Tenement Testament

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We went downtown today with Nancy and a friend to visit the Tenement Museum.

On the way, Nancy spotted a rooftop statue of a mass murderer.

New Yorkers found this Lenin statue in a trash heap outside Moscow. It’s as foul as a statue of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao, none of whom respected human rights.

Later we saw this statue of a person regarded as ethical and humane, who opposed the opium trade (good for him) yet was a “Pioneer In The [destructive] War Against Drugs”.

Lin Ze Xu

At the Tenement Museum, we saw an apartment inhabited 70 years ago by a family of Puerto Rican migrants.

Not immigrants.
Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

Their neighbors were Holocaust survivors.

The Epsteins survived Germany’s concentration camps. They met and married after WW2 in a displaced persons camp.
It was defiantly courageous for them to put mezzuzot on their doorposts—as the Bible commands—identifying themselves as Jews. (Why are there two on this doorpost? It’s a mystery.)

The Epsteins were allowed entry into our country in 1947 by a presidential executive order.

Such an order before WW2 could have, maybe would have, saved the lives of their first spouses, and spared them all indescribable torment.

From Proverbs: “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.”

And of the pen.

What we say, what we write—and when—matters.

It is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

We’ll be back on the bike later this week.

2 thoughts on “Tenement Testament”

  1. I really liked the Tenement Museum and learned a lot. I took my nephew there who lived almost around the corner and had never been. He reactedto the Tenement dwellers and their corner pubs that he’d like to revive!

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  2. Thank you for sharing. 

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