 |
|
|
| | Email this article • Print this article | King, Parks recalled at OSTT
Paula Amann
News Editor
A kippah-clad Jewish boy led a gospel choir in Hebrew, a church group sang a Shlomo Carlebach tune and family friends of Rosa Parks shared stories at a District shul Sunday night.
Close to 250 people converged Sunday on the social hall of Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah Congregation in the District for a program honoring the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of his birthday.
Remarking on King’s legacy, Rev. Winston C. Ridley of the District’s Greater First Baptist Church pointed out the crowd of blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, adults and children.
“Many of the freedoms we enjoy in our nation are due to efforts he expended,” Ridley said. “What you see here is a microcosm, a rainbow. … This is the dream, this is the vision.”
In a reminder that the fight to stamp out prejudice remains alive, host Rabbis Shmuel Herzfeld and Yossi Pollak noted their presence that morning in a unity march from the historic Boyds Negro School to nearby St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, also in Boyds, both spraypainted with swastikas last week.
“This is today; this is our neighborhood,” Herzfeld told the audience.
In incidents that may be related, the initials W.A.R. — which stands for the California-based white supremacist group, White Aryan Resistance — were spraypainted early last week at Quince Orchard High School and Ridgeview Middle School, both in Gaithersburg, and Germantown’s Seneca Community Church.
Recalling civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who died last year, Silver Spring lawyer June Jeffries underscored Parks’ role in a larger movement as secretary of her local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s a myth, said Jeffries, who knew Parks for 33 years, that the late activist sat down in the whites-only section of a Montgomery, Ala., bus out of sheer fatigue.
“Mrs. Parks was committed to racial and social justice not just for black people and white people in this country, but people all over the world,” Jeffries said, adding, “What she was really tired of was the system” that exploited people.
Meanwhile, two singers, of different races, seemed to capture the program’s message, winning ovations from the audience.
“When we understand one another, there will be peace in the world; when we love one another, there will be peace in the world,” crooned bespectacled Matthew Kritz, 10, of Silver Spring, and the choir of the First Baptist Church joined in the chorus, “Yiyeh shalom” (“There will be peace”).
In another sermon in song, soloist Bonita Ridley brought gospel passion to Leonard Bernstein’s wistful “There’s a Place for Us,” from West Side Story, a 1957 musical update of the Romeo and Juliet story set amid ethnic hatreds in New York.
In another moment uniting blacks and whites, Herzfeld friend Rev. Roger Hambrick, visiting with the choir of his Green Pastures Baptist Church in the Bronx, N.Y., dedicated the hymn “Healing” to ailing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and to an African American soldier injured in Iraq.
Sheila Scott — the blond wife of Sgt. Leroy Scott, recovering from brain damage, a broken back, an amputated right leg and a shattered left one at nearby Walter Reed Army Hospital — stood alongside blue-robed choir members, holding the hand of one and brushing away her own tears.
Herzfeld and Ohev Sholom members have visited the wounded sergeant, who received a Purple Heart award, and provided food to his family, thereby meeting his visiting wife and Jeffries, his cousin.
|
Article Comment Submission Form
|
|
|
|
