Wake Up Call: Jewish Children’s Museum Marks 20 Years

By COLlive reporter

Friends and supporters joined the 20th Gala Dinner of the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights on Wednesday evening, celebrating the positive impact of the landmark institution and its fostering of acceptance and education over the past 20 years.

The Museum, which is named for Ari Halberstam, who was murdered in a terror attack on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, celebrated welcoming over 4 million visitors in the past 20 years.

The mission of the Jewish Children’s Museum is to combine creativity and fun with education, part of a greater mission of teaching youth of all faiths, races, and backgrounds about the Jewish people, fostering acceptance.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht, Chabad of Yale University and the Shabtai Society, gave an emotional invocation, reminding the guests that while the terrorist tried to erase Ari Halberstam by brutal murder, he could not accomplish that, since Ari lives on every day in the museum and through all the children that are affected by its message.

Devorah Halberstam, co-founder of the Museum and Director of the Museum’s External Affairs, spoke about the mission of the Museum which was and is “light years ahead of the world around us, because we understood that change starts small, that with patience and care, a single seed can grow into something vast enough to shelter generations.”

“Tonight we celebrate 20 years of doing justice, 20 years of investing in our children’s futures, planting seeds, watching roots grow, nurturing dreams,” Halberstam said. “We have seen children rise to become leaders, artists, teachers, and change makers.”

Halberstam reminded guests that, just as Ari’s murder, October 7th was a wake-up call.

“I am a fourth-generation American, and growing up, I never experienced antisemitic hatred. But in the worst way possible, I felt what it means to be a Jew, but also to know what it means to die as a Jew. October 7th was a wake-up call to my fellow Jews and to all humanity about what antisemitic hatred is. It wasn’t just the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Babi Yar, Pogroms, the Holocaust. Sadly, antisemitism is alive and like a cancer spreading venom across continents,” she said.

Guest speaker Mayor Eric Adams said that he still loves this country, and we must fight the recent uprising of negativity, which has infected our youth, “by unifying against the social media that have hijacked our children and turned up the hate — not only [causing them to] hate themselves, but hate their country, and hate anyone that they don’t understand,” he said.

He said we can do this by “fortifying our conversations with each other and making sure that our laws don’t give in to those who want to commit perpetual hate crimes over and over again.”

“There are those who hate our way of life. We need to stop apologizing for them. We need to stop acting like it’s all right. It is not all right,” he said.

The MC for the evening was Adam Kuperstein, an award-winning journalist from NBC 4 New York, who thanked Halberstam and all the honorees for their fight against antisemitism.

Melissa Aviles-Ramos, Chancellor of NYC Public Schools, received the New York City Leadership Award, and pledged that the NYC Public Schools are focused on teaching students acceptance of other cultures and faiths with education, programs, and trips to museums like the Jewish Children’s Museum and others.

New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli received the New York State Leadership Award for his decades of service to the community.

Judge Michael Mukasey, Former Attorney General of the United States, introduced honoree Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, who received the Ari Halberstam Memorial Award.

“It’s hard to believe that it has been 31 years since Ari Halberstam was murdered in an act of antisemitic terrorism- and it is indeed hard- it is harder still to believe that we are living in the midst of a widespread resurgence of antisemitism,” Mukasey said in his remarks. “Not only around the world, but also in our own country, where many of us- and I include myself- believed that although there might be occasional antisemitic incidents, antisemitism would never become a widespread phenomenon. Oh boy, were we wrong.”

In her speech, Weiss said that she has turned to the wisdom of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks since the “split-screen reality that began on October 7th and that has continued to this day.”

“Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has explained that freedom is not won on the battlefield, nor in the political arena, nor in the courts, national or international, but in the human imagination and will,” Weiss said. “To defend a country, Rabbi Sacks said, you need an army, and of course, you need police officers. But to defend a free society, you need schools, you need families, and an educational system in which ideals are passed on from one generation to the next and never lost or despaired of or obscured. To defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education.”

Weiss said she saw the evil of moral equivalency when, after October 7th, in New York, “hip young people were chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult,” while in Israel, the country at the front line of the free world, something very different happened. “On the morning of October 7th, ordinary young Israeli women and men, many of them the same age as those college students marching for Hamas, closed their laptops, abandoned their startups, left their fields, and picked up their weapons, in many cases without waiting for instructions from the state or its army,” she said.

“What accounts for this difference? It’s very simple. The ideas and the values that were engraved on the hearts and minds of those young people in two free societies. One group of people was taught an inverted view of the world, in which there is a moral equivalence between civilians, between innocents and barbarians, in which the bright line between good and evil has been blurred or erased entirely. The other group, the group that picked up their weapons, learned something very different. They learned from first-hand experience the difference between civilization and terrorism. They learned that there is real evil in the world, just as there is real good. They understood that they were the literal last line of defense for the good, and they charged into battle to defend it.”

In attendance were: Mayor Eric Adams, Adrienne Adams, Speaker of the NYC Council, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, Chancellor, NYC Public Schools, Justin Brannan, NYC Council Member Michael Brodack, SAC, Criminal Division, FBI, Commissioner Jessica L. Tisch, NYPD Commissioner, Moshe Davis, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, Tom DiNapoli, New York State Leadership Award, Joseph Douek, Deputy Chief Francis A. Giordano NYPD Chief of Brooklyn South, Eric Gonzalez, District Attorney for Kings County, Crystal Hudson, NYC Council Member, Ms. Delaney Kempner, NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Tania Kinsella, NYPD First Deputy Commissioner, Fred Kreizman, Commissioner Mayor’s Community Affairs, Randy Mastro, First Deputy Mayor to Mayor Adams, Deputy Inspector Gary Marcus, Hate Crimes Task Force, Chief Charles McKevoy, NYPD Chief of Housing, Judge Michael Mukasey, Former Attorney General of The United States, Rabbi Yerachmiel Benjaminson, Executive Director of the Museum.

Andrew R. Arias, Deputy Chief at Detective Borough Brooklyn South, Assistant Chief Scott Henderson, Commanding Officer Brooklyn North, Captain Ronald Perez, CO 71 PCT, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, FDNY Chaplain, NY Board of Rabbis, Christopher G. Raia, AIDIC NYC FBI, Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn Borough President, Menashe Shapiro, Deputy Chief of Staff & Senior Advisor to the Mayor, Commissioner Dermot Shea, Commissioner Mark Stewart, NYPD Community Affairs, Chief Richard S. Taylor, NYPD Community Affairs, Commissioner Rebecca Weiner, NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Ms. Eva Wyner, Office of the Governor, Mr. Fabian Levy, Deputy Mayor of Communications.

Yossi Popack, Chairman of the Board JCM, Marcia Robbins-Wilf, Board Member JCM, Carol D’Auria, 1010 WINS News, Jeffrey Rodus, Vice Chancellor CUNY, Rabbi Michael Miller, Rabbi Emeritus JCRC, Rabbi Simon Jacobson, Meaningful Life Center, Rabbi Chanina Sperlin, Eli Slavin for Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, Pesach Osina, Yoeli Lefkowitz, Pinny Hikind for Comptroller Brad Lander.