Help to spread the word: Invites, Posters, Flyers

To download the official invitation as a PDF file, please click here

To download the 11″x17″ Poster as a PDF file, please click here

To download the 8.5″x11″ Letter Flyer as a PDF file, please click here

On Sunday, October 18, 2009 at Madison Square Garden, Words of Bonds will pay tribute to several Holocaust survivors, senior descendents of slavery, and educators for their good work in teaching, influencing, and empowering our American youth to help ensure that atrocities such as slavery and the Holocaust never happen again. The honorees have been working on the Words of Bonds project since its inception, and truly deserve such a tribute. These honorees give selflessly of their time to visit many schools and cultural institutions to share their stories, and to educate our nation’s youth that they must work to prevent history from barbarically repeating itself.

The Honorees will be:

To learn more about the honoress, please click here.

Louvinia Pointer, Educator (in memoriam)

Miriam P. Groner, 103 years old, Holocaust Survivor

Rev. Charles Leonard, 107 years old, slave descendant

Letitia James, New York City Councilwoman

Sidney Schwimmer, Holocaust Survivor & Historian

Martin Spett, Holocaust Survivor, Historian & Author Manhattan College

Sally Frishberg, Holocaust Survivor & Educator

Eleanor Holmes Norton, U.S. Congresswoman

Rabbi Alyssa Stanton, First African American Female Rabbi

Rabbi Jacob Jungreis, Principal & Educator

Dr. Fredrick Schweitzer, Historian & Author Manhattan College

Tal Brody,Former Captain, Maccabi Tel Aviv & Israel Prize Winner

Lusia Knoll, Holocaust Survivor & Educator

Dr. Jay Sommers, Holocaust Survivor


Anthony Brooks, Educator, Yonkers School District

TICKETS

• $250 for an individual seat
• $500 for two seats
• $750 for three seats
• $900 for four seats
• $1,100 for five seats
• $1,200 for a table of six

Kosher meals will be provided upon request. Please indicate in the special message field if you have any special seating requests, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS

To reserve your seats for this special event by credit or debit card, safely and securely via our partner First Giving, please click the button below:

To purchase tickets by mail, make check payable to:
School News Nationwide 1072 Fulton St :: Brooklyn, New York 11238

TO SPONSOR THIS EVENT

To learn more about partnering with us for this special event, please download our Partnership Package in PDF format here.

To view in a ebook viewer, please click here.

To sponsor or donate to this event directly, please click here to do so.

All donations are tax deductible. Should you have any questions, please email us at: CONTACT@WORDSOFBONDS.COM

LOCATION

Photo of where the Ceremony will be held MSG Theater Lobby.

Google Map to Madison Square Garden

Telling Two Stories With One Voice
by Steve Lipman

Bill Tingling, founder of a Brooklyn-based literacy project that teaches public school students the fundamentals of journalism, was looking for a new way to discuss prejudice a few years ago. Have the students — mostly from the minority community — interview Holocaust survivors, suggested an Irish friend of Tingling.

The result was Words of Bonds, a two-year-old initiative that has resulted in online interviews (www.wordsofbonds.com), speeches by survivors in public schools, an in-the-works documentary, and a kosher tribute dinner Sunday, Oct. 18, 6 p.m. at Madison Square Garden’s MSG Theater.  Several Holocaust survivors and descendants of slaves, and educators, will be honored at the dinner, which Tingling says is probably the first-such interracial event under the auspices of an organization with roots in the black community.

One of the honorees will be Tal Brody, the former Israeli basketball star, who will be attending the New York Knicks-Maccabi Tel Aviv exhibition game in the Garden earlier that day.

“We’re bearing witness” to two communities’ experience with prejudice, says Tingling, who in 1995 established School News Nationwide (SNN), a nonprofit multimedia educational group.  “If you don’t tell people about [the background of] the Holocaust and slavery, it’s going to repeat itself,” Tingling says. (For information: [718] 753-9920; bill@wordsofbonds.com.)
“Focusing on the preservation of stories from survivors of the Jewish Holocaust and accounts from the descendants of African American slaves, students will be able to examine the connections between these destructive events, as well as make links to currents events,” according to the organization’s mission statement.

Holocaust-denying statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad give the project greater urgency, he says.

Words of Bonds is not specifically designed to improve relations between the Black and Jewish communities, though that may be a side-effect, says Rev. Paul Chandler, a coordinator of the upcoming event who was active in the Project CURE dialogue group after the 1991 Crown Heights riots.

The project’s focus is the two groups’ accomplishments, not their victimhood, Tingling says.

“I’m not a victim,” says Sally Frishberg, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who will be honored at the Words of Bond event. A resident of Flatbush, Brooklyn, she was among a dozen members of her extended family saved from the Shoah by a sympathetic Polish farmer. After liberation, she moved to the U.S., worked as a public school teacher, then became a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust and a speaker at local schools, telling how she rebuilt her life here. “I don’t think of myself as a victim,”  she says.

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WHILE PAYING HOMMAGE TO THOSE ANCESTORS
WHO PASSED THROUGH INFAMOUS SLAVERY PORT

President Obama stressed the importance of remembering slavery to the importance of remembering the Holocaust, according to the CNN Web site.

“It’s one of those things that you don’t forget about,” Obama told CNN in an interview scheduled to air Monday on “Anderson Cooper 360,” according to a report on the Web site.

Obama gave the interview over the weekend while visiting the African country of Ghana, once a major slave trading center.

“I think it’s important that the way we think about it, the way it’s taught, is not one in which there’s simply a victim and a victimizer, and that’s the end of the story,” the president said. “I think the way it has to be thought about, the reason it’s relevant, is whether it’s what’s happening in Darfur or what’s happening in the Congo or what’s happening in too many places around the world, the capacity for cruelty still exists.”

Obama called his visit to Cape Coast Castle, a slavery dungeon, “reminiscent of the trip I took to Buchenwald,” a German Nazi death camp. “It reminds us of the capacity of human beings to commit great evil,” he said.

Obama said he hoped his daughters, Malia and Sasha, who accompanied him on the trip, learned about the history of slavery during the visit.

“And hopefully, one of the things that was imparted to them during this trip is their sense of obligation to fight oppression and cruelty wherever it appears,” he said.

WORDS OF BONDS TRAILER

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It is apparent that we have not succeeded in teaching our children well. Our students from NYC Public School 270 were just around the corner preparing to enter the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington D.C., where a citizen with a history of hatred and white supremacy attacked the museum with a rifle. His racism, anti-Semitism, Neo Nazism and anti-African American hatred fueled this incident in which he intended to kill and destroy people’s lives. He succeeded by killing a heroic security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns an African American who valiantly tried to apprehend the shooter and protect people. James van-Brunn the shooter was shot by other guards who arrested him and took him under control.

At the museum that night a new play “Anne and Emmett” was set to debut, a play about hate crimes which, much like “Words of Bonds,” attempts to explore lessons for children from humanity’s darkest periods. The play traces imaginary conversation between Anne Frank, a little girl killed in the Nazi Holocaust who wrote a diary and Emmett Till, a little black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Today would have been Ms. Frank’s 80th birthday.

“Our whole play is about hate, to eradicate hate, and this is an example of hatred,” said the playwright Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former US defense secretary William Cohen, who had been heading to the museum’s theater for final rehearsals ahead of Wednesday night’s premiere when the attack happened.

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