peacefully on heavily salted water in total darkness for nearly an hour, imagining myself an amoeba on an ancient sea, the door was ripped open and phone receiver into my hands. Ken asked what I was thinking about at the moment he called. "How much I have to pee," I replied, blinking.
     As the years passed, I'd circle back to WBEZ, first in the creepy old Bankers Building at Clark and Adams, with the radio tower on the roof, and then at their new digs at Navy Pier. For several years, the Tribune's ace columnist Eric Zorn and I would meet on Michigan Avenue every Friday and walk over to the pier to do a run-down of the week's news.
     Or I'd be a guest on particular programs — Scott Simon's "Weekend Edition" or "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" or Jim Nayder's "Magnificent Obsession" — a quirky early morning show on addiction and recovery. It was periodically rebroadcast, and now and then I'd hear from someone who caught my segment and was braced in their struggle.
     And that's just being on the station. I haven't even touched upon my experience as a listener. WBEZ reflected life in Chicago. Jazz at night in the city that practically invented jazz. Live feeds of important historical events — hearings, trials.
     Plus lots of fun — Garrison Keillor's folksy "A Prairie Home Companion," a mix of humor and music. "Car Talk" with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers — and if listeners today have a hard time imagining WBEZ running a show dedicated to car repair, well, let's say that station didn't take itself quite so seriously.
     Then again, these are more serious times.
     Last week, the U.S. House chainsawed $1.1 billion intended for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR's parent. The good news is WBEZ only gets 6% of its budget from the feds.
     It's much worse nationwide. In swaths of the rural countryside, the NPR station is the only game in town, a key source of important local and emergency news. More than 120 stations get more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government.

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Flashback 2010: Why were bombs sent to synagogues in Chicago?

Synagogue in Buenos Aires

      Anti-Semitism waxes and wanes, and if I seem nonchalant about it surging lately, that's because, in my view, it never goes away. If it seems fresh, it's because people forget, and anything short of the Holocaust tends to get shrugged off. Life goes on. This column from 15 years ago, written after two Yemeni bombs containing powerful explosives were sent to synagogues in Chicago, but intercepted due to Saudi intelligence.  Pause when the column gets to "the political philosophy now ascendant." Saw that one coming a mile away. And now it's here.

     "O despairer, here is my neck. By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me."
     Good old Walt Whitman. Always there in a time of crisis. I worried about tomorrow's election, I truly did. A year of angry ugliness, from 2009's summer of botched health care town halls to tomorrow, when the resurgent corporate interests and their Tea Party tools will have their victory dance.
     Then I dug out Leaves of Grass, and am not so worried anymore.
     "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."
      The deficit is indeed a problem — you don't fix it by cutting taxes, but at least they got people talking, if not yet actually thinking, about it. Which is a start. As is participation. The first words out of the mouths of Tea Party supporters are that they've never been involved in politics before. Well, bravo, welcome to the party. You always wondered who those people who didn't vote were, and now we know. They'll discover that political movements wax and wane. What's up today is down tomorrow. We'll find out whether spite has a future in politics.
     "All has been gentle with me . . ."
     It's natural to assume other people have things easier. It's also usually wrong. Don't mistakenly assume Whitman's boundless enthusiasm reflects an easy life. All was not gentle with him. His family was broke; he left school at age 11 to go to work. But that isn't what he wrote -- he saw America for all its brawny, sweaty, hay-stacking, lumber-cutting glory. It was not a stumbling slave-owning nation to him, even as the Civil War was about to tear it apart. He saw the "solid and beautiful forms of the future."
     I think that is my biggest problem with the political philosophy that is now ascendant — it assumes an American in decline, whose government cannot afford to govern, whose people cannot afford taxes, cannot tolerate the influx of a single new immigrant.
     "Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations."
     How could that be true in 1855 and not true today?
     "Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes."
     Lack of malice is a blessing — liberals forget that, enviously eyeing just how far compressed scorn can take a movement. But all biases are a kind of blindness — you aren't seeing things as they are, but seeing them through the filter of your own passions and dislikes. Sure, it makes action easier — you aren't reacting to unfolding events, but acting off an old script. Yet where does that action take you?
     "The fury of roused mobs."
     Since we have such a difficult time seeing flaws in ourselves, and such an easy time seeing them in others, I'll ask a simple question: Why do you suppose someone in Yemen would send bombs to synagogues in Chicago?
      The answers are obvious, but let's review them: 1) Because they hate Jews. 2) Because they hate Americans.
      Does that sound about right- Now ask yourself: What are the odds that the people putting those bombs in the mail ever met a Jew, or even an American- In Yemen, pretty slim. Yet they made those bombs and put them in the mail on general principles.
     Now ask yourself: Is abstract generalized hate confined to Yemen? Or do we see it in the United States?
     One of the Chicago synagogues a bomb was mailed to is the gay and lesbian Congregation Or Chadash. They're in Edgewater now, but they used to meet in a church in East Lake View, two blocks away from where we lived. For Yom Kippur 1996, my wife and I and our newborn went to Or Chadash for services because they were close and didn't charge much. The gay aspect didn't bother me at all, not until we were actually there, and I worried how we would be received, this pair of breeders with our spawn.
     Not that the congregants did anything to make us feel unwelcome. Just the opposite. We sat in the back, and every time Ross cried, we would rush him out of the room, so as not to bother people.
     About the fourth time this happened, I sprang to my feet. The rabbi stopped in mid-prayer.
     "You know," he told the congregation, "when I was growing up, I loved to hear the sound of the babies at the back of the synagogue. It's nice to hear it again."
     I stopped, fussing baby in my arms, and looked around. Congregants were not annoyed at this interruption. They were smiling.
     These are the people that some Yemenis acting under al-Qaida's murderous madness would have killed, sight unseen.
     If the lesson we take from this is the easy one — the world is filled with crazy people — then we're letting ourselves off the hook. Generalized malice at whole swaths of humanity is not confined to Yemen. The election tomorrow, alas, will not change that.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 2010

You can't have our freedom; we're using it.

Danish crown, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen

 
     I grew up in an era of protest. People taking to the streets. First for civil rights, then decrying the Vietnam War. Outrage peaked, and it could be hard to tell if the results were a rally or a riot.
     Actually, not so hard to tell — the looted stores were a giveaway.
     You could argue it worked — civil rights inched forward, the Vietnam War ended.
     You could argue it didn't, really — Nixon resigned in disgrace with the war still going on. It took a new president, and a new era, to finally bring the war in Southeast Asia to a close, nearly seven years after the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention. Civil rights remained elusive.
     As a rule, I don't do protests. I wonder: to what end? There is an essential optimism to protests that I sense is misplaced, a faith that someone is listening, someone cares about your appeal to a higher power, What I call "If only the czar knew." 

     We aren't alerting concerned leaders to troubling situations. We are begging the unhearing. We are wildly gesticulating before the blind. If anything, the social turmoil feeds Trump's plans to break American society — if somebody at a protest steps in a flower bed, he'll justify sending in the Marines.
     Then again, living in a fact-free hellscape between his ears, Trump doesn't even need that. There doesn't have to be a Reichstag fire this time; he can just make it up. "They're eating the dogs; they're eating the cats." American elected the guy who said that; what hope has she now? Facing a human virus custom built to defeat democracy, who can conjure up anything at all, present it as truth and have it accepted. A dishwasher in a Denny's can be branded the head of MS-13 and dragged away to a black op site.
     At best, participating in a protest is like voting — at best, expending considerable effort for tiny effect, to be an ant in a colony. At worst, street theater, a little play you perform in public for yourself.
     "Never confuse movement with action," as Hemingway said.     

     What's so bad about a little movement? A symbolic act of futility? Think how much effort gets wasted on everything else. I seem to have planted tomatoes this year, again, and what good ever comes from that? Sometimes you have to act, and if significant action is not possible, you still do what you can.

     So kudos to everyone showing up at a No Kings rally today. My wife and I are planning to go to one ourselves.  Not because I imagine it will do any good, short term. Or even long term. Or that things will get better anytime soon. They will not. 
     What I want is, when this is all over, to be able to look my granddaughter in the eye and tell her I did what I could. We tried to keep America the decent place which, if always falling short of its promises, at least made those promises. At least pretended to be fair and democratic and open. Not this nest of calculated cruelty, of indifference and fear and tearing down of the regulations, agencies and rules that keep people's lives decent. At least having the hope of decency.
     I see it as an almost physical tug of war. Trump and MAGA world are pulling at our rights, like a mugger trying to yank away a woman's purse. And we're pulling back, crying, "You can't have our freedom — we're using it!"

    I know I said that last concept in the column Friday. It seems worth saying again. And again. And again. Until we don't have to say it anymore.

A parade for Trump, but the true patriots will be in the streets

      I love a parade. Give me a crisply uniformed high school marching band, tall hats smartly strapped under chins, horns held high, playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." A line of fire trucks, lights flaring, sirens whirring. I'm lucky enough to live around the corner from where parades — Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day — pass by in Northbrook.
     My wife and I don't bother with folding chairs. Just stroll over and park our butts on the curb. Though that means we'll have to groan to our feet when the knot of veterans pass, so we can stand and applaud. We're spry. We're still up to it.
     Saturday's parade in Washington, D.C. is different. The stated purpose is to honor the 250th anniversary of the Army. But it has — like so much in this country — been seized, retrofitted, and put to work serving the greater glory of one Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, honoring his 79th birthday.
     Given how Trump has festooned the Oval Office in gold bling, I can see how the humility of that title, "president," might begin to gnaw at him, and he'll declare himself to be, oh, Emperor of Everything, Supreme King and Gloria Mundi.
     Assuming he hasn't already. There's so much to keep track of. You miss important stuff. Trump could have ordered the original Bill of Rights sent over from the National Archives to use as kindling in his fireplace and, I swear, the news would blip for 6 minutes until pushed aside by the next jaw-dropping violation of national norms.
     A president, remember, is a governmental official. Elected by the people. Subject to the laws of the nation, running the country as co-equal in power with Congress and the judiciary. Instead the bare Republican majority in Congress is sprawled prostrate, twitching to every whim of Trump, and the judiciary, increasingly packed with handpicked Heritage Foundation nestlings, either sings hallelujah or, when a dissenting voice is heard, can be ignored.
     Who dares to enforce a court decision that crosses Trump? To echo a line credited to Stalin: "How many divisions does the U.S. Court of Appeals have?"
     Trump has an army, which he's forcing to parade down Constitution Avenue, mimicking his idol, Vladimir Putin — honestly, if they blare, "To Serve Russia," that nation's military anthem, from loudspeakers in Washington Saturday, you might be shocked. But would you really be surprised?
     He also has Marines, 700 of whom he sent, along with the California National Guard to Los Angeles this week, over the objections of LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
     An academic perfectly summed up what's happening.
     "He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power to undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties," Ilya Somin, a law school professor, told the New York Times.
     Mayor Brandon Johnson, striking a tone I cannot recall a Chicago mayor ever taking in the face of looming unrest, called upon the city to "rise up" and "push back" against the federal government undermining our rights.
     "This is a necessary fight," he said at his press conference. "I am counting on all of Chicago to resist in this moment because, whatever particular vulnerable group is being targeted today, another group will be next."

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