Good Monday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on Sefaria’s 10-year anniversary and its new digital Torah-writing initiative and feature opinion pieces from Jonathan Greenblatt, Dawne Bear Novicoff, Jon Hornstein and Rebecca Shafron. Also in this newsletter: Monica Gebell, Harriet Schleifer and Suzy Bookbinder. We’ll start with Saturday’s event marking the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Ahead of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., 60 years ago, Joachim Prinz, a rabbi who fled Germany in 1937, spoke out against Nazis in the same spot as president of the American Jewish Congress, reports Melissa Weiss for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.
“I speak to you as an American Jew,” Prinz said on Aug. 28, 1963. “As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea.”
On Saturday, a new generation of leaders stood before tens of thousands of people gathered in the same spot to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Prinz’s words “still resonate,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, whose organization participated in the original march, said in his address. “They tell us: stand up in the face of hate, speak out and don’t stand idly by.” The fates of the Jewish and Black communities, Greenblatt added, are “intertwined” and “indivisible.” (Read Greenblatt’s opinion piece about the march below.)
Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, noted that her organization participated in the original march. Pointing to the upcoming Jewish holidays, Katz suggested that “as the high holidays compel us to repair, we also act together. As our kehila kedosha, our holy community, we draw strength from one another. We remind ourselves that we stand in a long line of people of every race and creed willing to stand firm for the values we believe in. We remember Dr. King’s refusal to be satisfied ‘until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was 22 at the time of the first march, told the crowd: “I watched the speech live on television. The clarity, power and cadence of Dr. King’s words and his delivery was like nothing I had ever heard before. His speech truly moved me and it moved the nation.”
Kraft added, “We were so proud to know that Jewish people were among the most active of non-Black groups participating in the civil rights movement.”
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