My life's work has all been preamble to this next step. In a few weeks I leave for Germany and Poland to witness and study the Holocaust. In the photo, I stand by the Holocaust Memorial wall at the JCC, among the names of people and families from Rochester killed as well as those who survived the unimaginable. For six years, more than 40 hours every week, I saw those names through the window as I managed the JCC Coffee Shop. My life has been shaped in ways I doubt I'll ever fully understand. Racism, injustice, the poor and ignored, and the struggling have followed me around beginning with civil rights and peace movements in college. Landing in Rochester in 1969, I found myself pulled into being with people in our county jail, local courtrooms, Attica and other prisons working with community advocates, priests, ministers, rabbis, lawyers, and others to change conditions, find competent legal representation, and support families. Years working at the Urban League, NYS Division for Youth, and NYS Social Services entwined me with city youth facing barriers to their futures of segregated failing schools, child abuse, and narrowed opportunities. The gift of ten years as Director of Rochester's LIFELINE crisis/suicide hotline opened my life to paths of hope in the face of despair, struggles, and sometimes tragedy.

Inexplicit or meant to be, I have now been asked to join Nazareth and Hobart William Smith college students, professors, scholars and one or two of very few remaining Holocaust survivors on a ten day journey: "The March: Bearing Witness to Hope" (May 16th to 25th). We will visit cities that once were vibrant Jewish communities, go to concentration and death camps engineered by the Third Reich, and to historic locations commemorating acts of resistance and rescue in the face of the "final solution.” Participants commit to identify, confront, and transform situations of prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance, institutionally as well as interpersonally, upon return.

As part of my commitment when I come home, my initial focus will be to put together intergenerational panels of those of us who will have walked in the footprints of the Holocaust. In small gatherings of individuals, in forums in varied settings, and with organizations, we will share our experience. And as importantly, explore questions looking with new eyes and perspectives at systemic issues of racism, justice, concentrated poverty, involvement and leadership in our own local community. I will also work to develop a fund to support community involvement tied in with future trips.

For now, I need to quickly raise $4,900 from groups and individuals to help underwrite and sponsor my involvement. Students have opportunities for financial assistance that are not available for community representatives. So I am reaching out to ask you, if you are able, to contribute and to share this with other individuals or community or faith groups to ask if they might join in giving support. If we can exceed the goal of $4,900, those funds will become the base for community involvement in future trips.

In some ways I know, yet I cannot fully imagine, how transformative this experience will be for me personally, and more importantly for what will come from sharing it and engaging others on return. I will be carrying many people in my heart as I travel through Poland including children in my family with disabilities. Adults and youths, caught up in systems that overwhelmingly impact the lives of people of color, will be with me. There are individuals who have shaped my life like Rabbi Judea Miller, who I worked with and who had a profound effect on my life. I will visit Majdanek, the death camp where two boys, his half-brothers, were killed. Inside me will be other individual people, a number of prisoners who I met in the Monroe County Jail. They were among 29 prisoners and 10 guards killed 45 years ago this September by indiscriminate gunfire by state troopers at the Attica prison uprising (still the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War). I carry the people and families whose names are on the wall of the JCC Holocaust Memorial I saw each day as I was schlepping coffee for so many JCC members including those who continue to be over-the-counter family to me.

I feel uncomfortable asking for financial support to sponsor me for this journey even as I know it is not about me. It is for those who faced and are facing injustice, racism, and beyond anything we can imagine—those killed and survivors. It involves acting on the experience that will be shared on return, and a call to all of us to be more than bystanders to racial divide, fracturing by class, and injustice of any kind in the midst of where we live. I hope you can join in supporting this trip and be a part of the spirit I carry with me.




Photo: With my sister Linda, daughter Sally, and grandson Oscar