Support Neal's July 4th GAP Ride and ACLU's Vital Work

Hello Friends - I am once again planning to bicycle the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) Trail this 4th of July weekend from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, MD (this year in 3 days, which is a step up for me from last year, wish me luck!). I am dedicating my 2025 ride to the memory of my maternal grandmother Selma Goldberg Klearman Portnoy (1904-1994) and raising funds for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation to support their vital work defending democracy and fighting for immigrant justice. Every contribution helps and your support will spur me to complete my ride!

My Grandma Selma arrived in the United States with her family at the age of 16 in 1920, fleeing civil war and deadly anti-Jewish pogroms following World War I in the former Pale of Settlement (the region of the western Russian Empire beyond which Jews were prohibited from living and that included most of what is today Ukraine as well as several other Eastern European nations). Selma settled in St. Louis, MO, married a fellow immigrant named Nathan Klearman, went to work, learned English, became a U.S. citizen, and raised a family. Had they been unable to escape to the United States, Selma, Nathan, and their families would have been at great risk of being killed either in the pogroms or a few decades later in the Holocaust.

The ACLU was founded in 1920 (the same year Selma arrived in the U.S.), largely in response to the Palmer Raids, the campaign led by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to round up and deport so-called dangerous radicals, many of them Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Thousands of people were arrested without warrants and without regard to constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure. Those arrested were brutally treated and held in horrible conditions. The early ACLU also supported the right of trade unionists to hold meetings and organize and secured the release of hundreds of activists imprisoned for their antiwar activities.

One hundred and five years later, the ACLU is still leading the fight for civil liberties and democracy through litigation, advocacy, and organizing. The organization's current priorities include immigrant and racial justice, reproductive freedom, transgender rights, and voting rights and democracy. In this period of accelerating authoritarianism and wealth concentration, marked by daily assaults on workers' rights, immigrant justice, and freedom of speech, the ACLU is on the front lines of the fightback against the current Administration's menacing ICE raids and other xenophobic and autocratic actions. Among a broad range of campaigns and activities, ACLU lawyers have been instrumental in the successful efforts to free from detention Tufts University graduate student worker (and SEIU member) Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia University graduate student (and former UAW member) Mahmoud Khalil - both wrongfully locked up in retaliation for exercising their freedom of speech - and the return of Maryland resident (and International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers apprentice) Kilmar Abrego Garcia from imprisonment in El Salvador. ACLU attorneys continue to fight against the deportations of these immigrant Americans and to defend immigrant workers and families across the United States.

You can learn more about the work and history of the ACLU at their website: www.aclu.org.

I hope you will consider contributing to my 4th of July GAP Trail ride in honor of my Grandma Selma and in support of ACLU's tireless efforts to protect immigrant workers, expand democracy, and advance justice for all.

Thank you!

Neal